FromageMoustache

2016-03-12 00:50

Okay! I am on it!

I understand your point, and i am getting a feeling that it will be dramatically important when will come the time to draw from memory/imagination to understand how things are put together and that i won t be able to use my observational skills in that matter.

Thank you for the detailed critique.

Uncomfortable

2016-03-27 00:13

A fine boobie indeed.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-02 01:51

You've got some good stuff here, and some less good stuff. I think the biggest thing that jumps out at me is that I'm not 100% sure that you're fully understanding how the early masses you lay in exist in 3D space. Based on what I'm seeing, I believe you're still leaning towards interpreting these shapes as being 2D on a page, rather than establishing a construction. Always remember that you want to be building up 3d form, so you've got to be aware of how each component exists as a separate addition to this construction in 3D space.

That said, I do think that an understanding of 3D space is starting to show through, even though your steps don't necessarily reflect it. Your texturing is also coming along nicely, especially at the far end of the set. At the beginning you seem to be struggling a little, but with the lizards and the mice, you seem to have developed a much more solid understanding of how to organize those textures in a way that conveys the visual information to the viewer without overwhelming them with contrast and noise.

Keep up the good work, and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-02 18:11

You're moving in the right direction, though there is a fundamental shortcoming that you're exhibiting - you're still thinking in terms of 2D, rather than 3D. What you're drawing is in your mind, composed of shapes, not forms. This isn't abnormal at all, but it is something you have to overcome.

The first thing I want to emphasize is how you look at those initial masses you construct, the head/ribcage/pelvis. We draw them as ellipses, so it can be very easy to mistake them for simple 2D shapes, but really they represent 3D balls. The best way to emphasize this is to use the ribcage/pelvis balls to construct a simple 3D sausage form (just like lesson 2's organic forms) with one ball at either end.

Once you've established that form as a base, it's just a matter of adding more organic forms on top, such as the shoulder masses, and then extending forms off of those. The whole process looks something like this: http://i.imgur.com/O18BDIx.png

The other important thing I want to stress has to do with the same thing - when you approach your heads, you have a tendency to draw the basic ball form, and then all of the other details you add just float on top. You do this to varying degrees, sometimes leaning more towards establishing 3D forms, but usually (like with your cheetahs) there's no real basis for where those facial features are sitting. What you want to do is extend the 3D form of a muzzle (which is often rather box-like) off the starting head/cranium ball.

I'd like you to try another four pages of animal drawings, keeping what I've mentioned above in mind. Don't add any detail/texture to the first three pages of those, just focus on the 3D construction.

Uncomfortable

2016-04-06 22:57

Very nice work! Your drawings are coming along really nicely, and you seem to be demonstrating an excellent sense of form. I'm also liking your subtle touch when it comes to texture - the little tufts of fur here and there, and the wrinkles along the elephant's trunk are very nice touches.

While I'm perfectly satisfied with the quality of your work, I do want to share this with you, just as a loose suggestion of another way of approaching construction. I can see that in your drawings you sometimes play with contour lines, but often times you'll also apply the initial masses and the torso as flatter shapes. When tackling these kinds of constructions, I like to jump into 3D as early as possible, considering each form as a separate mass that I can add.

I extend this concept all across the board, even when constructing the head, where I'll attach a box-like form to the cranial ball. Working like this ensures that every detail is grounded within the construction, and nothing floats arbitrarily.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-05-05 20:06

Your drawings are good. They're posed well, they capture a sense of gesture, and all of that good stuff. That said, they're missing some of the core aspects I try to push in my lessons. Everyone has their own way of drawing, and it's not necessarily a good idea to fix that which is not broken, but from my perspective, there are a few fundamental issues with your approach to drawing, as demonstrated here.

• You draw timidly. From the looks of this work, it's done with a ballpoint pen? I can't be sure, but either way, the lesson requires a fineliner/felt tip pen, specifically because it makes it MUCH more difficult to be timid and rough. The point of my lessons and how they're structured is intended to force you to stop and think before every mark you put down. I don't want people drawing by instinct, scratching their lines down before planning and considering whether or not the line should be placed there in the first place. If you're sketching loosely, you're not really considering forms as concrete, solid objects. Instead, you're loosely considering them in abstract terms. This can be okay with simple constructions, but when those forms need to be intersecting and combining with other forms, creating a complex network of volumes, the amount of information you hold in your head often hits its limit. Furthermore, this sort of loose sketching implies a deeper lack of control over your own reflexes and motor skills. Fundamentally, we are all about applying the ghosting method. Identify, prepare, then execute. Every single mark. Over time and with practice it becomes less of a conscious thought, but the steps are always there.

• Extending from the previous point, your application and consideration of form remains in the abstract, rather than the concrete. If you look at this demo I did in the past, you can see how I consciously consider every element I add as a 3D object, like a lump of clay, being added to the construction: http://i.imgur.com/O18BDIx.png. From your drawings, I see an incredibly high level of observational skill, on a linear level - you can see the lines you need to draw, and you can capture them quite nicely. The difference however is that you're not treating them like a part of a larger form, so you lack awareness of how the actual components (torso, shoulder, leg, neck, etc.) fit together, and how they relate to one another in 3D space. This spatial understanding is key when you want to go beyond replicating an image, and consider how the same pose you see from a photo would look from a different angle.

