Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals
5:00 PM, Thursday April 1st 2021
Hey Uncomfortable!
First thing's first, congratulations on the Proko vid. I'm sure even for a professional that's a big deal in terms of exposure and it was the best surprise seeing Drawabox being represented there. It was an added bonus that I happened to be doing lesson 5 itself when it aired. I was amazed to learn about aphantasia and how you work around it using the fundamentals. It goes to show your talent as a communicator, in both design and instruction.
Anyway, I want to preface the homework with a short note on the journey through lesson 5: First, it's more than the allotted pages but only in a technical sense -- the most drawings on a page is 3, with the majority of them only 2 and more than couple with only 1. I hate the sketchbook I'm using. Second, please excuse the extra-horrid draftsmanship at the start. It was towards the end that I suddenly "remembered" what it felt like to draw a clean line and utilize 3D awareness. I promise the work at the end is, though far from perfect, much better than the start.
I finally seem to be wading out of the dark waters of an overuse injury that for months went unaddressed through misdiagnoses and unnecessary testing. I had to stretch lesson 5 over about 2 months, if my math is correct, about half of which being downtime where I couldn't draw at all. It was one of the most trying periods of my life (I had a lot going on alongside the stress of injury + my day job is a content writer and developer, so my hands are important for that too) but, now that I can draw, I can say I'm the happiest man alive. There is no feeling sweeter than the opportunity to see hard work pay off in real ways.
The organic forms exercise I actually did afterward because I lost the first two -- which is good, because I found a photo of one and saw that I really didn't understand how to really delineate the progression of ellipses. All in all, my main focus was less on adding any detail/cast shadows, except for a few instances with shoddily-drawn fur (though I think Dogtopus came out okay), especially after lesson four where I went overboard with hatching and ended up doing 4 extra pages lol.
Anywho, thanks again for everything that you do. This system you've set up has been a godsend for those of us looking for a foundational course that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars. The feedback loop that you and the community provide is so much more important than many realize before they stumble upon it. Forgive the first half of the lesson's saliently poor draftsmanship, but if you want me to redo any number of pages just say the word. I drew many more pages that weren't in the sketchbook, anyway.