Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals
12:05 AM, Wednesday June 8th 2022
Thank you to whomever mught critic this, have a wonderful day
Hello I'll be handling the critique for your lesson 5 homework.
Organic Intersections
-Starting with the organic intersections, your forms are beginning to wrap around each other believably but I have a few things to call out. First, avoid the technique where you draw a big sausage and then add a bunch of smaller ones on top, try to keep them equally sized, and also keep them as simple as possible without any unexpected pinching or swelling throughout their length. This is something that you did better on your second page, just try to add a few contour lines to describe the curvature of the surface instead of simply drawing silhouettes. When it comes to the cast shadows try to push them further, right now it seems that they are hugging the form from which they are being projected, these shadows also act as contour curves so give them a nice curvature.
Animals
-Moving on to the animals, these are moving in the right direction, but let's see in which areas you can improve
-First of all it seems that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you want to fit in the page, the best approach is to give each additional drawing as much room on the page as possible only when that drawing is done we should asses if there is room for another one if there is not then it is perfectly fine to only have one drawing in the page as long as it is making full use of the space available in the page. Taking a look at your work I can definitely see a few instances where you are leaving a lot of empty space on the page .
Keep in mind that by limiting the space available in your page you are also limiting your ability to engage in spatial reasoning and you are also making it harder to draw from your shoulder.
-I can see that whenever blocking out your major masses you draw them as simple ellipses, your first priority should be to be confident in your belief that these are forms with volume and that they exist in 3D space, so add a contour line to describe their curvature.
-One of the most important things during this lesson is how you build legs. You are moving in the right direction when it comes to this, but you tend to jump a lot between using the sausage method and drawing flat shapes. Remember to only use the sausage method, this approach is not really about capturing the shape of the legs precisely as they are, instead it is about laying down a basic structure that captures both the flow and solidity of these limbs in equal measure. Once you have drawn each sausage, draw the intersection between them, this is a super important step so don't forget about it, after that we can start to add additional masses to better capture the shape of the legs. This process is better shown in this demo.
-I like to see that you are using additional masses a good deal and layering on top of the initial structure, I like to see how you are wrapping their silhouette around the form they are falling on, however you seem to use them quite sparingly, and a lot of them primarily focus on the silhouette without as much consideration for the forms that don't directly impact it. There's value in exploring these inner masses - like a missing puzzle piece that helps hold together the ones that create bumps along the silhouette's edge.
-I do like how you're approaching your feet. Corners are a good idea since they help imply the presence of internal planes and generally to make these structures feel more three dimensional. I do notice you going for boxier forms but I do think following the approach shown here from another student's work would help you push this even more. Try to push for adding other boxy forms for toes and such.
-And lastly I want to talk about head construction, I like to see that you are drawing the eye sockets with shapes that capture the different planes of the head, however it is best to draw them as a pentagon pointing downwards,this will give you a wedge to fit the muzzle into and a flat top for the brow ridge and the forehead, remember to draw big eye sockets and big eyeballs. And as always keep looking for opportunities to push these exercises further, when drawing the facial features try to follow the planes of the muzzle, this approach is better shown here and you can also see on this other diagram.
Okayyy, I have given you plenty to work on, but I think you will not need any revisions for this one, I trust you will continue to improve with more mileage and practice. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete
Next Steps:
250 Cylinder Challenge
Thank you very much:)
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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