[deleted]

2016-03-10 00:05

[deleted]

Uncomfortable

2016-03-10 00:12

Very nice work! Your textures have really come a long way, with a wide variety of them present across your insects. Your forms are also fairly solid, but I have one concern that comes into play here. I'm not sure if it is perhaps because of your scanner's settings (it's best to use photo presets, drawing presets tend to boost the contrast and get rid of some of the nuance in your work), but the linework you use for your initial lay-in feels quite timid.

This doesn't exactly cause issues with the solidity of your forms (though it CAN, you're compensating for it just fine) but in the final drawing it leaves some lines almost invisible. You may want to consider adding a touch more line weight to some of those marks so they read more clearly.

Anyway, I'm really pleased with the sense of experimentation and development that I see from this set. Your early pages aren't that great, with some of the forms falling flat, or the textures coming out a little cluttered, but there's noticeable improvement with each drawing.

My favourites include the snail (that texture along its body where it meets the shell is really nice) and the house fly's got an excellent focal point developed around its head, with the gradual increase of detail as you zero in on that area.

Keep up the great work! Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-03-14 15:58

Yeah, I'm a bit on the fence about plants being the first dynamic sketching lesson. It started off that way because it's how my instructor organized it, and at this point changing the order would be a little problematic, and dealing with the flat leaf shapes in 3D space early is probably a good idea... But still, insects are definitely more comfortable for most people.

Uncomfortable

2016-03-19 15:56

Unfortunately, this month I'm taking a break from free critiques. If you happen to be a current patreon supporter, be sure to send me a message containing your reddit username through patreon's messaging system. Otherwise hold onto your homework and resubmit it on April 1st.

For more information, check out the announcement.

Uncomfortable

2016-03-22 22:17

Your forms are excellent - this shows through in all of your drawings, but especially the first couple of lay-ins. Your application of texture is pretty good as well, but there is one considerable area here where you can improve.

From what I can see, you are playing with applying texture using a variety of methods, but you have a tendency to fall back to using hatching lines very, very liberally. If I had to guess, I'd say that whenever you feel a space should not be blank, that is the first solution that pops into your head - just scribble some hatching on it.

You've got to fight against that reflexive urge. First and foremost, less is ALWAYS better than more. It's okay to leave surfaces blank, and sometimes it's really necessary to strike a good balance. Don't be afraid of leaving surfaces blank.

Secondly, if you are going to put some sort of texture on a surface, don't scribble, don't be loose, think through your approach. You've clearly demonstrated some areas where you've taken some time to observe your reference image, but I think you can push that much further. Put your pen down, don't give into the urge to jump into drawing. Just sit and look at your reference image, study it, try and ask yourself questions about it. Why does it look so smooth? What makes it look bumpy? And so on.

When you pick up your pen again, think before you put down any ink. If you read the notes on texture, you'll see that I generally encourage people to think about where their shadows are going to be, and to really spend time designing those shadow shapes. Then, texture should only be applied where you want to gradually transition from pure black shadow to light. Texture is just another tool, and in this case, we use it because we generally can't use middle greys or colour - we're stuck with full dark, or fully light. In order to achieve transitions between those two tones, we have to create patterns whose density gradually decreases as they move towards the light.

Another thing to remember is that hatching lines function as little contour lines - they describe the surface of your object, so if you half-ass it and draw straight lines over a rounded surface (which you did a couple times, though not too often), it's going to flatten the object out. Admittedly, there are times where I do this purposely, but right now it's unlikely that you're going to be doing that yourself.

In general, I think it'd be a very good idea to try drawing for a while without using any hatching lines at all, because you have a very clear reliance upon it that you're gonna have to shake. Above all, an artist needs to be in full control of his or her tools, and every single part of a drawing should be the result of a conscious decision on their part.

Your digital work is coming along nicely too - I won't touch on this too much, but one thing that jumped out at me that you can work on is your edge control. Your rendering tends to lean very much towards very, very soft rendering across the board. When you apply colour or value, all of your edges are very smooth and gradual. It's important to balance your soft edges with hard ones. Generally soft edges tend to make it very easy to be vague about your form definition and they all imply very smooth surfaces. Hard edges require decisions - it's the same as what I mentioned before, about everything being the result of clear, conscious decisions. You may want to try starting your rendering off purely with hard edges, and then making the decision to soften certain edges up while leaving others firm.

Anyway, as you requested, I'm very much nitpicking at this point. Your forms are great, and that is the primary focus of all of my lessons - texture and rendering is a distant second. You're doing well, so keep it up and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Oh, one other thing - when you submit homework, there's no need to notify me via patreon. I get notified when someone submits a comment to any of these posts.

Uncomfortable

2016-03-25 00:03

There's some improvement that I'm seeing here - your application of texture on the second set there has definitely improved considerably, and you're moving in the right direction as far as that goes, paying more attention to your reference images and relying less on memory. Keep that up.

Your general construction of forms is still a little uncertain though. Rather than having to do with the forms themselves, I think it has to do with your line quality. Looking closely, I can see that your lines are rather shaky and lack confidence. You're really stressing over trying to nail every line, so they come out stiff and uncertain. You're drawing them slowly, rather than spending all of your time ghosting/preparing, and executing the marks themselves with confidence and speed.

I'd like you to take a look again at the organic intersections exercise (the last exercise from lesson 2) - I think that's a great way to warm-up and loosen up. Take a look at these notes I wrote for someone who was struggling with them (the right side) and do two pages of organic intersections. Focus on the volume and solidity of each organic form, and make sure you start off by defining a simple ground plane on which to drop these forms. Loosen yourself up, don't draw your lines slowly and carefully. Let your lines flow smoothly.

Then, I want you to draw one more insect - take it all the way through the process, from lay-in/construction to detail, but take photos of it as you progress, documenting the steps you take.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-04 20:25

I'd say my favourite of these is the wasp. It demonstrates a decent grasp of form and construction, and a pretty well developed eye for texture. This leads me to believe that with many of the other drawings, you were not necessarily doing your best.

The example I decided to focus on was your scorpion - you can see some notes I drew here.

• You're not constructing your object with solid 3D forms, you're drawing loose, approximative marks that come out more like flat 2D shapes.

