Uncomfortable

2016-09-05 21:58

I see what you mean - generally you're not doing too badly, but the issue is that drawing from an image puts a lot more pressure on you to really look and study your reference. A reference image contains a lot of information, and it's up to you to really sort through it and figure out what the different components are. What those basic construction forms are that you should be starting with.

When you follow one of my demonstrations, I already do that for you. You still are building up some nice constructions (page 7's beetle thing is quite nice) but you really need to focus a lot more on looking at your reference and studying it closely. One major shortfall that I'm seeing is the legs - I honestly can't be certain, but the legs that I'm seeing don't often match up with the kinds of angles and bends and lengths that I'm used to seeing for these kinds of critters. I feel like you may be working more from memory there than from actual observation, causing you to make mistakes in these areas.

So, overall you reaaally need to push how much you really LOOK at your reference. Don't draw for more than a couple seconds without looking back and work on your sense of what the core forms should be, when appyling the constructional method.

I definitely approve of your intent to draw more insects, but from what I'm seeing you are moving in the right direction. So keep at it, but I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one when you feel you've had enough of insects.

Actually, you might be better off sticking to the insects until I have the chance to update lesson 5 with new content. I'm out of town right now, so as it stands the plan is to do that for September 17th. Starting with the animals before then might be a little less productive.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-06 18:36

Really nice work. I'm especially loving your constructional studies, it clearly demonstrates your understanding of how each bug is constructed from a variety of forms. Moreover, your particuar use of more geometric forms is very interesting.

It does look like you do need some more work on keeping your proportions in line (this is largely a matter of spending more time really looking at your reference as you draw, and keeping yourself from falling into the trap of working from memory, which can happen even after a few seconds of looking away). I am very confident in your sense of form however. For example, your initial studies of the grasshopper are looking really strong. The final drawing is a little less so, and I think it's because you actually break away a little bit from the constructional approach you used for the studies. Just use the exact same approach - build right on top of those simple forms.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that while I'm loving the dynamism of your line weights, you could do with toning the overall weights down a bit. When the lines start to get a little too thick, it starts to look more cartoony. Keep up the nuanced tapering/swelling of your lines though, just scale down your maximum weight and adjust everything else to match.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Oh also, as I've been mentioning to others, you maaaay want to hold off on moving onto the animals lesson just yet - I'm planning on updating it as I have the others for September 17th (if all goes according to plan). It'd have been updated sooner, but being away from my workstation makes things rather difficult.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-06 18:50

Excellent work. Your constructions are looking really solid, but also quite confident and your use of line weight really ties everything together. Your experiments with texture also add a nice touch to drawings that are already quite successful, and I'm glad to see how many different approaches you used (instead of trying to apply the same kind of methodology to wildly different surface qualities).

I'd say your moth's furry texture was okay, though a little loose (but still way better than most of the furry textures I see at this stage from students). You can find notes on how to tackle fur in the 'other demos' section of lesson 5 but I'll also try and cover it when I update that content.

For most people I'd recommend taking the opportunity to reflect upon previous lessons, tighten up their constructional skills with plants and insects and whatnot, but you're doing very well already so I see no issue with you jumping over to Lesson 14 for a bit.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-09 02:24

Pretty nice work! Your sense of form and construction is coming along great, so you're definitely heading in the right direction. You do also have some nice textural experimentation here and there, but there's two points that I'd like to raise:

• When it comes to construction, try to hold yourself back a little. Think more before you put down a mark. It's very common for people to want to feel out their marks as they draw them, and honestly at times I'm guilty of this too. That said, it really pays to get used to economizing your use of line (it's one of the reasons we use ink after all). If you think on the page instead of visualizing your marks before you put them down, you end up with a lot of strokes that don't actually serve any clear purpose. Trying to apply the ghosting method more stringently will help you reduce this, since it forces you to consider the purpose of each mark before you make it.

• When moving onto the detail phase, there's a fine line between things that look like intentional, carefully observed and conveyed texture, and things that start to get a little too chaotic and scribbly. I see a lot of examples where you're drawing what appear to be form shadows (the big blotches of black). This is fine, but there's two things you should consider. Firstly, where those shadows have soft and hard transitions (soft edges use texture-patterns to gradually go from dark to light, using the carefully-designed alternating marks in a tight space to convey different values when seen at a distance). Secondly, which areas should be full black. When you fill in such an area, make sure it gets filled in completely. Little errant slivers of white can really have a negative impact, because they become very hot and distracting due to their contrast with their neighbouring tones. When something draws the eye, but it ends up being an unintentional, undesigned feature, it will often decrease the perceived quality of the drawing. Long story short, be more intentional with your rendering, and spend more time observing the textures present in your reference image and use them to your advantage to convey those soft edge transitions.

