Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

1:20 PM, Saturday February 6th 2021

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Uh quick note before anything else, I misread and didn't realise you wanted us to pick 2 species and do 2 pages of each species until the end of quadrupeds, so I've got 2 pages of random quadrapeds and single pages of squirrels and wolves... :)

This lesson really made me much more confident in drawing animals :) I didn't know I had it in me!!

I honestly really enjoyed this lesson far more than I anticipated! Once I had a better understanding of how to add masses, I think my drawings came together a lot better, particular on the arms and legs (though maybe I went overboard?)

The areas I struggled with most were Fur, adding masses onto heads (though I think I got better at this), breaking the heads into planes, bird tails and wings, paws, and adding the lower jaw.

Thank you in advance for your critique :)

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2:44 AM, Tuesday February 9th 2021

Don't worry about the misreading there - if we're being entirely honest, it's been so long I didn't even remember the specifics of the assignment anyway. As far as I'm concerned, it's a bunch of animals and then some horror story hybrids at the end :P

Honestly, your work throughout this lesson is extremely well done, and it's far better than most. Your organic intersections demonstrate a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another, and how to create an impression of realistic gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. I have just one little point for you to keep in mind - make sure your shadows are being cast from a consistent light source. The second page is mostly fine on this front, but the first page has some shadows being cast both to the left and the right.

Moving onto your animal constructions, there are three primarily areas I look for, and you've knocked them all out of the park. The first of these is how students handle their additional masses. Many students struggle with understanding how to effectively capture the relationship between those forms and the existing structure to which they're being added, but you've shown a clear grasp of how the specific nature of each form's silhouette clearly establishes how it wraps around the forms that are already present, and how the various inward curves of that silhouette responds to specific forms - not just random whim. As a result, your constructions feel very solid, and you do a great job of building up from simple to complex.

The second point I look at is how students handle their legs. You're doing an excellent job of starting with a simple sausage structure, and then building up any additional bulk or forms on top of it, again minding how the silhouette of each additional mass needs to wrap around it. This is helping you maintain a strong sense of solidity, while also capturing any necessary gesture/movement (your running squirrel is especially well done).

The last major point I look at is how students approach their head construction, first and foremost how they build their eyesockets, and how they build up their construction around it. Based on your work, you may already be familiar with this informal head construction explanation - it's informal because it's something I put together after my last update of this material, based on explanations I was trying to provide as part of my critiques. I feel it does a good job of exploring how we break the head down into a series of planes however, which is a big part of any face (animal and human), so it's something I intend to integrate into the core lesson material once my big revision campaign reaches here. Currently I'm only at Lesson 1, but I'm working to rerecord all my video content.

Anyway, you are for the most part doing a really good job of building your head constructions around that eye socket. One thing I would recommend though is to try to use pentagons instead of diamonds, with the point oriented downards. It allows for enough structure to support a brow ridge cutting across on top, and a muzzle fitting in between the eye sockets.

Since you're hitting all my major areas of interest, let's take a look at something I don't generally pay much mind to - the fur. I noticed that you were having a bit of difficulty with it, so it wouldn't hurt to talk about it a little. You're headed in the right direction in terms of how you approach it, but I think there are two things that are needed to take it that much further: space and time. Give yourself both more room for your drawings, so you have plenty of space to explore the specific way in which you're designing those tufts of fur. And of course, give yourself more time, to do so more carefully. With fur there's a common urge to go into a repetitive auto-pilot, falling into patterns when drawing fur. Do everything you can to fight back that urge, and focus on every mark you're drawing. Here are some notes on top of one of your pages, exploring how I'd approach the lion's mane.

Even though I don't necessarily keep my tufts entirely closed, I try to treat it as though I'm taking the basic silhouette of that furry object, and then extending it. I'm not just adding lines at its edge, but rather building onto the shape itself. We of course aren't allowed to do this in our construction (since altering the silhouette of a form once it's drawn will flatten out our construction), it's fine in this case.

Of course, you can also take a look at the notes on fur in the lesson but I'm sure you've already seen them.

Anyway, your work is coming along great, so I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work.

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.
7:28 AM, Thursday February 11th 2021

Thank you as always for the in depth feedback!!

Not sure if you'll see this but i forgot to ask, how do you handle foreshortening of sausage forms?

8:53 AM, Thursday February 11th 2021

Considering the scale at which we're working, unless you run into really dramatic poses where the legs are coming right at the viewer (which we aren't really dealing with here), there's no real need to put foreshortening on the sausage forms. Remember that foreshortening is only dramatic when the objects in question are very large, or very, very close to the viewer's eye. Since these issues don't come up, we can focus on simple sausage forms which inherently promote the illusion of solidity more easily than a more complex form.

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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