Every approach has its advantages and disadvantages. Your current approach certainly isn't bad, but it is loose, and less grounded in form and solid construction. Yours does however have a very nice gestural, energetic quality to it.

As for your questions, the head one's fairly easy to consider - again, it's all about forms. You draw the cranial mass (that head-circle-thing), and then try to place everything else relative to it. A more constructive approach would be to consider that cranial mass as a sphere, off which more forms are extruded and connected to create the general muzzle structure. Here's a quick demo of what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/HglXa3N.jpg.

As for the texture, the issue lies more with taking the time both to observe the textures more carefully (your observation of form is solid, but you seem to get rather overwhelmed when looking at detailed textures), and taking the time to really design and craft the shapes of the spots. Yours don't look like someone tried to match up the pattern from their reference image - it looks much more like you saw "SPOTS!" and then went to task drawing what your memory told you spots looked like. Always remember that your memory is flawed (ha!). Don't spend any more than a second or two drawing before looking back at your reference image, and don't just give up and let yourself do a sloppy, rough, approximative job. No one ever learned anything by cutting corners.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but if you want to do some more animal drawings attempting to apply a more constructive approach, feel free to submit them. Otherwise move onto the next lesson, where I believe you're going to find that if you don't apply a more concrete, constructive approach, you'll struggle considerably.

Oh, by the way - read this article: http://drawabox.com/article/construction.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-09 15:46

Great constructions, and very nice sense of form. Your textures are also coming along really well - at least when tackling things other than fur. When it comes to hairier subjects, you're really overcome with the urge to cover everything with marks and doing so has two negative repercussions:

1. Too much visual noise - all of the extra marks are creating a lot of contrast between light and dark, which ultimately draws the viewer's eye. Ideally you'd want to draw the viewer's eye to the areas you spent the most care and time crafting.

2. Because you're forcing yourself to draw more marks, you're going for quantity over quality - you're spending less time designing each tuft of fur, and instead end up in some areas just drawing spiky marks. This is especially visible in your work because there's a range of furry textures you've drawn - some with much more going on in them, and some with less.

A few well crafted marks are far more valuable and far more effective than a plethora. By well crafted, I mean taking into consideration their position and their arrangement. Considering how you can make the best use of them - for example, a well arranged tuft of hair that breaks the silhouette of the form is going to read REALLY strongly, making a more lasting impression on the viewer, than that same tuft of hair placed in the center of the form.

Always aim to draw less, when it comes to texture, rather than more - and don't be afraid of merging a large amount of noise into shapes of solid black to take an area that's gotten really noisy and tone it down again. You've done this in some areas (the first rhino), but there are other areas where it would have been a good idea, such as the belly of the sitting gazelle. In this one you really scribbled like crazy to fill it in, but the result was a lot of alternating points of black/white. If you're having trouble filling shapes in with your felt tip pens, a black brush pen can be effective, though at times a little hard to control.

Anyway, you've nailed the main focus of this lesson - form and construction. Texture is a secondary issue. So, feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-10 17:00

Admittedly, it's very difficult to give you advice without actually seeing what you're doing. It's generally best to bring up these concerns after you've given it a solid attempt and have completed the homework, so I have a nice body of work from which to derive my critique.

Should I try to visualize part of the reference on the page and "trace" it?

Absolutely not - we are not trying to simply reproduce the flat image, we are trying to understand how that object is constructed and ultimately reconstruct it on the page.

Should I imagine it as a bunch of forms and try to copy those instead?

This is closer to what you should be doing. Don't fuss too much over achieving 100% accuracy, instead focus on capturing the simple forms that make up your construction, and doing so in relatively correct proportion. If you look at these two demos (1, 2), you'll see how I start off with simple forms. Each mass is similar to the organic forms tackled in lesson 2, and all I'm doing with them is fleshing out the volumes of my object. As I build up my construction, I add additional forms, always mindful of how each form interacts and connects to those already present. In my mind, these ellipses I draw are not just flat shapes - they're 2D masses, that if I wanted to, I could add contour curves to in order to represent how they occupy 3D space.

I saw that the horse's coat has a fairly simple, smooth sheen to it. Tight hatching seemed to capture that best." Well, how does one go through the process of determining what's best? Is it a matter of practice and experience?

It's a matter of making the wrong decision enough to figure out what the right decision is. Based on the tone of your rant, you seem to be pretty frustrated with the idea of making mistakes. Mistakes are normal, they're expected and par-for-the-course. In fact, mistakes are entirely necessary. You don't learn anything from doing something right the first time, and it seems to me that you feel if you're not creating beautiful drawings, you're doing it wrong - "it" being the exercise assigned to you.