Anyway, aside from that, really nice work. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. You may however want to wait a bit before you do - I'm planning on revamping the lesson 5 material for September 17th (it'd be sooner but I'm on vacation away from my workstation), and it'd probably be worth waiting for me to make those changes.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-12 20:00

Pretty well done! Your general use and understanding of form and construction is coming along well. I do have one biiiiig thing to point out though - I'm noticing that you appear to be drawing in phases - first laying down marks with a lighter (perhaps grey) pen, then going back over it with a black one and refining your shapes.

The problem with this approach is that it relies heavily on the idea of replacing lines and doing a sort of clean-up pass. This almost always undermines the confidence of your marks, as you're focusing more on trying to match up your lines with previous ones, rather than focusing on the solidity of a given form. This in turn can very much flatten out a construction.

Instead of approaching it in this way, it's better simply to rely upon adding line weight to key areas after the fact to help pull some lines forwards, and push others back, making the important lines clear, and making some other marks less significant in the hierarchy of the drawing. The difference here is that instead of replacing lines with new ones, you're emphasizing ones that already exist.

Your general approach is good, but I do want to see you attempt 3 more pages in this manner.

Aside from that - and you don't have to incorporate this into your drawings just yet if you don't want to, but I figured it'd be worth mentioning - right now you're focusing more on establishing those black form-shadow shapes rather than actually thinking about texture. This is more or less okay, as I'm not forcing anyone to delve into texture, but the use of form shadow does make me think that you're making some attempts into actually getting detail in there. If this is the case, try and think about how the black areas transition back into the whites. Consider where you have soft transitions, and where you have hard ones. I talk about this more in the 25 texture challenge, and have done a specific demo about how I apply this to various insects here.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-13 20:44

Not a real critique, but those are looking pretty nice. Just gotta keep an eye on your proportions is all. Constructions are looking good. Also, just a heads up - I'm planning on revamping the material for lesson 5 this Saturday, so I'd hold off on starting on that lesson til I update the demos and add an intro video.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-16 19:47

Really great work! Your sense of form and construction is coming along great. All of your lines are looking very confident and well planned. You appear to be drawing everything that is necessary for you to understand how your forms sit in 3D space, and nothing extraneous. I'm also really pleased with how your contour curves deform with full awareness of how the surfaces turn in space (like your hercules beetle's shell).

In some areas you do need to watch your proportions, like the wasp's thorax being a bit large (maybe, I'm not 100% sure about this, but in my experience they tend to be more spherical rather than oblong), but generally you're doing really well. Also don't forget to draw drop shadow shapes, it helps to ground your object in your environment.

Consider this lesson complete, and feel free to move onto the next one! I'm planning on making the new material for lesson 5 (new demos, intro video, etc.) tomorrow, so don't start on it until the lesson's been updated.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-20 17:37

Lovely work! Your sense of form and construction is really coming along well, and your drawings apply the use of line weight and black/white shapes very effectively to take the inevitable clutter of lines and organize them nicely into a well focused piece.

As you move forwards, I do believe that you should continue to focus on how your contour curves wrap around the rounded forms (overshooting those curves a little bit should continue to help here). This should ultimately help really reinforce that illusion of curvature in areas like the segmentation on the abdomen/thorax. In some areas you've done this very well (the house fly's abdomen), in others (praying mantis' abdomen (which you labelled as a grasshopper), ant, etc.) it's coming along okay, but there's definitely room for improvement.

I also noticed that there were a bunch of drawings here where you didn't draw the little shadow outline - looking at your scorpion, it really goes a long way to ground your drawing, so it's definitely worth doing for all of them.

In general though you're doing great, and are definitely moving in the right direction. Keep it up and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-20 18:00

Definitely coming along well. The line weight is a nice touch, though I think you'll continue to refine your approach to this with more mileage, and as your pressure control improves.

