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1:58 AM, Tuesday May 4th 2021
Starting with your organic intersections, your work here is largely well done - just avoid the deflated, wobbly sausage you added to the top of the second page stack. Focus on having your sausage forms feel inflated and heavy for this exercise.
Continuing onto your animal constructions, honestly I'm very pleased with your work overall. There honestly isn't much to criticize, so instead I'm going to go over the major elements of this lesson, and discuss what you did well. If we come across anything that may have been misunderstood or can be improved, we'll address it as it comes along.
So firstly, your head constructions - you're clearly putting a lot of attention towards wedging the various "pieces" of the head construction together. The eye sockets, the muzzle, etc. It's not quite the strategy I'd use, but it does hit the major notes. The main difference is that my approach focuses on keeping things simpler for the base construction of the head, which does have value. The simpler our forms, the better. If you're focusing primarily on just establishing the relationships between those forms in simple terms, it'll retain its solidity very well - and then you can always build upon that foundation afterwards.
One minor point I find to help when it comes to eyelids, is instead of drawing the top and bottom eyelids as simple lines, draw them as entire forms - like a piece of putty being stuck over the eyeball, as shown here. This'll help you focus more on how it wraps around the ball structure.
Secondly, your leg construction. For the most part you're making pretty good use of the sausage method here. There are a few places where you're missing the contour line to define the intersection between sausage sections, but they are present in most cases. It's still worth mentioning that using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool (and one you use fairly well). It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively. When it comes to things like antlers, try to reduce the reliance on individual contour ellipses there - I imagine you're using the branch technique, but remember that you only need to place ellipses where you actually feel it'll be too tricky to draw a longer edge segment. You've got quite a few packed together, so I expect you can probably drop some of them and not have your construction suffer for it.
Thirdly, your use of additional masses. Here you're doing a great job of specifically designing the silhouette of those masses to have them actually wrap around the existing structure. You're using this effectively in larger areas like along the torsos where you need to build up muscle mass along the animals' backs, but also in smaller areas like building up the finer elements along their legs. Just remember that this technique basically needs to be used whenever we want to alter a form we've already constructed - so for example, in your snapping turtle, you ended up redefining the outline of its shell's silhouette in a way that risks flattening out the structure. You can read about this concept in these notes.
I actually did catch one thing about the additional masses that wasn't quite as good as in other drawings - if you take a look at this elk's legs, you've actually been somewhat sloppy. The placement of many of these masses appears to be kind of offset, as shown here. I also pointed out an area where you cut-off one of your additional masses where it was overlapped by another form. Be sure to draw all your forms in their entirety, fully closed, and if they should overlap, allow them to overlap in 3D.
The last thing I wanted to mention is just a minor point - for the texture along the snapping turtle's arms, this would have been an excellent place to use implicit drawing techniques, focusing on capturing the shadows cast by those textural forms, rather than drawing them all explicitly. Here's an idea of what that could look like.
So, I was able to find a few places to offer advice, but again - overall you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
8:51 AM, Wednesday May 5th 2021
Thank you so much for the detailed and specific feedback! You've certainly given me plenty to think about and work on in the future, I apprectiate it.
Staedtler Pigment Liners
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).