When it comes to texture, there's a lot of different ways to put marks down on the page. Speaking of the smooth sheen of a horse, it's true that hatching is probably an effective approach - but what kind of hatching? If you use short strokes, you'll give the impression of a rather rough coat. Longer, flowing strokes will imply thickness and smoothness. Furthermore, where are you putting those strokes? Different places will have a different amount of impact on the viewer - if you fill on the center of the body, you'll result in a LOT of noise and contrast, which draws the viewer's eye to it. Conversely, if you place your texture in such a way that it breaks the silhouette of the form, and limit yourself to that (not putting much texture in the rest of the form), the impact on the viewer will be much stronger, but in a subconscious sense. Their eyes won't be drawn to it or distracted by it, but by breaking the silhouette, you'll put this information in the forefront of what their brain processes. I've dug up an older demo of that concept here: http://i.imgur.com/a0r47lY.jpg. Basically, before looking at any sort of internal details, your brain looks at the silhouettes of forms first. If that silhouette is complex and broken, it has a much greater impact than information that is conveyed much later (like filling the inside of a form with hatching).

I constantly fail at drawing muzzles, and I think that's because approximation and thinking on the page hurts that area the most.

When you draw a head, you start off with the ball that represents the cranial mass - that isn't the whole skull, but it's generally the mass of the head not including the front of the face or the jaw. This is a 3D form, and just as with the rest of the body you can add new forms to it. Generally when it comes to the muzzle, I like to think more in terms of boxes - so the first thing I'll do is I'll hinge a box-like form (don't get too caught up in things being rectilinear boxes, just the idea of a form with clear planes) off the front of the cranium, and I'll start trying to fit it into the form I see in my reference. Remember, your memory is worthless - you need to be looking back at your reference constantly. This is where all the information is, it's really just a matter of whether or not you can look past the wealth of information to identify what you're after.

I did this demo of a bear's front-facing muzzle a little while ago. The most important thing is to be aware of how each form fits into each other. Everything fits into something else, nothing floats arbitrarily. Everything is grounded in another object. The biggest problem is that people tend to look at faces and their mind reverts to dealing with 2D elements - where an eye, a nose, a mouth, they're all free-floating and can be rearranged however they want. Instead, think of your drawing like a 3D sculpture, which you can carve into, and add mass to. If you want a place to put the eyes, you have to cut in and dig it out.

Anyway, like I said, it's much easier to identify your specific issues when you submit your completed homework. Don't let your frustration get the better of you, and don't fear or be disparaged by failure. It's easy to say, sure, but really you're fighting against your mind here. Once you accept failure as a necessary component of growth and progress, you'll find that it won't hold you back quite like it does now.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-11 15:39

Unfortunately I don't accept homework submissions out of order - because of how the lessons are structured, with each one building on the one before it, I rely on the fact that earlier lessons clearly expose certain fundamental issues that later lessons cover up.

I've collected a bunch of demos I've done for other students - you might find these to be helpful, as they primarily concentrate on the importance of construction. That said, if you want a critique specific to your work, you're going to have to have each prerequisite lesson marked as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-13 22:14

Your work starts out pretty nicely with your birds, and generally there's a pretty decent level of quality across the entire set, but there is a major issue that becomes quite clear as we go through it - the importance of transitioning from shape (the initial ellipses we use to block in the cranium, ribcage and torso) to solid forms with well defined volumes as early as possible.

The rhinos on page 9 are a good example of this problem. You start off blocking in the ellipses, but then jump straight into drawing strictly from observation, rather than deconstructing the forms in your reference and reconstructing them on the page. Remember that we're not simply seeing and copying - we're building it up.

This is a pretty common problem I come across, and as such I've done a few demos on the topic that I can share with you. Many of these demos are very relevant - the first two, the one with the cat, the one with the horse, etc. The others are certainly good to look over as well, as they touch on other important issues. Still, the issue you want to deal with first and foremost is solidifying that concept of working with form and construction.

If you look at the first demo, the most important thing I do early on is to construct a solid, sausage-like torso between the ribcage/pelvis masses. I do everything that's necessary to make it three-dimensional in my mind, including using contour curves to show how the surface warps through 3D space. From there, I tack on more 3D forms. The thing about thinking about your 3D subject in 2D is that things aren't really anchored in space. It's like you have a bunch of little cut-out pieces of paper and you're taping them together in a collage. Conversely, when thinking in three dimensions, everything needs to be solidly anchored in space to something else. For example, you can't simply draw the muzzle part of the head - you've got the cranial ball-mass, so you can hinge a box-like form off of that and build on that to create a solid, convincing construction.

More than anything, it's about how you think and perceive what you're drawing. Your own believe in the space you are defining on your page - the 3D space, that is - shows through in your drawing. Initially we need to rely heavily on tricks like drawing through forms, adding contour curves, etc. to convince ourselves of the illusion we're crafting. Later on, it'll be much easier to trick yourself, and therefore all of your viewers as well.

I'd like you to try another four pages of animal drawings - focus entirely on the constructions, with no texture or detail.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-20 20:55

Generally you're doing quite well. The primary issue is that you tend to be quite timid when it comes to pushing the constructional aspect of your approach. You draw the additional marks that help you understand how the forms you're drawing interact with one another quite faintly, if you draw them at all, as though you're preoccupied with the cleanliness of your final drawing. The final drawing is entirely unimportant - what matters is the construction.