• Your contour curves aren't wrapping around your forms convincingly, so they're not really serving their purpose.

• You're not drawing through your ellipses

• You're overly dependent on hatching lines, using them for all of your textures instead of really taking a close look at your reference images and conveying elements of what you see there. Hatching lines capture one possible texture that we see in the world, but there's far more than that. Here's a demo I did a while back about insect textures.

The beetle on the left side of the last page is pretty good too, form-wise, though it falls apart due to the overuse of hatching. I'd like to see you do another four pages of insect drawings, focusing first and foremost on your construction - building up your objects with solid 3D forms. Secondary to that, spend more time observing your reference images to identify the various patterns and repeating visual elements that exist. Construction is always your primary focus, so don't jump into texture until your construction is solid.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-07 23:05

Some of these are quite well done, others a little less so. Overall, your form and construction are pretty decent, while your texturing - especially when it comes to hairy subjects - needs a fair bit of work. Our focus is always going to be on form, which is infinitely more important than texture, but I'll give you some tips on how to tackle furry and hairy things.

Before that, I want to talk a little about form - looking at your wolf spider, you've done a good job with the main body - you started off with two ellipses, drawing through completely and establishing forms that feel fairly three dimensional. You may want to apply one or two contour lines here, though, just to drive that message home. The line on the abdomen definitely does a lot to define the volume of the form, while the thorax/head section is missing that a little bit.

Ironically enough, when it comes to long, thin forms like legs, the visual impact of contour lines tends to be much more stark, so here it's important that you really push the sense of that curve wrapping around the form, and that you limit how many contour lines you apply. Applying them at points of segmentation is totally fine (as long as you try to nail that wrap-around illusion), but adding more than that can start to make things look a little stiff. We see that in some of your other insects.

I certainly hope you're continuing to practice the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 - in this case especially the organic forms with contour curves. It's a good idea to pick a few of these exercises and do them as part of a warm-up regimen each day, alternating which exercises you choose.

Anyway, onto texture - the problem with hair is that if you try to draw every single strand, or even half as many, you're going to end up with loads of visual noise and contrast. It becomes very distracting and unpleasant to look at. Furthermore, it can be very easy to fall into the trap of just scribbling randomly to capture a sense of hair, because we naturally think hair is fairly chaotic. In fact, hair is not - it tends to group and clump together, flowing in predictable directions.

When things group together, we can avoid drawing every individual, and instead capture the groups as shapes and forms themselves. If you take a look at these notes, you can see that these clumps can be used along the silhouette of an object to get the greatest impact with the smallest amount of actual detail. The silhouette is actually what the eye notices first, and as such, even little discrepancies along the silhouette's edge will have considerably more impact than all of the detail contained within the shape.

Anyways, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete - be sure to continue working on those contour lines, and remember most of all to focus on constructing solid 3D forms as parts of your constructions. If you haven't had the chance yet, be sure to read the article on constructional drawing.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-10 02:09

There's definitely something not quite correct about your approach, but I'm having trouble seeing it from your final results. I'd like you to do one more drawing, specifically of this beetle.

Take several photos as you move through the stages of construction so I can see exactly how you're approaching the drawing.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-12 23:40

Not bad! Your texturing is generally very nice, and your forms are okay although in some places they can certainly use a bit more work. The biggest thing I need to stress is that you need to constantly be thinking in terms of 3D - all the little components of your construction are 3D forms, and when two 3D forms touch, their intersection is a 2D shape. It's not quite enough to understand that intersection in terms of a simple line, you need to really think about how those forms come together in three dimensions.

I notice that when it comes to skinny forms (legs mostly) your contour curves tend to get rather sloppy, due to the limited space you've got. All the more reason to put more focus in these areas, not less.

I noticed in a few drawings you jumped into texture/detail before even finishing up your construction. Keep in mind that texture is nothing when compared to the importance of your construction/lay-in. No detail work will save a poor construction, while a strong construction will be fine without any texture at all.

Here's some notes on how you approached your mantis, and how I would approach the lay-in myself.

One other issue I noticed was that you have a tendency to go way overboard when it comes to hair. When it comes to hair (or really any texture) less is always more. Attempting to capture every individual strand will result in far more contrast and far too many distracting tangents. Here are some additional notes on how I tackle hair/fur: http://i.imgur.com/Eb6hr0h.jpg

I'm still going to mark this lesson as complete, but I want you to very much focus on your form/constructions as you move forward, and also I insist that you spend some time going back to the organic intersection exercise from lesson 2. This exercise should help you get used to the idea of dealing with all of these construction forms as 3D objects that interact with one another.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-12 23:46

Your grasshopper there certainly marks a weak start, but by the end of your homework set your constructions are much more solid and confident, and you demonstrate some fairly decent texture work. I really like that scorpion fly - the general construction would have been quite challenging, but you pulled it off quite nicely. Your linework's a little sketchy here and there, so do I want to stress the importance of ghosting through your lines and thinking/planning before every mark you put down. Fight against the natural urge to be loose, and never chicken-scratch (as you did with the scorpion fly's drop shadow.

There's one other minor thing that I want to point out - in the fly you drew at the beginning, you've got a line going through its torso. That line represents the minor axis of all of the contour curves that wrap around the form, but your contour curves (which are simply visible sections of entire ellipses) do not align to it. Be mindful of these sorts of things in order to achieve really solid feeling forms. Here's what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/PBAoox2.png

Anyway, feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-15 23:40

Nice work! I have to say, the bed bug gave me flashbacks - when I was taking the dynamic sketching course at concept design academy, the room I was staying in had bed bugs, and worse still, I didn't have a bed frame - my mattress was directly on the carpet.

Anyway, your forms and constructions are excellent. I get a clear sense of your volumes, and your understanding of space. Your textures are at times a little weaker - I'd say that when you try to push the boundaries and go a little more complex in your textures, you tend to fall back on scribbling to various degrees. I'd say it's a particularly controlled form of scribbling, but I can still see that sort of randomness within certain defined parameters. When seen from far off it's not a huge issue, but if you look up close you start to see the chaos.

