Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

4:43 AM, Friday December 31st 2021

Drawabox Lesson 5 Homework - Album on Imgur

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Here is my homework for lesson 5. I'm not confident I did particularly well this lesson.

Uncomfortable gave me lots of feedback last session that I've tried really hard to take on board, namely giving my drawings more space, taking more time with my drawing and constructing additively more in 3D. About midway through the homework, I started taking breaks whenever I felt the need to rush and I think that improved some of my attempts.

Some of the things I think I'm still struggling with is texture and sausage forms (particularly when they're smaller). At some point I want to do the texture challenge because I still feel I don't quite 'get' it. Exact proportions were something I struggled with as well. I could never get the size of the ribcage and pelvis to feel right and I think this affected the dip in the back that is part of the process of constructing the animals.

For my hybrid, I decided to take this opportunity to draw my favourite pet in Elder Scrolls Online. I planned out what animals I did beforehand so it informed that drawing and I still heavily drew from references of real animals. The indrik (particularly a baby one) is a mix of a deer, goat and bird (kinda). I've included a reference of the creature. I hope its okay that I did the homework this way.

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8:27 PM, Monday January 3rd 2022

Your work throughout this lesson is, by and large, very well done. You should be quite proud of what you've achieved here, as I can see significant improvement, and overall a lot more confidence/comfort here than before (and you weren't doing particularly badly before, just had a number of things to keep in mind).

Jumping right in, your organic intersections are very well done. You're doing a great job of establishing the relationships between these forms as they sag and slump over one another in 3D space, under the force of gravity. You're also applying the cast shadows well, doing so in a consistent manner, and emphasizing those spatial relationships.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I'm very pleased to see that you are, most of all, thinking a lot about how your forms fit together, how one new additional wraps around the existing structure, and how every element you add exists as a solid, three dimensional element in the world, rather than just a partial shape or individual mark on the flat page. That said, there are a few things I can call out to your attention to help you continue applying these exercises as effectively as possible.

Firstly, let's look at how you're handling part of your additional masses, specifically in terms of their silhouettes' designed, as you wrap them around existing structures. As I've called out here, we cannot place arbitrary corners on our masses' silhouettes - instead, those corners (which are a form of complexity, just like inward curves) that occur only in response to contact with an exsting structure. In some cases we simply can't use them, so we use the sort of smoother, S curve transition shown in my little example on your page.

I can see examples of these arbitrary corners across many of your animals, though you tend to do it more when building upon the skinnier sausage structures for legs in cases like this capuchin monkey. You can refer back to the ant leg demo from my previous critique for more resources on how to build your forms up here, as well as this one.

In some cases however, we can take advantage of the fact that all quadrupedal animals have a lot of muscle built up around their shoulders and hips, which help drive their limbs as they walk. It's not always obvious, but if you know to look for it, you can often find signs of such muscles, which in turn can be represented as a simple ball mass against the body. Other additional masses can then wrap around it, creating a more integrated impression, like that of a 3D puzzle with all the different masses fitting together.

Continuing on, I can see that you're employing several different approaches for head construction, with some that are better than others. Overall, the approach I recommend using (as mentioned here at the top of the tiger head demo) is the head construction explanation on the informal demos page. I go much more in-depth as to why this is the case in this reply to another student's question, but in the future that informal demo's approach will be more thoroughly integrated into the lesson material.

Try to apply that approach - down to the specific pentagonal shape for the eye sockets (which allows for a gap between them for the muzzle, and a flat surface along the top for the forehead), and defining the actual forehead space - as directly as you can to your animals. It won't always fit perfectly, but it's the principle behind it that will help make your head constructions more solid.

Furthermore, when drawing your animals' eyes, one thing that will help you in getting the eye shape itself is to actually build up its upper lid and lower lid as separate additional masses, as shown here.

While these two points do leave a fair bit of room for growth and improvement, I am still very pleased with how your work is coming along, and I feel that these are things you can apply on your own, and do not require further revisions. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - but there's one last thing I want to call out.

In regards to the hybrid, keep in mind that this exercise is primarily focused on taking multiple references and figuring out how to fit them together. In this case, I'm unsure of whether you simply drew from that screenshot (it largely does appear to be that way), or if you used references from the different animals whose parts make up the whole. I just wanted to clarify the way this exercise in particular is meant to be done, so you can be sure to apply it as effectively as possible on your own.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:39 PM, Monday January 3rd 2022

Hi Uncomfortable,

I must admit the inconsistencies in the course can be a bit confusing but I ultimately understand why they occur. A quick question I had in regards to that was if we should still flatten out the further back legs of quadrepeds with straight lines? I noticed the technique on more older videos so I wasn't certain whether to apply it.

In regards to the other points, yeah, they make a lot of sense. My instinct for not always following the exact recipe was trying to observe the reference and choose the right shapes but as you point out the homework is just exercises. I think it likely originates from doing Proko's figure drawing course at the same time where he suggests picking the write forms to suit in his mannequization video. Nonetheless, I also get why the sharp corners can be non-beneficial.

Thanks again for the in-depth critique and for clarifying that lots of feedback does not equal doing poorly. Prior to doing this course and seeing that video you linked from Steven Zapata, I had a less constructive reaction to making mistakes. I'd like to thank you for helping me get through that.

2:34 AM, Tuesday January 4th 2022

For the back legs, this is something I allow, although I leave the choice up to the student. There's no real harm in flattening out the other legs, and compositionally it does help - but in terms of the "exercise" each drawing is meant to be, it does make sense to construct everything we see as a solid, 3D form, for the simple reason that saying it's okay to flatten one thing but not another gets confusing. So, that is probably something that will be eliminated when I'm able to revise this lesson. Things like this are the main reason I'm really eager to do a whole suite of new demos, rather than keeping any of the older ones that are still around.

Short answer - don't worry about it.

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