Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

5:08 PM, Monday May 6th 2024

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Hello, finally finished Lesson 4, took quite a lot of time to be honest, but at last done...

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

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12:37 PM, Tuesday May 7th 2024
edited at 12:45 PM, May 7th 2024

Hello Tomako, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms most of these are sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There are a few places where an end gets slightly pointy, or there’s some subtle swelling through the midsection of a form, but overall you’re pretty close to what we’re aiming for, so good work.

The majority of your linework is smooth and confident, and you’re doing a good job experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves.

I noticed that sometimes you’d place an ellipse on end of the sausage that the contour curves tell us is facing away from the viewer, such as the form on the top right corner of this page. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.

Moving on to your insect constructions, your work is skilfully done, as you’re demonstrating strong observational skills as well as an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space. You’re doing well, but I do have quite a few things to talk about that should help you to get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

Firstly, remember that every drawing we do in this course is an exercise, and it is important to follow all of the instructions as closely as possible, even if we do not fully understand why the instructions are in place. For example, the homework assignment is for the first 4 pages of constructions to be purely constructional with no texture or detail.

I get it - detail is a lot more fun to get into, and it also leans into things like drawing more from the wrist. It may be a more comfortable area to focus your time, whereas things like drawing tight, even ellipses where you need them to be may be a lot more daunting. But the thing is, these drawings are just exercises.

We aren't to focus on reproducing the reference image at all costs, or to have our drawings come out looking impressive - rather, each drawing is just a puzzle. We start with a reference image that helps us determine the direction of our goal, and we start out with simple pieces, gradually building them up piece by piece until we're able to achieve something more complex, somewhat closer to our reference than when we started. That process involves considering how different forms sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it - it's by forcing our brain to think about these things as though they exist in three dimensions that helps develop that mental model of space, and our underlying spatial reasoning skills.

There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that to some extent you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

The next point I want to talk about relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

  • Actions in 2D space, where we're just putting lines down on a page, without necessarily considering the specific nature of the relationships between the forms they're meant to represent and the forms that already exist in the scene.

  • Actions in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about how each form we draw exists in 3D space, and how it relates to the existing 3D structures already present. We draw them in a manner that actually respects the 3D nature of what's already there, and even reinforces it.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

For example, I've marked on your work here and here in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. I do think that with some of these examples you may have been attempting to subtract “in 3D,” and while it's entirely possible to do this correctly in 3D space, I'm advising students not to work subtractively at all when building up organic structures within this course. This is because students tend to be prone to doing it wrong without realizing, and then reinforcing 2D thinking instead. Sticking to working additively in 3D space will on the other hand be a lot harder to do wrong (as long as you're somewhat mindful of what you're doing), and will ultimately reinforce that 3D thinking and eventually help you subtract more effectively as well.

Another thing I did notice is that many of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that there would be a gap between passes around your ellipses (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

It’s also possible to extend the construction “in 2D.” On this section of your crab I marked in blue a couple of examples where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page. As Uncomfortable has been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is, admittedly, a little hard to tell exactly what you were doing on some of your constructions that are only 400 or so pixels across and/or are heavily textured. For more precise feedback on your lesson 5 work, please include some construction only pages, with no texture or detail whatsoever. Either draw your constructions larger, or upload higher resolution photos of your work.

It looks like you were working towards using the sausage method on the majority of your pages. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

Everything we add to these constructions serves a specific purpose, and this includes additional line weight. Right now you seem to be applying quite aggressively thick line weight to places that appear arbitrary. Additional line weight should be kept subtle, think of it as a whisper, not a shout. It doesn’t take much additional line thickness for the viewer to pick up on it. Given the bounds and limitations of this course, the most effective use of additional line weight is to clarify overlaps between forms, and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can find an explanation and demonstration of how to use line weight in this video. This prevents us from applying line weight to more random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight. We should not be viewing additional line weight as an excuse to trace back over the silhouette of the construction and perform a clean up pass, as discussed here in Lesson 2.

I’m also noticing a tendency to start your construction off lighter, and then increase the weight of your marks as you progress. This can encourage us to redraw more of the structure than we strictly need to. I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight as discussed above only towards the end.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. I can see you’ve clearly put a hell of a lot of time and effort into this aspect of your drawings, although in places you appear to be pursuing goals that were largely your own, rather than what is requested of you for these exercises. There are some areas where you’re doing a good job of implying textural forms on an objects surface, although in many cases you are in effect, getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum. On this page I’ve marked out a specific area where your texture was done well, as well as an example where you got more caught up in decoration. In future please do not fill in large areas with black, such as this bee. not only does this not add textural information to your drawing, is actually removes information, by obscuring the underlying construction, making it more difficult to provide feedback.