I encourage you to continue trying to approach it with more control than that - think about the flow and rhythm of the textures - even when a texture may appear to be random and chaotic, there is always an underlying structure and direction. Here's a demo I did a while back of some insect-specific texturing: http://i.imgur.com/a3Lh6ER.jpg

Anyways, textures are a minor part of the work - our main focus lies on form and construction, which you handled phenomenally. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Edit: There's one last thing I wanted to mention - I noticed that the fine control of your pen pressure, and the general nuance and subtlety of your linework has improved significantly since your first submission for the plants lesson. Well done!

Uncomfortable

2016-04-18 18:35

Looking through your work, the overall conclusion I'm coming to is that you may not be investing as much of your time and focus on the lay-in/construction phases. Most specifically, your contour curves are falling short - they don't fully convey the sense of wrapping around rounded forms, so they don't push their volumes. Looking at your work from lesson 2, I know you are capable of doing it quite well - perhaps you've just fallen out of practice. Remember that you should be keeping up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2, picking a couple each day and doing them as warmups.

Furthermore, remember that you're constructing an object out of 3D forms - in this case, mostly organic forms. You've got to keep that suspension of disbelief in your mind, that these forms you're drawing on a flat sheet of paper exist in three dimensions. On top of that, whenever two 3D forms intersect with each other, their intersection is a 2D shape - you should be aware of how these forms are intersecting (since they're mostly simple organic sausage-forms, your intersections will mostly be ellipses), and you should draw them in.

Lastly, your texturing tends to be rather scratchy and half-assed. Looking again at your lesson 2 work, you're clearly capable of far better than this. Don't rely on hatching lines, look clearly at your reference images and identify the visual patterns, flows and rhythms that exist there. Consider how the visual elements are spread out across a surface, if it's even or clustered in small groups, or however else. When it comes to hair, try to avoid drawing every little strand, and instead consider how those strands clump together. Leveraging the silhouette of your shape (breaking up the silhouette's edge) can allow you to convey texture very effectively without having to fill in the entirety of the object. You can find more information on dealing with hair/fur here: http://i.imgur.com/Eb6hr0h.jpg

I'd like to see four more pages of insect drawings, and for each drawing I'd like to see photos after the construction stage, and then after the texturing stage.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-20 22:44

There are only a couple pages of these that really demonstrate very much understanding of the material in the lesson - the rest are examples of what you mentioned, your habit of rushing and getting caught up in the sensation of drawing, and doing so without actually thinking.

Your cerechus chrysomelinus and your ant are both alright, but they also show tell-tale signs of rushing and generally being sloppy, drawing without putting much thought into the marks you're putting down.

If you remember from lesson 1, a huge part of the approach to drawing we espouse is the application of the ghosting method. The method itself is all about thinking before every single stroke you put down. You certainly are not accustomed to this, and likely haven't really kept that in mind, so you really should go back and reread that material. Sketching loosely and hoping things come together simply will not do.

my hand starting scratch the paper in chaotic movements

To put it simply, don't allow yourself to do this. Before you put any mark down, you must think about the mark you want to draw, consider what it adds to the drawing, and what purpose it serves. Furthermore, when you draw a form, make sure you draw complete forms. Don't get caught up in thinking about your final result - we're not in this to create beautiful finished drawings, this is all about understanding how the forms come together to construct solid representations of what we're studying. Your current haphazard approach does not do anything to develop your sense of form or 3D space, because it is demonstrating very little awareness of what solid, complete forms exist in your construction, and how they interact with one another.

From the looks of it, you haven't really kept up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 - even after having them marked as complete, you should be continuing to do them regularly, picking one or two each day to do as part of a warmup routine. Those exercises aren't ever 'finished'.

Make sure you go back and reread those lessons to refresh your memory. Furthermore, make sure you read this article on constructional drawing.

Lastly, once you've done that, and once you've revisited the things you've forgotten, I'd like you to try this lesson again.

As for your questions:

1. There's nothing wrong with learning from multiple sources, but do not combine them until you are finished absorbing the material from a given source in its entirety. People have a tendency to blend everything they're learning all at once, and they end up missing the most important facets of each in the process. For instance, when doing my lessons, I expect you to follow everything described in the lessons exactly as it is written.

2. While it's okay to practice working digitally simultaneously, in your specific case I would be a little cautious. Digital media has the tendency to make beginners develop bad habits (mostly related to rushing and being impatient). These are issues you're already wrestling with, so it might be better to put off working digitally until you've been able to get those things under control. That is entirely my opinion, of course.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-30 01:05

There's definitely some improvement over the set. At the beginning, you have a clear tendency to chicken-scratch your lines, most notably with the moth. I'm glad that you tone that down considerably as you progress, though there are still some other issues I'd like to bring to your attention.

Rather than explaining it entirely in writing, I ended up doing the bulk of my critique as a demo: http://i.imgur.com/N3OcGpp.png. The main points to focus on are:

• Always force yourself to remember that you're not transferring a 2D photograph onto a 2D piece of paper. You're studying how the object represented in the photograph exists in 3D space, then reconstructing it as a series of 3D forms on the page. It's very easy to lose track of the 3D aspect of this process, so you constantly need to remind yourself that every element you add is an independent form - you need to understand exactly how it sits in 3D space and how it relates to the other forms in the scene. Contour lines help immensely here, but you need to apply them in such a way that they really describe the curvature of the surface in order for them to be completely effective. Of course this takes time and practice, but keep pushing yourself to think in terms of 3D space, and imagine that your pen tip is carving over a 3D form, not on a flat page.

• The process we use does not involve creating a rough sketch, then cleaning up. The shapes and forms we put down during the first stages are the very same lines that make up the finished drawing. If you think about it in terms of everything being forms, you can't really consider the initial lay-in to be some sort of approximate, loose sketch - they're solid forms, so if you need to make adjustments, in your mind it needs to be as though you're carving those adjustments. It's very easy to change things in a 2D drawing, but if you think about it strictly in 2D, you'll lose the sense of volume and solidity.

• Line weight is an important tool - be sure to reread the notes on how you can use it from the box challenge: Line Weight.