Here are some demos I've done for other students that stress the importance of construction, and specifically understanding how the different forms intersect with one another. One thing you fail to include more often than not is the mass of the shoulder (as a simple organic form) and how that shoulder mass intersects with the torso.

When drawing your dog snouts you did a pretty good job of fleshing out how the snout form connects to the cranial mass (the initial ball) of the head. When drawing wolves you didn't factor this in as much, which resulted in a weaker construction where features tended to float in space more rather than being grounded and anchored in the underlying forms.

Based on what I'm seeing, you have pretty strong observational skills - that's saving your ass when you get too relaxed with your construction. Of course it's good to have strong observational skills, but in a situation like this it can easily make one overlook the underlying problem. Make sure you push that construction much harder when you practice this material in the future.

Anyway, your work is coming along well, so I'm going to mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-26 17:01

I think you're progressing pretty well - you're showing a growing sense of form and construction - your birds feel really well done, and the torsos of some of your four-legged animals are well executed. The important thing though is to remember that the arms and legs and every other part of the animal's body should be perceived as a separate intersecting form. Right now it seems you're breaking away from that constructive mindset, and fall back into drawing individual lines attempting to capture exactly what you see, rather than identifying the underlying forms and then drawing them. It's also extremely important to be aware of how each form connects to the others, to the point that drawing in the intersection helps immensely.

I've written up some notes for you here: https://imgur.com/a/cSxsr.

You'll notice that I also talk about your use of texture - this is definitely an area of weakness for you. It seems that instead of thinking through the shape and design of each individual mark (like the tufts of fur), you focus more on drawing more of them, relying instead on a bit of randomness for each individual one. This results in the marks being fairly ineffective in conveying the sense of fur. Always remember - less is more. It's perfectly acceptable to draw fewer marks, but it is integral that you take care in designing each mark so that it is as impactful as possible.

This demo may also be of use to you: https://imgur.com/RbpiW1J

You've got plenty of room to grow, but you're developing well. I'll be marking this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. You'll find that the next lesson relates quite closely to the form intersections from lesson 2, and if you haven't continued practicing them (and you should still be practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2) you should definitely refresh your memory. The thing about heavily geometric objects is that the idea of drawing the underlying forms and not just what you see becomes significantly more important. Don't let all of the details and complexities distract you - identify those forms and focus on constructing them individually so that they are solid and carry a sense of weight.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-27 22:13

Your drawings display strong observational skills, and your application of texture and detail is quite nice. That said, a LOT of these drawings fail to follow the constructional process I've laid out.

What I'm seeing, for the most part, is that you're laying down the initial ellipses to 'rough' the drawing in, kind of like a loose sketch. Because of this, your subsequent passes does not build on top of and adhere to the previous steps. The constructional drawing method requires you not to loosely mass things in, but to actually construct the forms. That is, you don't treat them as suggestions - you build up solid forms and then stick to them, adding more forms to the construction as you go to attach additional necessary masses (like the shoulders and such).

I've got an album of demos I've done relating to constructional drawing (mostly with animals, but some insects are in there too) that you can see here: http://imgur.com/a/AFSzb.

The thing to pay attention to is how the initial masses I start off with are balls, not ellipses. They're three dimensional forms. I quickly use the ribcage mass and the pelvis mass to create a sausage-like organic form with a couple contour curves to reinforce the illusion of volume. The important thing here is that as the person constructing this object, I need to be convinced that what I'm drawing is 3D, not simply a bunch of marks on a flat page. I usually am a little less focused on the 3D nature of the legs, instead pushing their simple gesture with a few simple curves, but I'll usually try to mark out their joints to mark out there they bend. This is an extension of an awareness I want to push of how each form intersects with its neighbours. Knowing (and marking out) where those forms intersect helps understand which lines to push and pull, and how everything relates to one another.

Lastly, you're a bit sloppy when it comes to fur textures. The textures on your birds is really quite well done, but when it comes to fur you tend not to think through each stroke, instead just scribbling a few marks here and there. It's important, especially when putting those tufts of fur around the form's silhouette, to really design them so as to make them as effective as possible. In that album of demos, you can see how I've done that specifically with the raccoon.

Anyway, I'd like to see you do 4 more pages of animals - focus on furry, four legged mammals, as your birds are generally quite well done.

Uncomfortable

2016-05-28 16:57

I can't offer you much since you haven't completed the previous lessons up to this point, so I don't have the context to give you well formed critique (and completing prerequisites is one of my rules). That said, I do have this demo on approaching fur that I use in my critiques of others' work: http://i.imgur.com/RbpiW1J.jpg.

One problem a lot of people have is that they try to cover their entire drawing in texture, which results in a lot of visual noise and high-contrast areas. The viewer's eye gets really distracted and overwhelmed, which gives the impression that the drawing is garbage.