Okay I think that covers it. Your work is looking strong and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. That said, please make sure you read through this feedback carefully, and take steps to apply this information to your animals in the next lesson, where the points discussed here will continue to be just as relevant. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid).

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
edited at 12:45 PM, May 7th 2024
10:08 AM, Friday May 10th 2024

Thank you very much for the amazing feedback you provided.

I will make sure to apply the knowledge in Lesson 5 and onwards.

Regarding texture - yes, I will make sure to force myself think about using cast shadows technique to describe how the surface would feel, but it is hard for me to ignore very distinct patterns like those on ladybug wings for example... Maybe I have done them poorly, but those patterns may go as another contour curve describing the wing, although admittedly it is unnecessary then to fill them black?

And a couple of very quick question to the critique, if it is allowed?)

  1. Leg construction - I tried to use the sausage method where I could and I understood it pros, as regards to capturing both gesture and form at the same time and I would continue to use it in Lesson 5, but some insects for example spiders have parts of their limbs, which are closer to the end quite stiff, "sharp" and straight, references provided below...

So the best tool as I see it here would be to use either an ellipse rather than a sausage, or to do more of a flat shapes, or should I try to force a sausage in there?

  1. The second question is regarding substractive construction. So the general advice is to avoid it because of the tendency to do it wrong and because people do not think fully in 3D doing so, but for example on the Carabidae drawing, page 5, it is much better to use substractive method instead of additive, cause the elliptical form for the abdomen overlaps the ellipse for the torso, and considering the fact that the form of the abdomen itself is quite simple, it is much easier and if there is such a thing "right" to do it substractive way, rather then inventing some imaginary form and adding another on top of it, which would look and be much more confusing to be honest...

For the termite head I see there could be done an additive construction, but dunno whether my opinion is valid or not, to fully grasp the 3D space intuitively one must try substracting from time to time, which I do, occasionally as absolute most of my construction is additive...

These are all instruments, for example leaf construction method works great for wings, I found that branch exercise worked great for the dragonfly tail, and to me it seems that the substractive construction as an instrument would work best in the specific example of Carabidae (page 5)...

So is it okay to do it from time to time, just to train, as drawings are exercises, with absolute most of the construction being additive of course?

So there is the link

https://imgur.com/a/VxehCmr

Once again thanks for such a detailed feedback, and for lots of points and reminders. Apologies for the low quality, next time it would be much better... I have been accidentally compressing the photos sending them to PC, will not happen again.

I would also add some non-textured work and spend more time thinking about the 3D relations of forms...

And thank you for the reminder that those are not supposed to be super pretty drawing, cause sometimes I could get carried away with drawing explicit details, or some of my decisions were to make it look prettier.

I tried to use shadow shapes to separate forms instead of line weight, and I like to go one more time over the silhouette of the drawings so it would stand out more with all those shadow shapes..., but I never tried to lightly sketch the initial construction, and do "clean passes".

Thank you very much for the feedback, and I would love to hear the answers to the questions if it is possible...

2:18 PM, Friday May 10th 2024
edited at 2:28 PM, May 10th 2024

Hello Tomako,

1- Not sticking to the sausage method in lesson 4 isn’t necessarily a mistake, as some of the demos don’t use the sausage method we expect to see students experimenting with other strategies. Now that I’ve called it out and explained why we’d like students to use the method throughout lesson 5, I do expect you to stick with it, regardless of whether you feel it is the best strategy or not. There is subtle curvature along the length of the legs of the spider images you attached, so using ellipses would make them unnaturally stiff. We can build out the pointy tips to the legs by adding a cone-like additional form to the last leg sausage, as shown here.

2- We’ll be covering correct subtraction in the hard surface constructions of lessons 6 and 7. Don’t worry, you will get to use this in the future. For your lesson 5 homework please build your constructions by adding in 3D, as discussed in my critique.

If you find yourself wanting to do things like trace back around the silhouette of your construction to make it look nice, or copying colour patterns because they’re “hard to ignore”, remember that your responsibility as a student is to follow the instructions to the best of your current understanding. Not only does this help you get the most out of what the course has to offer, it also allows us to streamline the critiquing process, and continue to offer these official critiques at such a low price point, by minimising the number of times TAs need to explain the same feedback points to the same student. If the idea of having this responsibility seems unfamiliar to you, I urge you to rewatch this video which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox, and what your responsibilities as a student are.

edited at 2:28 PM, May 10th 2024
8:00 PM, Friday May 10th 2024

Thanks for the reply, I will stick to the sausage method and additive construction only then! Thanks for explaining the spider leg and providing the visual reference for it, it is very helpful!

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