As far as the main focus of this lesson goes - construction, that is - I see a lot of improvement, but there's one particular drawing that stands out well above the rest - that is the ground beetle. The forms, the line weight, the contour curves, all of it comes together to create a very solid construction and the illusion of real, tangible forms that carry their own weight. Very nice work.

There is of course plenty of room for growth, but this shows me that you're moving in the right direction, and that you ultimately understand the concept of construction and how to properly depict form. I'm glad to see that you're pushing yourself to draw larger (this also has an impact on the relative thickness of your lines, as a small drawing with very thick lines tends to look clunky).

Also, the photos are certainly much better than the scanned version, as they capture a much wider range of tone and value, giving your lines much more nuance and subtlety. Your scanner appears to be set to the 'drawing' preset - the photo preset may give you much better results.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-09-20 18:03

That cuckoo wasp is looking especially good. One thing that I am catching is that you have a tendency to be a little too loose with your marks, drawing perhaps a bit too soon before really having the chance to plan out the next stroke. Try and hold yourself back a bit, and remember the importance of the ghosting method.

On one hand, I definitely do like the energy in your drawings - they're anything but stiff, so the legs and other such things flow quite nicely. That said, in order to really emphasize the illusion of form and weight, you need to exhibit a little more patience.

Overall though this is a big step up from your last submission, so keep up the great work. I'll mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-25 17:14

There's definitely some stuff to work on. The first thing that jumps out at me is that your initial lay-in lines appear to be very faint and timidly drawn. Additionally, in many of your drawings you treat these initial masses as being more loose sketches and suggestions, rather than actual forms being constructed. For the most part, each phase of a drawing's construction should be respected in subsequent passes. Furthermore, you need to be much more aware of how different forms connect to one another.

For instance, look at your praying mantis - you jumped in way too complex for your torso, instead of constructing simpler, more solid underlying forms, and as a result that torso appears quite flat. Furthermore, we have no sense of how the tube of the neck connects with the torso, further emphasizing this flatness.

The spider on the first page also shows a lot of early forms that have a lot of complex information in them that is not supported by any underlying scaffolding/construction. You can't simply jump in so early - you need to build up to more complex forms, starting from those that are simple enough to stand up convincingly on their own.

I want you to go back and try this lesson again - watch the intro video and read through my demos again, and watch the video recordings as well. As far as construction goes, your last lesson was much more methodical, but for some reason that's missing here.

More than anything, you need to take this to heart: you are not drawing flat, 2D shapes on a page. You are constructing objects, form by form, building them up as if they were sculptures in a world you can only see through the window that is your paper. At no point can you think of these forms as being flat and unsolid, as if you believe that, so will those who look at your drawing. You're conveying an illusion, and you must buy into that illusion whole heartedly. Drawing through forms, using contour lines in certain well-planned locations (like the connection points between separate, solid forms), and ensuring that no form or detail is ever placed arbitrarily on your object without being grounded in some underlying part of the existing construction are ways you can help further emphasize this illusion.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-25 17:50

Not bad. I like some of the awareness of how different 3D forms intersect with one another, like the connection point of your fly's thorax and abdomen. That said, there's one major issue that I'm seeing in general - you're not really drawing through your ellipses, and in the case of that fly, the thorax's initial form should have penetrated into the abdomen, and then the point of connection would have been added as a contour curve between the two. Right now your thorax ends abruptly, rather than achieving a smooth, rounded form, that end looks stiff. That stiffness is something we see from most of your ellipses, largely because you're drawing them slowly and carefully, rather than confident and then continuing around the elliptical shape before lifting your pen.

Your huntsman spider generally looks pretty nice - these rounded forms are a little more relaxed, and each form reads independently as being three dimensional.

In general your drawings are decent, but I think drawing through your ellipses and ensuring that each one feels like a solid 3D mass before moving onto the next step would really help bump up many of your drawings to the next level. Aside from that, your work is looking pretty good.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-09-27 20:42

Really phenomenal constructions, and your use of line weight is spot on. I especially like how you have a tendency to let your lines swell into their weights rather than jumping directly from one to another. This fluidity adds a certain degree of character to your drawings, and makes them feel much more believable. You also have a certain confidence with how you approach the masses you lay-in. You're not afraid (or at least you don't appear to be) of making mistakes by being overly bold.