Instead, you can focus your detail on the silhouette of your object, and leave the interior largely blank. The trick to this is that the viewer's eye sees your drawing in multiple phases - first they identify the general shapes, identifying the silhouette. Next they see the internal detail in terms of value changes (different levels of light/dark). Lastly, they see the colour changes. Each subsequent phase is of significantly less importance, so it takes a lot more effort to convey information with any sort of impact.

Conversely, this also means that the very first phase - the silhouette - can convey information with an immense amount of impact with very little effort. In this case, by breaking up the silhouette with little tufts of fur, the viewer's subconscious immediately picks up that the whole thing is very furry, even though the interior of the form is blank. This allows us to really cut down on the amount of visual noise and distraction in our drawing, focusing on only what is necessary to communicate the idea.

When you do this however, it's important that each tuft is carefully designed - a lot of people will just half-ass it, and it'll still look rather poor. Take the time to consider how each line curves, and ensure that your tufts are solid shapes of their own, rather than individual lines coming off tangentially from the object.

There's another explanation of the concept here: http://i.imgur.com/Eb6hr0h.jpg

Uncomfortable

2016-06-16 21:33

Not bad! Your sense of form and construction is coming along nicely. There certainly are areas where you could improve (here's some notes on what they are but generally you're moving in the right direction. There's four points I outline in those notes:

• When drawing texture, draw less, design more. A few lines drawn with intent have far more impact than a hundred drawn erratically.

• Pinching a form (like the sausage form of the torso) along both sides will undermine its solidity, so be careful with that

• The muzzle is just a ball and a box - the important thing to remember though is to be mindful of how the box and the ball intersect with each other. I've seen you draw the forms, but I don't often see a clear consideration for how the two forms fit together.

• Avoid limbs that are fully straight and rigid. Add a slight bend at the joint there.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-06-21 22:04

I've written up two pages of notes for you, which you can find here. Overall, I think you're demonstrating a growing grasp of working in three dimensions and constructing your objects, but you're skipping some of the steps from my demonstrations, and are working more from memory than you should be. Remember that memory is faulty, and the moment you look away from your reference image, the majority of the information you gleaned from it gets overly simplified by your brain in an attempt to process it. You've got to be constantly looking back and forth between your drawing and reference.

Also, remember that one of the key aspects of constructive drawing is an awareness for how objects intersect with one another in 3D spaces. It's a grasp of this that will truly allow you to understand how things fit together, and will also allow you to properly fool yourself into believing that you're no longer drawing flat shapes on a flat page.

Along with the notes I pasted above, be sure to look through the collection of demos I shared with the subreddit earlier this month: http://imgur.com/gallery/udZZ8

I'd like you to try another four pages of animal drawings, taking what I've said here and in the notes into consideration.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-07 18:48

Your observational skills are fairly good, but that is pretty much what's carrying you through here. Your underlying constructions aren't very strong, because you're not perceiving the components of your lay-ins to be 3D forms. You're treating them as loose, approximate sketches, or flat shapes.

Take a look at the animal/insect demos in this big demo gallery.

There's two main things that you're missing. First off, the three balls we draw, are 3D forms representing three specific parts of the body. The cranium (part of the skull), the ribcage and the pelvis. The cranium is generally more or less a perfect sphere, while the pelvis and ribcages are not - they're stretched and angled to match the orientation and size of the parts they represent.

Next, you combine the ribcage and pelvis into a sausage-like torso (this demo demonstrates this concept.

This leads into the second issue - when you draw the neck, connecting the head to the torso, you need to be mindful of the fact that the neck connects and intersects with the torso in a specific location. If you don't take these intersections into consideration, you very easily fall into the trap of thinking in terms of 2D shapes, rather than 3D forms. This initially jumped out at me in your seagulls, where there's no distinction whatsoever between the neck and the torso.

This is extremely important when it comes to connecting your legs to the torso as well. If you let things just bleed into each other, you're not really thinking about how they all fit together as separate forms and components - you're just thinking of reproducing the photograph, which means transferring 2D details with no construction going on.

I'd like you to try another 4 pages of animals. For the first three, focus entirely on construction - don't do any details or texturing at all. On your fourth page, you may expand into detail, but make sure you still put plenty of thought into your construction.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-24 00:19

Very neat! I've added it to the homework section of the lesson, and have credited you with the recommendation.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-28 01:27

So you've got some good, and some less good. I think when you copy the demos (the oryx, the bear) you do a particularly good job - the trick is really wrapping your head around why the demos are stronger (specifically what the demos are demonstrating) and applying them to all of your drawings.

