Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

The eye sockets are an incredibly important part of head construction, and often students will draw them too small, or without enough care to properly reflect this.

The cranial ball we start with is a rounded, smooth surface. Heads, however - regardless of species, with humans included - are actually a combination of flatter planes. The trick to head construction is figuring out how to build up to the correct arrangement of flat planes. Figuring out where to actually draw the edges between them.

The eye sockets are our first introduction to straight(-ish) edges, taking an otherwise rounded ball and laying the groundwork for separating it into a series of planes. Once in place, we can start connecting the other facial elements to it - a footprint for the muzzle, which can then be extruded out, as well as the brow ridge and the cheekbones.

All these pieces fit snugly to one another, rather than floating loosely without any clear relationships. The head is a three dimensional puzzle, and once completed, you can think of each of these forms as chunks that fit perfectly into one another, all buttressing around the eye socket.

To further demonstrate how the approach above can be applied to a wide variety of head constructions, here's a demo if it being applied to a particularly banana-headed rhinoceros.

You'd think that it would require a fundamentally different approach, but it doesn't - it just includes more steps, as we gradually build up to our desired 3D structure.

This carp demonstration by our teaching assistant DIO delves into how the concepts we use on the animals in the demo can be applied to other cases that may seem wildly different, but are still ultimately made up of the same kind of pieces.

A quick demo construction of a rat.

This one is an analysis of how to construct a puma in a particularly difficult orientation. You'll notice a lot of animal studies look more from the side, yet here not only is the subject in more of a three quarter view, but it's also got its hindquarters in a higher position. Our Discord community came to know this one as the "drama puma", and for those reasons it's a real challenge.

It's also a great example of how all of the drawings we do for this course are exercises. The end result is still pretty messy and confusing, but going through this process can teach you a lot about the nature of the forms that make up this complex animal.

As we've discussed back in lesson 2 when talking about texture and detail, cast shadows are king. This is just a basic example of how you can convey simple feathers by capturing a few of the shadows that they cast on each other.

The torso-sausage is the core of any animal, and quite easy to construct. In this demo I actually drew the ribcage way too small, but ignoring that, look at how the sausage is like a water balloon that is being held up by these two solid masses inside of it. The middle sags in the middle, and it remains relatively rounded and simple, conveying solidity and volume.

While a lot of animals will have visible masses and bulk along their spines (on the top), I still construct them in this manner, only adding the additional bulk after the fact similarly to the organic intersections from lesson 2.

This one's pretty old, but it still shows the principles of construction fairly well. Note that I haven't used the sausage method for the legs, but I'm still applying a lot of the same concepts.

This one's very old, but I feel like the way it accentuates the volumes and general gestural nature of the legs still makes it valuable in some ways. There is a lot to be learned here, just don't let it cause you to stray from the techniques covered in the main lesson and demos.

When tackling fur, make sure that you're not going into auto-pilot, trying to cover your silhouette in zigzags. Add specific, intentional, designed tufts of fur along the silhouette. This is what is going to carry the majority of the illusion of fur - you don't even have to put that much.

Taking the concepts described in the demo above, here I'm applying it to a construction of a raccoon.

Constructional principles applied to an oryx. Notice how I'm building up the bulk of its back with additional forms, not trying to achieve this all with the torso-sausage.

A construction of an elephant. Again, I'm not adhering to the sausage technique for the legs here, though they're still reflecting a lot of the gestural qualities that the technique espouses. Remember that these techniques you're learning are intended to teach you the concepts that lay beneath them. Once you get the hang of them - which can take some time and practice - you can then apply them as much or as little as you want.

Just be sure to stick to them when working through these lessons so I can be sure that you're getting a good deal of experience with them.