Right now your textures are pretty hectic and noisy. When it comes to making something seem hairy, don't focus all of your attention on the interior of the forms. Really, you don't need to touch the inside much at all - all you need to do is break up the silhouette of the form, adding tufts of hair to its edges.

You also have a tendency of being very chaotic and scribbly, and you absolutely need to tone that down. It's because of this that your textures end up overwhelming - you're drawing much more than you're thinking, hoping that adding more lines, more ink, will convey what's stuck in your mind. Stop. Take your time and think through your problem. Consider how you might be able to achieve your goals with fewer strokes on the page.

Anyway, for now I don't want you to think about texture at all. Right now we are going to focus entirely on the form construction - I'd like you to do 6 more pages of insects, stopping just short of the texturing step. The drawings should be completely recognizable by use of form and construction only, without having to add surface detail.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-05 19:42

You've done quite well. The main focus of the exercise - form construction - is your biggest strength here, and you clearly have a good sense for manipulating those forms in 3D space and conveying them as solid elements.

Your texture is definitely not particularly well developed, though it's not a big deal right now - I always say that you can go through all of the lessons without drawing a single texture, and if your understanding of form and construction is solid, you've understood the core of what I'm trying to teach. That said, if you want to push these to the next level, I strongly encourage you to take more time to really observe the different kinds of textures that are present on your subject matter.

More than that, there's one very important fact that helps rendering click in some peoples' minds. Texture is the result of tiny forms on the surface of an object. What you see as the texture, and what you capture in your drawing, are not the forms themselves, but rather the shadows they cast. Think of how a tiny raised bump casts a very subtle, curved shadow. Now, consider the fact that you are currently attempting to capture all of your textures in terms of lines - but shadows aren't just lines. Sometimes they seem to manifest that way, but really they are much more flexible than that. They can start out thin, but swell to greater weight and thickness, and they can even come together to fill entire swathes of surface with solid black. If you try to think entirely in terms of line, you end up somewhat limited in the kinds of textures you can capture.

Take a look at this demo I did a while back on the textures found on a beetle, and pay special attention to how my lines fuse together into larger shadow shapes: http://i.imgur.com/a3Lh6ER.jpg.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that I noticed you submitted lesson 4 and 5 at the same time. To be honest, I wasn't terribly pleased about this. The fact that your understanding of form is very solid assuages my frustration, but at the same time, it implies certain things about the value of the critiques you're receiving. Each lesson builds on the one before it - so if you had made some major mistake here, I would have asked you to toss your next lesson's work out, redo chunks of this one to fix the problem, and then redo the following one. It's largely because the same theoretical issue would be present in the next set, so there would be no point in me critiquing it. Needless to say, it would not be an entirely pleasant process for either of us.

But, on the bright side, your work is well done, so I'll overlook it this time! Consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-06 19:42

You start off a little weak, but I think by the end of it you've made considerable strides towards understanding how to manipulate form in 3D space, and how to put those forms together to create solid constructions. You've got quite a few nice pages here:

• Page 2 marks the beginning of understanding how to work in terms of constructive drawing.

• Page 4 really starts pushing that

• Page 6 takes a bit of a step back in terms of form (it's kind of flat) but your use of texture is very nice. Just remember that even when you're going to apply texture, your forms should be the first priority - that means not being timid about adding contour curves where you feel they'll help you push that sense of volume.

• 8 and 9 are looking great, with 9 pushing both form and texture/detail in a great direction.

The most important thing is always to focus on the step you're on, rather than thinking about how to make your life easier for later steps. This means draw as confidently and put down as many marks as are necessary for you to really understand how your construction exists in 3D space, rather than worrying about how those marks will show up in the final drawing. Of course, wasting lines is no good, so always consider whether or not the lines are really contributing to your understanding of space and form - but if they are, don't hesitate to put them down.

Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-07 19:18

Very nice work! Your sense of form is developing really nicely, I can see your mind wrapping around how each piece connects to its neighbours, and how they come together to produce this solid construction. The only thing I want to recommend is not to use any sort of scribbling when doing your texturing. I'm specifically looking at the textured hercules beetle, where you applied some rather scratchy looking texture to its head and underside. The problem with this is that not only does it rely on randomness (which I frown upon), it also creates a LOT of noise and contrast, which draws the viewer's eye to it, but provides no pay-off. Pay-off would be something more meticulously planned and designed, rather than a chaotic pattern. Were I you, I'd have filled that space in with solid black, which would distract and draw the viewer's eye much less.

Anyway, keep it up! Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-10 18:52

Aagh your insects are gross. That is, admittedly, a pretty good sign - the ones that unsettle me tend to be those that are well constructed.

Your use of form and construction is pretty well done - you're not wrong about the quality going up and down throughout the set, but overall there's a reasonable standard here. I'd say that the ones that seem weakest are likely the ones that went too complex too quickly, rather than solidifying the forms/construction before moving into more complex detail. As the constructional method always pushes, you want to go from simple to complex, never adding any detail that is not already supported by that which is already there. In this regard, the grasshopper stands out as a pretty good example of this. Too much detail, too quickly.

Conversely, the dragonfly at the end is excellent. Each component of the body reads as distinctly 3D, and you can feel exactly where each one connects to the ones around it.

I will point out though that you have a tendency to rely very heavily on crosshatching - this belies the likelihood that your'e not actually looking too closely when it comes to texture, and that you're probably overwhelmed by all of the information there. Take a look at this demo I did a long while back: http://i.imgur.com/a3Lh6ER.jpg. There's a wiiiide array of possible textures you can get from insects, and really from everything, and the majority of them are not simply captured through hatching lines.

Additionally, when you tackle hair, like on the wasp, it's not a great idea to just draw individual strands sticking out. This creates a lot of tension with the tangents between the lines and the object's silhouette, which can be distracting. Instead, it's better to regard these strands of hair as grouping together into tufts. Here's a couple demos that relates to this:

• http://i.imgur.com/Eb6hr0h.jpg

• http://i.imgur.com/a0r47lY.jpg

Anyway, consider this lesson complete and feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-15 18:14

Very nice! Your forms feel muuuuch more solid now, than they did with your plants, and as a result your constructions feel considerably more believable. Your texturing is coming along well decently as well - it's certainly not the main priority of any of these lessons, but I'm glad to see you starting to move away from such heavy use of hatching lines, most notably in your scorpions' claws and flies. You're still relying on them a fair bit, but the shift is noticeable, and it's a good sign. You'll have to continue working on shedding yourself of that crutch, of course, but it'll happen over time.

