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.

A quick demo construction of a rat.

I didn't add the notes here that I do to most of my demonstrations, but I felt watching the construction of a moose's head come together as a gif might also be helpful.

Pay attention to how, especially around the muzzle, every mark I put down follows the surface, curvature, and plane distinctions of the form beneath it. This allows additional masses to wrap around the more basic structure in a way that further reinforces, rather than undermines, the illusion that this construction is three dimensional.

Tapirs have pretty strange heads, but they can still use the same principles we use for any other construction. The key is to remember that they are all made up of 3D forms, and to think of your forms as having planes - a top, a side, a front, a bottom, etc. Don't just stamp them on top as flat shapes.

This is a pretty detailed demonstration I did for a student who was struggling with the lesson, picking on a donkey in particular. It focuses on all major elements of construction as applied to animals - the basic masses, the use of sausage forms for limbs and torso, the adding of further organic masses that conform to the structure underneath them, etc.

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.

An analysis of how I would gradually build up the construction of this gazelle's head.

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.