There are a few things that you seem to be missing more often than you're hitting them. First though, here's some notes on your dinosaurs: http://i.imgur.com/4ghPjsD.png

So, things you're missing:

• You're not drawing through most of your ellipses. In fact, a lot of your ellipses tend to be quite loose and flimsy. Drawing through them definitely helps, but there's a certain quality to an ellipse that makes it feel as though it's no longer really a flat, 2D shape, but rather a ball with weight and solidity. Contour curves can help (any sort of lines that run along the surface of the ball) but a good deal of it is really a matter of convincing YOU that you're not just drawing a simply flat shape on a flat page. The first step is for you to fool yourself into buying into this illusion - once you're convinced of it, you'll be more effective in fooling others. Once you're convinced that an object is truly a 3D form in 3D space, you'll find your subconscious starts to force you to abide by the rules of the three dimensional world. For instance, you can draw a straight line across the inside of an ellipse. If you are fully convinced that the ellipse is in fact a ball, however, cutting a line straight across it would be breaking the rules - your brain would force you to curve the line along the surface of that ball instead.

• Since everything is a form, you need to push yourself to be aware of how every form fits together with its neighbours. It's very easy just to drop a bunch of rough lines on a page, but they're going to come out flat. If two 3D forms are set against each other however, understanding how they intersect and interact will help reinforce the illusion that they are in fact 3D. So, don't be afraid to draw the connections between the neck and torso, neck and head, or the shoulders and the legs. Notice how the oryx drawing has so much extra linework, compared to other drawings, but you can really feel the masses under the skin - there's nothing wrong with extra linework, as long as they help you understand all of the forms at play.

• Don't let anything float arbitrarily. Looking at your kestral heads, you can see that each beak is just kind of pinned on with a guess. There's nothing anchoring it to the head - it was not constructed, so much as you drew it largely from observation. Because of this, it feels flat and flimsy. Looking at my dinosaur head demo in the notes I linked above, you'll see how you should approach the construction of a head. The cranium (one of the 3 primary masses) is always a sphere. The muzzle extends off that cranium - it's not a loose sketch, it's a solid box-like form. I've hinged it off the ball, and you can see how I've drawn exactly how the end of the box wraps around the ball. From there, you can start chiseling down the forms - no detail floats arbitrarily. Everything is set in its place. Thinking of it in terms of sculpting or carving is a good way to perceive it. You're not just drawing onto a rough sculpture with a marker, you're actually taking a chisel and chipping away at it. Even the eye is a good example of this - the eyeball sits in side of the eye socket, and the eye lids wrap around the eyeball. They're all interconnected.

Anywho, you are doing a pretty good job, but I think you're being hit from all sides with a lot of information, so take it easy, and take it slow. I'd like to see another four pages of drawings - this time don't do any texture or detail - focus entirely on the construction. Don't be afraid to draw your lines confidently, we're not in this to make pretty pictures. For instance, your puffins show some timid, faint contour ellipses that end up cutting out halfway through. They're not inherently bad, but it's a sign of drawing timidly, of consciously not wanting these lines to show up as much as the others. Don't worry about it. Again, look at my oryx demo - I draw each line full and dark, and I deal with organizing all of it later on. As long as a line is valuable and helps you understand the form you're drawing, draw it confidently. If the line doesn't contribute, or it accomplishes the task another line already has done, then don't draw it at all. No middle ground.

[deleted]

2016-07-28 10:50

*tips virtual hat

Uncomfortable

2016-08-04 20:42

Very nice work! Your constructions are very solid, whilst maintaining a sort of organic flow to them. Your textures are also generally very impressive for the most part. There are a few areas where things could have gone a little bit better, but such is the way of things when we experiment. Some of those include:

• The nursing bison - you applied standard hatching across the mother's back leg, which flattens the forms out considerably. This is totally fine in some cases, as where you used it on the legs on the opposite side of the animal from the viewer. It's not a good idea however when that side of the animal is facing the viewer, as that's where you want to convey a strong sense of three dimensionality.

• Generally your mark making is very conscientious and purposeful, but here and there you get a little more scribbly than you should (like the first horse). You definitely want to avoid any zigzagging strokes.

As for your questions, I believe for now, the answer to both is the same - first and foremost, ignore the colours in your coats. Remember that you initially want to think about texture, and the colour of a thing has no impact on this. It's very easy to confuse the two - that is, the little shadows made by varying small forms along a surface, and the colour of the surface itself, so setting the latter aside will help you better grasp the former.

Secondly, with colour out of the way, it's completely fine to leave a surface somewhat uncovered. If a material is truly perfectly smooth (they rarely are, but they can come close), there will be no raised little bits and bumps to cast shadows, so there will be no marks to be made upon them. These shadows, these marks, are by nature a sign of roughness. You should be equally comfortable with leaving a surface blank as you are with covering it completely.

Anyway, you've done a great job. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-09 20:30

I'm a little bit on the fence. There's a lot of good stuff here, but it's wrapped up in a somewhat sloppy execution in some areas. There's a few basic things that you're missing (like the fact that you're not drawing through your ellipses, which you should be doing for all of the ellipses you draw for my lessons), and some generally loose and flimsy construction - but at the same time, you ARE applying constructional approaches, and you definitely are benefitting from them.

For instance, in terms of flimsiness, a good example is the torso of the cat. Its torso is meant to be a basic 3D sausage-like form made by connecting the ribcage and pelvis. You've done this, although both sides of this sausage have been drawn with a concave curve, resulting in a very weak structure. I actually have a demo from ages ago also involving a cat where I demonstrate this concept: http://i.imgur.com/R7NIJej.jpg. Specifically look at the top right corner.