Keep up the great work! The change from the last lesson is REALLY noticeable. Feel free to move onto the next lesson. Also, I wanted to share this collection of other demos I've done - it might help as you move onto the animals. What I believe might be most important to you right now is the raccoon that demonstrates how I tackle fur, almost completely capturing it as tufts that break the silhouette of an object with almost no hatching applied to the interior. Any detail that modifies the silhouette of an object will read 10x as strongly as detail applied to the inside - you can use this to convey complex textures (like hair and fur) without having to go nuts and end up with really high-contrast areas.

Anyway, feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-22 18:04

I'm glad to say that your timidity and your general sense of form and construction has improved considerably, and that pushing you forward to this lesson was the right decision. The various parts of your insects definitely feel considerably more solid, and you do a decent job of capturing their volumes.

I think you're doing a good job of experimenting with different approaches to adding detail/texture to your insects, with some approaches not working out so well, and others coming out somewhat better. One thing I noticed here and there were these short contour-curve-ish lines that you've got on areas like the black ant's abdomen. Honestly I don't think they're a particular great idea - they're not really pushing the illusion that they're wrapping around the form (because being so short, it's hard to really get that curvature right), and they end up feeling like just a bunch of individual, uniform lines. Uniformity is something that generally comes off as boring - so you'll want to space things out irregularly, vary line weight, etc. especially when dealing with organic subject matter.

I think your ladybird spider and your darkling beetle came out quite nicely, and I especially like how you've merged a lot of the small little bits into larger areas of solid black where that detail gets very dense. For more ideas on how to apply that in different ways, you can take a look at this demo I did a long while back: http://i.imgur.com/a3Lh6ER.jpg

Anyways, you're developing nicely, and you're on the right track. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-02 15:23

Your work improves over the set, but your drawings are still coming out remarkably flat. That said, looking at your work I get the distinct impression that you're entirely capable of conveying the illusion of form, but that you're overly occupied with the idea of creating a pretty drawing that your basic form constructions suffer for it.

To put it simply, you're way too focused on your rendering/detailing. The main thing I think you're missing is consideration for how the different forms in your construction actually intersect - it helps immensely to get your head around the idea that this is all three dimensional to actually include the cross-sections of the points of intersection, so that you can fully comprehend how the two forms relate to one another. Otherwise it's easy to fall back into the trap of thinking of these as flat shapes on a flat page.

Ultimately, everything we're doing here is creating an illusion. The first person you want to be successfully fooling, however, is you.

Here's a few demos on constructing insects from the big demo dump I did earlier in June:

• Ladybug - notice how my contour lines run along the surface of the forms, specifically the one running down the middle of the whole bug

• Beetle - focus on how the overall form of the shell turns in space - that silhouette is your primary method of demonstrating that the object is 3D, not 2D.

• Spider - start simple, but be precise. By simple, I mean breaking the flow of your line and changing course/direction as little as possible. Use contour lines wherever necessary to remind yourself of how those surfaces turn through space.

I'd like you to do another 3 pages of insect drawings, but do NOT go into any texture or detail. Your detailing is very good, but we want to focus on your constructions.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-06 19:09

Many of your initial lay-ins are fairly well constructed, but I believe as you start to get into texture and detail, you pay much less attention to form and construction, and get too caught up in the detailing. Your texturing is really nice on some of them (rhino beetle, scorpion) but ultimately even the best texturing will fall flat when applied to a weak construction.

When it comes to construction, one extremely important thing to keep in mind is that you are at no point drawing a loose approximate sketch of any sort. Looking at the rhino beetle, you roughed in the body with a few very loose ellipses. The ellipses you draw here aren't just ellipses - they're actual solid forms that intersect with one another, and you're using them as the base for this construction. Once you have that basic form constructed (the lay-in), then you can start building up complexity in successive passes. At no point are you ever drawing a line that isn't supported by the construction that already exists at that point. Looking at your rhino beetle again, you drew the ellipses for the body but then your actual drawing of the abdomen/thorax/carapace didn't really adhere to what you'd already put down. You used the initial lines as a suggestion, so you strayed from the foundation you were building up.

I'd like you to do three more pages of insects - on the first page, focus entirely on filling it up with lay-ins, no detail at all. No loose/faint drawing, followed by cleaning it up. Construct from the ground up, building simple forms and then breaking them down to add complexity. The next two pages can be dedicated to more detailed drawings - remember that detail is not king here. Don't go overboard with it, and absolutely do not try to overshadow your construction with texture and visual noise.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-09 17:40

Your work is generally very well done. Great constructions, and very meticulous texturing. I might even be inclined to suggest that your textures are a little bit overdone - they're almost overwhelming. At this point you'll want to start thinking about how to imply more detail than you actually explicitly draw in, so as to avoid the problem of creating too much visual noise. I talk about this in the 25 texture challenge.

Also, you may want to look at these two demos/notes in regards to drawing fur:

• http://drawabox.com/viewimage/texture/fur.jpg

• http://drawabox.com/viewimage/texture/raccoon.jpg

Keep up the great work - I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-12 19:50

Looking very good! You start off a little weaker, but your constructions improve significantly over the set, as you get more confident with the subject matter. I'd say that with the very last page, they dip again slightly (perhaps you weren't quite feeling it at that point) but the majority of your other pages show a good to strong sense of form and construction, and your texturing is generally well thought out, with a good variety of patterns, and a nice balance of visually dense/detail-heavy areas against simpler rest areas.

Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-14 23:24

Your constructions are coming along well, and your general use and understanding of form is solid. There's a few areas where things get a little bit weak, but this is inevitable over a set of many drawings. The first of these is the scorpion, which isn't badly done, but definitely suffered from being drawn relatively small (compared to the other drawings). Smaller drawings result in having less room to think through spatial problems. The other problematic one I saw was the crab spider at the end, whose abdomen feel a bit flat. You can see how even that middle contour ellipse there goes off the form in order to maintain its own integrity. This also shows me that you were more than likely aware of the issue - in which case not trying to correct it was probably the correct decision (since corrections draw attention to mistakes).