Next, you're also not putting enough thought into the orientation, size and position of the three initial masses - specifically the ribcage and the pelvis. As this may suggest, each form specifically represents that part of the body. Your ribcages don't reflect the position and size of the animals' actual ribcages.

Thirdly, look at the camel's legs - you've drawn very complex, bumpy, lumpy shapes with no underlying structure or scaffolding to support them. Remember that the constructional method requires you to start everything off as simple as possible, and then to build up complexity in successive passes.

Now, your rhinoceros (on the left side of the page) is an example of sloppy, yet still surprisingly effective construction. You get a strong sense of its bulk, and the layering of muscle and hide, though your lines still don't feel terribly well planned or considered, so in the end it feels both impressive but also not particularly solid and heavy. Rhinos are heavy, so your drawing should ultimately give that impression.

These are all some things for you to consider - more important than anything, don't just jump into drawing on the page. Stop and think before each mark, consider what you hope to accomplish with the next line you put down. Also, be more mindful of your use of contour curves. Make sure they wrap around the forms convincingly.

Lastly, think in 3D. A lot of what you're drawing are just loose 2D shapes. You should be drawing 3D forms - convince yourself that this is what you're doing. If you're not buying into your own illusions, no one else will either. Think about how each form has different sides - a top, a bottom, a front, etc.

Be sure to go over the "other demos" section of the lesson - there's many demos on the overall construction, as well as some focusing specifically on how to construct the head, tackle fur, etc.

I'd like you to do another four pages of animal drawings.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-15 20:18

It's improving, bit by bit. I'll be marking this lesson as complete, and leaving you to practice this material on your own, but here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Be mindful of the joints on the limbs. Actually drawing lines to divide them up into the various segments of the limb can be quite helpful, as it gives a visual hinge-point that can help you to think about how it might bend in space.

• Your contour curves specifically when it comes to the additional organic lumps we add to bulk the forms out are kind of poor and sloppy. Remember to wrap those curves around the forms, overshooting a little if need be.

• When it comes to the animals' heads, you tend to toss construction aside. As I depict [here](http://drawabox.com/viewimage/lesson5/bearhead.jpg, build out from the cranial ball. The muzzle, or at least the bulk of it, is usually going to be fairly boxy, so think of it like a box intersecting with a ball, and then flesh out the remainder of the head from there. Don't just paste eyes on there like stickers, think about it more like carving out the eye sockets, and then placing the eyeballs within them.

So, like I said, I'll mark this lesson as complete. Beyond this, it's a matter of continuing to practice. I also believe that the particular perspective on the matter of construction that the next lesson takes should help.

The last few lessons have been more forgiving - they're organic, and you can get away with relying more on observation and a little less on construction. If you do that with drawing the straight forward geometric objects from lesson 6, you'll struggle immensely.

The one piece of advice I have for you moving forward is this: when drawing a geometric object, force yourself not to think about it as though you're drawing that object. Instead, you are drawing a series of primitive geometric forms arranged in such a way that they appear to be that kind of object. If the object has rounded corners, ignore them. Ignore any kind of additional complexity, and focus entirely on the geometric forms. Eventually you'll reach a point - perhaps the last 5% of the drawing process, where you'll finally round off your corners and put the finishing touches, but before then, it's all about the basic forms. The longer you continue to treat them as such, the more successful your drawing will be. Ignore all detail.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention - it'd be a good idea to complete the 250 Cylinder Challenge before attempting lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-18 01:41

There's a fair bit of good here but there are a few fundamental things you're not doing correctly, which is having a considerable impact.

So firstly, don't treat your initial masses as loose suggestions. Each one - that is, the cranium, the ribcage and the pelvis - are concrete masses that represent those specific parts of the body, and you are to build on top of them. In many of your drawings, your initial masses are left floating inside of other forms you add in subsequent passes. Those subsequent forms - for example, the torso - should snugly encompass the ribcage and torso.

Think of it like sculpting. You've created your simple masses of clay for each of these things, and then you cover them in tinfoil, creating a sausage-like form with one of those major solid masses at either end. You wouldn't be able to have those masses floating around inside, because they wouldn't be grounded.

Look at this overdrawing for more information: http://i.imgur.com/bXgRJ60.png

Overall, it's really important to recognize that every form is 3D, and that you're building out a form construction. All of the details that come afterwards are completely unimportant. All that really matters is that construction. Looking at some of your drawings, you do understand that, but you don't always apply it. For instance, the little seal head made up of simple forms in the bottom left of this page is a more correct approach, though I don't see you doing that in the larger drawing. Instead, I see you adding the additional features of the head without any underlying construction to support it.

Also, on that same page, I wanted to bring up the particular way you're approaching drawing texture. Texturing with ink is, needless to say, difficult. Adding on the fact that texture is not the focus of any of these lessons, there's no expectation for you to be able to nail it. That said, one thing that's making it somewhat more difficult is that in these drawings you're actually treating your felt tip pen as though it's a pencil. Instead of taking advantage of the pen's benefits (being able to fill with a strong, solid black), you're still trying to hatch and sketch, like working with graphite.