As far as things getting busy, I don't really see a whole lot of that. I'm pleased with your comfort level with letting your details merge together into larger areas of solid black - this approach definitely helps keep the noise levels down, as it reduces the contrast in those regions.

In general, you're doing well, so keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-24 18:25

This is actually considerably better! Much less sketchy and scratchy, and for the most part your constructions feel more solid. I especially liked the top right of your second page of lay-ins, there's a clear sense of how the carapace warps around the insect's body. The drawing on page 4 is also very nice, especially where you've approached the detail and texture, though its legs fall a bit flat.

Now, with the point that you brought up about simple bugs, you bring to light an issue that I should be able to clarify. Texture will not fix a flat drawing. All of that is determined well before the texturing phase, and no amount of detail or lighting/shading will fix it. It all comes down to you understanding the forms that make up your object, and how they all fit together.

I did a little demo to show how to tackle that particular ladybug, though I've got another from a previous critique that shows the same concept. Another thing that is important to keep in mind is the silhouette of your forms. If you look at 3D form completely in silhouette, where it appears to be a solid, graphic, 2D shape, you'll find that more often than not you can infer some detail of how that form curves despite not being able to see any internal detail. Any information you can convey from the silhouette alone is going to have the greatest impact, because it is the silhouette that our eyes perceive first. The first bit of information will always carry the most weight - it's for this reason that I don't even cover matters of shading, as I find that sort of internal detail to be surprisingly unimportant (and often ends up being used as a crutch for those who haven't figured out how to manipulate the silhouette or take advantage of contour lines). You can see what I mean in this demo.

One last thing I wanted to mention was that your contour curves right now are a little bit on the sloppy side. Try to put more thought into the execution of each individual one, and consider overshooting those curves to better capture the illusion of it wrapping around the form. You can see what I mean here: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms.

Overall you're making good progress. Still plenty of room to grow, but I believe you should be good to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-25 20:43

Honestly, I was a bit disgruntled when I saw the two new messages on reddit, since I'd literally just finished critiquing and was about to head home. That said, I'm very pleased with your work on this lesson's homework, so the critique should be very easy, and your drawings are a joy to look at.

Your drawings are excellent. Your forms and constructions are solid, and they improve considerably even over the set. That scorpion is looking especially confident, as is the rhino beetle. If I had to remark upon anything you might want to work on, it's the timidity of your initial lay-ins. Looking at the initial masses you drop in, you appear to use a fairly light touch with your pen, resulting in a faded and less committal mark. I can certainly see why, but the downside is that when you draw with a lighter touch, your hand tends to be less stable, and your ellipses and organic curves stiffen up. There's no reason to be worried about drawing with confidence - you can always increase your line weights later on, and come back with nice, bold textures as you already have.

Anyway, keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-27 19:48

Looking at how long ago you submitted lesson 3, I was expecting your work to be awful. It seems I was wrong though - you've done a pretty good job, and have demonstrated a solid sense of form and construction, and your use of texture is quite good (though I strongly recommend moving away from hatching or crosshatching, as it usually looks quite sloppy and is rarely the best choice when it comes to capturing most textures).

You're absolutely right that insect legs can be quite challenging - you've done a pretty good job with them however, and have been able to avoid the general pitfall of making them look stiff and awkward. You'll find that in certain cases, it's better to drop the emphasis on form and instead emphasize gesture and flow. This is sometimes the case with more substantial animal legs as well. You'll notice that in some of these demos: http://imgur.com/gallery/udZZ8 (you also should find some other helpful information in there on topics such as hair/fur and other kinds of construction)

The only thing I want to remind you of is the importance of continuing to draw through your ellipses. It may seem inane right now, but I insist that you do it for all the ellipses you draw for me.

Anyway, I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-31 20:05

Generally you're doing well, and some of your constructions are quite nice. For example, the dead center of page 2, the scorpion and the earwig are well done. One thing I'm noticing across your drawings however is that you don't always draw through forms. You do here and there, but more often you stop drawing where another form overlaps. This results in each individual form flattening out and reading more as a 2D shape, rather than a solid part of a larger construction.

Also, you're not really drawing through your ellipses (different meaning of 'draw through', I'm referring to this). I fully expect you to draw through every ellipse you draw for my lessons, without exception.

Back to the whole construction thing, take a look at the 'other demos' section of the lesson 4 page, especially the wolf spider and the ladybug. Look at how I start out those constructions - I'm not concerned with how the forms intersect with each other or how they occlude one another just yet - I'm just laying down those forms, focusing on making each one read as being solid.

Part of it may have to do with your line quality - things are a little shaky and uncertain at times. It's important to draw your lines from your shoulder, and to avoid drawing too small on the page.

Overall you do seem to grasp the primary concepts, just be sure to continue pushing yourself to draw through everything. Look again at the drawing in the middle of the second page - its tail is a great example of constructional drawing. You drew the bulk of it as a simple shape (although you should have drawn it as a solid enclosed form), then you constructed your ribbing around it, section by section. It's much cleaner and better put together than the scorpion below (which has its own strengths, though its tail is very flat and a little sloppy).

Anyway, go ahead and move onto the next lesson but keep what I've mentioned here in mind.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-03 18:50

No, the exercises have value regardless of what medium you choose to do them in. That said, certain tools (in this case, ink), in the grand scheme of the whole course are much more effective when it comes to developing your skills.

Drawing in pen is difficult, it's true. That's not in any way limited to you specifically, but is something that everyone who does these lessons struggles with. It forces you to think before you draw, to plan things out and to draw those lines worth drawing with confidence. The fact that you find it difficult is not a reason to try and find another route - it's a reason to face the challenge head on and overcome it. Never allow the difficulty of a thing dictate your choices.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-04 01:15

Knowing my policies and just how many homework submissions I get, you really shouldn't be posting homework halfway through an attempt, even if you're struggling with something. With a fully completed submission, you give me the opportunity to identify issues and explain what I see, and enough volume of work to communicate them to you.

Coming to me half-baked like this, I can't really give you a whole lot more advice than continue practicing. On the second page, I can see you trying to flesh in your scorpion claws by starting off with balls that are somewhat too big - so there's one point you need to practice, estimating a more accurate size for your initial forms. Looking at the beetle beneath it, you're progressing well in terms of understanding how to use less rounded contour lines, but you need to work on better visualizing how a form turns in space. Recognize the planes of the form, the top, the sides, etc. I have a demo in the "other demos" section of this lesson about this in particular.

Also, watch your line quality - you're getting sketchy, especially on that scorpion.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-10 20:02

Your understanding of form is improving considerably. The bottom half of this page is especially exhibiting really tangible, solid constructions. While you probably are going a bit overboard on the contour curves (at least on the scorpion's legs), it's not in such a way that it's massively detracting from the drawing itself.

Your grass hoppers are probably the main part that highlight a bit of weakness. When you construct them, you initially lay in those starting ellipses/balls, but form there you jump directly into the segmentation of the carapace you see in your reference image. Think of it like jumping across a chasm instead of chopping down a big tree and crossing over that. You're skipping an important step.

The important step is constructing the solid form on which to construct the grasshopper's body. You'll encounter this a fair bit in the next lesson, and the lesson page has a lot of useful demos in regards to creating sausage-like forms for the torsos and then building up more forms on top of that. It is something to be aware of though, as skipping steps will result in your constructions flattening out, with the complex details overpowering the meagre constructional elements present. The basic construction should always be dominant.

You've got some decent texturing in there. Some of them are less good, but your first two beetles are pretty okay, the wolf spider on the page I linked above is subtle, but quite good, and the speckling on the dung beetle is nice. Texture is going to be slow going, you should be pleased with your results right now. Your fur/hair elements aren't great, but you are experimenting with two different approaches to the problem, which shows that you are learning. In one, you draw a bunch of individual strands of hair, which ends up too noisy. In another you try to draw tufts of hair, but perhaps don't spend enough time observing your shapes, and you place the tufts in the center of the body, rather than around the silhouette of the form where they'd be a considerably stronger read.

Again, these are things you will encounter in the next lesson - a couple of the demos touch on fur, but it will take some practice to really have the idea settle in your mind.

Keep up the great work, and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

ExpectedFactorialBot

2016-08-21 02:58

4! = 24

^(Result from) ^WolframAlpha. ^(You can harass my creator /u/ProudPiMP.)

Uncomfortable

2016-08-21 23:55

There's some good, and also some less good here, but overall I'm feeling pretty positive in regards to your direction. Your understanding of form is reasonably good - the biggest weakness here is that your line quality is various degrees of bad. You range from being a little impatient to being ridiculously sketchy and rough, with some chicken scratching thrown in there for good measure.

So, where you excel is your sense of 3D form and space, and to varying degrees your grasp of construction, while your weaknesses are the more base-level technical skills that don't take a whole lot to fix.

Looking back at your last lesson's homework (which was submitted almost a year ago, jeez), your line quality is waaay better there. Everything is much more purposeful and planned out, likely because the previous two lessons are still fresh in your mind. After this year long gap, you've fallen into bad habits and forgotten entirely about things like the importance of applying the ghosting method to each and every line you draw.

Keep in mind that after completing lessons 1 and 2, you're supposed to be continuing to practice those exercises regularly - picking two or three exercises each day to do as a warmup before moving onto that day's work.

Anyway, here are your main issues:

• Not ghosting your lines - you're very rough and sketchy with your linework, you should be thinking and planning before executing each mark. Look back at the description of the ghosting method in lesson 1 - there's three specific steps, and you should be applying each one to everything you draw. Keep in mind that these lessons have changed and evolved somewhat since you last did them.

• You tend to draw very timidly and faintly initially, largely because of your sketchy approach. You should be drawing complete forms with confident strokes. No chicken scratching, no trying to make your lines super faint and barely visible. You can come back afterwards to add line weight and help organize everything afterwards in order to clean things up. While drawing the initial construction, you don't want to worry about being clean. You want to worry about not being wasteful, and about creating solid forms. For example, look at the red ant - there's nothing solid about the abdomen on the larger drawing at the top. You loosely sketched it with many independent lines, rather than laying it in as a single, solid elliptical ball-form.

• Don't draw as though you're drawing with a pencil. This is similar to the timid thing, but it extends into how you approach texture. You tend to use a LOT of hatching lines. You should be using a felt tip pen for this lesson, and the strength of that tool is that it is made to create strong, dark marks on the page regardless of how much pressure you use. A proper felt tip pen with strong ink flow will only vary in terms of the width of the mark made, not in how faint it is. This is entirely different in nature to a pencil, so you don't want to use the same techniques. Think about drawing with full dark shapes, and consider how to transition from them to the full white areas by using little texture-patterns. Don't use hatching don't take advantage of the fact that some of your pens may have weaker ink flow (or be running dry) to achieve fainter marks.

Now, it just so happens that I spent all of yesterday updating this lesson. Last week I updated lesson 3, adding a 40 minute intro video and 3 new demos, this week I did the same thing to this lesson. You should go back and look at the new content for lesson 3, then look at the new stuff for this one. It should better explain how I want you to apply the general use of construction, and might catch you up on some of the general shifts drawabox has gone in the last year.

Then I'd like you to try another four pages of insect drawings.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-24 01:51

That was something that we did in the class I took with Peter Han, but lately I haven't really wanted to stress people to do that. If you want to, that's fine, but you don't need to feel compelled to do it. That said, be sure to ignore detail and texture altogether for the first half of your drawings.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-24 19:20

Your constructions are coming along pretty nicely, and they improve a fair bit over the set. I especially love the dragon fly at the end - most people do pretty poorly with dragon flies, grasshoppers, anything so very cylindrical and straight, but you've got a lot of nicely layering forms and segmentation and it all reads quite well as three dimensional forms.