Looking back on some of your pages from the last lesson like this one, you do know how to work with ink. It just slipped your mind a little bit. Use the dark blacks, fill them in (a brush pen could help here), and don't be so eager to cover everything with detail and texture. Focus on your transition areas (where you want to have a more gradual shift between white and black) and on your silhouettes.

I do see examples of you trying to get those tufts of fur along your silhouettes, like in this drawing. The core problem here is that each tuft is pretty erratic, you're not focusing very much on each individual one. You're relying more on quantity than quality. It's very important that you design each tuft of fur, creating a shape that will read clearly as part of that silhouette. Try to picture in your mind what the animal would look like if its entire silhouette was filled with pure, flat black. All you'd see is the edge detail. With this rodent, the edge would be fairly ratty, kind of unclear and messy. You don't want messy - you want planned and designed.

I really like your zebras. There's some things off about them (proportion, the specifics in regards to their leg constructions and such, you may have gone too complex too early), but overall the torsos and the masses there feel confident and well constructed. You're not covering them in all sorts of erratic attempts at texture - they're clean and every mark is much more deliberate than elsewhere in your drawing. It looks very much as though you were applying that Oryx demo, and it seems to be working to your benefit. Those problems in regards to proportion and such are merely signs that you need to be more careful in terms of observing and studying your subject - that is, look and study more, draw less.

Anyway, you're moving in the right direction with that, but it's important that we focus on making these shifts towards having a greater respect for the solid masses in our constructions, and also a respect for the pen itself (not treating it like a pencil - hatching almost always looks awful in drawings like this).

So, I want to see four more pages of animal drawings, but with absolutely NO texture or detail. All I want is construction. I know you're capable of doing a good job of it, you just need a few little pushes in the right direction.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-18 02:10

So there's a lot of good, and a lot of less good here. The first thing that jumps into my head is the size of the pages you're drawing on - they seem to be pretty small, and as a result each drawing feels rather cramped. You're not giving yourself a whole lot of room. Secondly - and I could be wrong about this, but - it looks like you're drawing all of this in ballpoint rather than felt tip (either that or your pens have really shitty ink flow). This has the effect of allowing you to be considerably sketchier and less thoughtful with your mark-making. There's a lot of very faint constructional marks, which technically shouldn't be possible with a decent felt tip pen, and that fundamentally undermine a great deal of what I'm trying to push with these lessons.

I am seeing a lot of basic consideration for form and construction, and a growing grasp of how everything fits together. I especially like your camels - they show an excellent sense of the intersection of the different forms, and many of the later ones capture that illusion of three-dimensionality with very little wasted linework.

That said, your proportions (as you mentioned yourself) get pretty bad at times. Fundamentally the problem there is that you're simply not spending enough time looking at your reference image, so you're missing key elements, and then these missing bits snowball into more significant problems. You simply cannot trust your memory. You need to be constantly looking at your reference image, looking away only momentarily to draw a mark or two before looking back. Any more than that, and what you've gleaned from studying will quickly be oversimplified by your brain in its attempt to understand.

Actually drawing a 2D breakdown of the proportions is a very good idea, and it's something I stress in later lessons (specifically when dealing with vehicles with lots of complex parts). In order to benefit from it though, actually draw those proportion studies.

When it comes to texture - specifically fur - you tend to be very erratic. You scribble fur in varying degrees, use a lot of hatching, where you should instead be filling things in with solid black (you're drawing with ink, not graphite, so don't treat it as though you're drawing with pencil - be mindful of how working with ink means accepting the limitations of that medium, instead of trying to avoid them). At a base level, your approach to the various textures - like the fur, the rhino's skin, and so on - are good. The problem then is that you're trying to work way faster than you are capable, and aren't taking the time to properly design those little marks and features.

A good example this is how you deal with fur on your bears - you make the right decision of trying to draw it in along the silhouette. The problem is that you just scribble that fur on, it's ratty and chaotic and you have gone to no lengths to actually shape and craft it in a specific manner. Think about what those drawings would look like if you filled their silhouettes in with solid, flat black. The edges would be tattered and unrefined. They'd look sketchy, instead of intentionally carved. That's why it doesn't look good.

This is at least in part because your pens aren't forcing you to come to terms with these little sketchy details. Since the ink isn't full-dark, it's not screaming at you every time you put a mark down without thinking it through, or planning it.

Now, despite all of that talk about texture, I want you to submit four more pages of animals - with absolutely no detail or texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on nailing your proportions and observing your reference images carefully. Do the work with a solid felt tip pen with clean, black lines. No rough or light sketching, only well planned, confident strokes. And as for that last question - yes, if you make a mistake and you can't find a way to incorporate it into your drawing, do your best to just roll with it.

People generally don't resubmit lesson work unless I ask them to. This doesn't mean I'm against it, but what you should definitely consider is the massive amount of work I have to do every day, and the fact that every additional critique adds a considerable amount to my plate.