As far as texture goes, that will take time to develop, and progress will be pretty slow. One thing I want to stress is that you've got some areas where you've filled sections with hatching lines, where it seems to me like you really meant to fill them in to be solid black. It's important in such situations to actually fill those sections in with black, and then to consider where you want your transitions between light and dark to be quick and hard, or soft and gradual. Gradual transitions are where you focus your texture-patterns, to create areas of alternating light/dark (which, if you know anything about pointilism, will cause the values to blend together when viewed at a difference, creating different levels of grey depending on the proportion an density of dark to light). Keeping your textures in these transition areas helps you to avoid over-rendering, and helps you maintain your focal areas. I've got more information about this sort of thing on the 25 texture challenge page.

Also, I wanted to mention that your scanner's presets right now aren't really doing your work any favours. You're probably using a 'drawing' preset (most scanners come with settings for b/w drawing, colour drawing, b/w photograph, colour photograph). The drawing presets really blast away a lot of the nuance and subtlety of linework, which tends to make it look considerably harsher than it actually is. Ideally you should be using the photograph presets to get a nice, gentler range of values.

Lastly, last weekend I updated the material for this lesson (and the weekend before that I updated the lesson 3 content). You should definitely go back and watch the intro videos for both lessons, and look through the new demos. They may help fill in some holes in your understanding that we may yet be somewhat unaware of.

Anyway, keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson when you're ready.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-25 19:44

Generally I'm seeing some pretty good grasp of form and spacial awareness. Many of your constructions come out quite well, especially the beetles. You seem to be understanding the whole idea of building things up from basic forms, while stressing the importance of recognizing even those building blocks as being three dimensional, rather than just loose approximations with no real weight.

When it comes to your texturing, you definitely do a lot of experimentation which is great. One of the larger issues that I tend to see comes from you drawing as though you're drawing with a pencil, or even a ballpoint pen. Felt tips are by nature quite different, and have certain limitations that should influence how you choose to draw with them. Rather than attempting to get them to do something they're not great at (creating marks with different levels of faintness - felt tips will go from 0 to full black immediately), try and work within their limitations. To create a sort of gradation with this kind of tool, you have to rely upon creating areas of alternating light and dark marks. At a slight distance, these marks blend together, creating the illusion of greys, whose darkness depends on the density or sparseness of the dark marks in that area. This is where texture comes in very handy, to be used as a tool for depicting transitions between light and dark.

Additionally, you should be more willing to fill dark areas in completely. Don't rely on hatching to quickly fill a space in when drawing from nature. This will merely produce some very high-contrast areas with lots of slivers of white amongst the dark marks. By filling it in complete, you end up with a fairly inert space that does not cause undue distractions to the viewer, allowing you to have greater control over what you wish to become your focal area. It can at times be difficult to fill areas in with a standard felt tip - a brush pen can come in quite handy in this case.

You can get more information about texture, the use of it to create transition, and some additional exercises if you're interested in the 25 texture challenge. Keep in mind that texture is not really that important to us right now, so don't let it draw your attention away from further developing your use of construction and your sense of space.

Lastly, just a question - what thickness of pen are you using? Your marks don't seem to go beyond a certain weight or thickness, so I'm wondering if you might be using a pen that is thinner than 0.5mm. I could very well be wrong, of course.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-29 16:03

To be honest, I'll be able to give you a better response when you actually submit your homework. There is going to be a lot of stumbling, a whole lot of failure as you go along, and it's pretty normal for things to turn out better when you follow along a step-by-step demonstration. In those demos, I pick apart the forms and lay them out for you - when doing it on your own, you have to rely on your own sense of space, which is still developing.

All you need to focus on is putting your best effort in for now - once I look over the completed homework submission, I should be able to identify certain things you may not have noticed or have been aware of, so leave that to me.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-29 18:21

Generally your constructions are pretty good. I am noticing though that you aren't drawing through your ellipses. I expect that you apply this method to every single ellipse you draw for my lessons, without exception.

There is one little thing that caught my eye, in terms of construction. For your ladybug (the coccinelle), the shell covering the abdomen doesn't feel terribly solid. I can see that you laid in an ellipse for that section of the body (which itself, doesn't feel terribly solid - keep in mind that what you're laying in is a ball, not just a 2D shape, before wrapping the 3D form of the shell around). The other issue is that after drawing the shell, the ball kind of... disappears. It's not a part of the construction anymore, which results in the drawing looking awkward. The forms you lay in should for the most part be the masses of your construction - not imaginary volumes. It's true that we do carve into those volumes, but here you've negated it to such a degree that it's undermined the solidity of the whole thing. Instead, try and figure out what the shape of the ladybug's body is underneath the shell, and figure out how much of it sticks out underneath, and conform your initial ball to that.

The other point I wanted to raise was how you deal with filling things in. I can't be sure, but from the looks of it you're using a ballpoint pen - those are only tolerated for lessons 1-2, from lessons 3-7 you MUST use a felt tip pen or fineliner with a 0.5mm tip. When drawing with a fineliner, you largely get either a full dark mark, or no mark at all, and it'll vary in size based on how much pressure you use. On the other hand, a ballpoint pen's stroke will vary, sometimes functioning a lot more like a pencil.

It's true that the felt tip pens are rarely ideal, and sometimes their ink won't flow properly resulting in a fainter stroke - but you should be basing your approach to drawing around the idea that it's either full dark, or it's not. So, when you have to fill in a shape in your drawing, you should fill it in completely to be a solid black. In your drawings, we can see how you've used a sort of tight hatching that leaves little slivers of white in between, creating a rather noisy, somewhat distracting pattern relative to a solid black shape. Additionally, hatching in general is usually not something you want to use when actually trying to add texture or detail. It's a filler - it signifies that you don't want to leave this area blank, but you aren't going to put in the time to actually see what texture and detail is present there. The primary way I use hatching in my drawings is when I purposely want to flatten something out, to push it back and mark it as unimportant. Everywhere else, it's important to take the time to observe what textures are present. The notes on the 25 texture challenge may be worth reading.

Anyway, since your constructions are generally well done, I'll mark this lesson as complete. I don't know when you last read through the lesson material, but if it was more than 10 days ago, you should give it another look, as I added a 40 minute intro video and three more demos. I did the same thing to lesson 3, so that may also be worth looking over in order to refresh your memory.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-02 19:58

Unfortunately free critiques are closed this month. You can check out the state of the union post for more information.