While I do agree that some of your contour curves don't quite wrap around the forms in a way that reinforces the surface's curvature, it's actually something I didn't immediately notice. The way you handle the silhouettes of the forms already conveys such a strong sense of that curvature that many of the contour curves don't add that much more, and therefore the fact that they're a little bit weaker doesn't have a significant negative impact. Still, take more care when you draw them, and always remind yourself of how they should be hooking back around as they reach the edge.

Your newer drawings are obviously the better of the set, though I do like the textural experimentation you have going on in the earlier attempts. You do have a tendency there to rely more on using more ink however, than perhaps you should. Less is more is a good rule of thumb (and one I've probably mentioned in the past). By drawing less and thinking through the marks we're planning on putting down more, we can achieve more interesting details and textures with far less ink on the page.

Anyway, you're doing fantastically - keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-04 20:47

Not bad. Your constructions are (generally) pretty decent, but your observation isn't always the best. You do need to slow down at times and really take your time studying your reference image, being sure to look back at it every few seconds rather than staring at it, then relying on memory.

I really like the construction for your fly, it's probably the one that best demonstrates strong observation. Your spider's forms are solid, but the legs do not connect to the side of the body like that - there's a whole section underneath the thorax where they connect. Additionally, in your ladybug, it seems you haven't really put a whole lot of thought into how those legs actually connect to the body.

Another part of observation is a matter of proportion - it's natural to struggle with this, and it will improve with time and practice. Definitely be aware of it though, so you know to focus on how different parts of your subject's bodies relate to one another so that those size relationships are not out of whack when you reproduce them.

I'll mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-07 19:35

How do you think I feel? PEOPLE KEEP SENDING ME DRAWINGS OF SPIDERS D:

So your work is coming along decently. I especially like the house fly and the dragon fly, and the spider at the end is quite nice as well. I do have one concern I'd like to mention however - I'm noticing that you lay in your initial forms as being more loose shapes rather than solid forms, which you then go on to largely ignore. This isn't inherently wrong, but I do want to stress the importance of thinking as though each mark you put down isn't defining a shape, but rather a solid form. It's like you're building up masses of clay, and so these forms actually need to be carved in order to be adjusted. Can't simply ignore the previous mark and replace it with a new one. For example, look at the spider in the end - its abdomen was adjusted, but in a way that didn't really carve the initial lay-in so much as replace it.

Aside from that, nice work! Keep it up, and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

No wait DRAW MORE SPIDERS!

Uncomfortable

2016-10-08 20:37

You're making some solid progress through the set, and seem to be developing a solid grasp of the use of construction in this context. I'm especially pleased with this page where you've clearly established the underlying forms and then wrapped new, separate, equally solid forms on top for the shell and so on. Where the part of the carapace that rests on top of the head/thorax and leads into that upper horn-thing though, keep in mind that you should flesh out the form of the transition between the shell and that cylinder. Your drawing seems to flatten out a bit in that area, because when you went about connecting those forms, your brain went back to thinking of it as more 2D shapes rather than three dimensional forms.

I think the very last page was a particularly good place to throw in a quick little demo in regards to wrapping forms around your initial masses (which you did well with that beetle, but not so much here) and also the importance of defining how forms connect to one another: http://i.imgur.com/vN8cZQv.png. Anyway, I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

And no, bunnies are goddamn terrifying. They're not just cute like everybody supposes. They've got them floppy ears, and twitchy little noses. And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eye sight for anyway?!

Uncomfortable

2016-10-08 17:49

The orange button leads to this thread, so you posted it in the right place. I'm going to get to your critique in a bit, but could you send me a screenshot of the top part of the lesson 4 page? I want to see what you see, and make sure that the orange button is actually there.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-08 20:57

Reaaaaally nice work. The first page or so was kind of uncertain, but things really picked up almost immediately. Your sense of form and how each mass relates to the others, how they connect, and how they can be built upon really comes through with these drawings. Your flies and mosquitos are especially well done, but really your beetles, ladybugs, scorpions.. hell, it's all really well done. I'd say the grasshoppers at the end is a little bit on the weaker side, but I don't doubt that you were likely just getting tired, and that given a little more time to push through that, you'd nail them too.

You're absolutely moving in the right track, and I sadly don't really have anything more to offer other than my blessing to move onto the next lesson. Keep up the fantastic work.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-09 19:07

Looking good! You've got a lot of nice stuff here - I especially like your stag beetle and your cricket. The one thing that I do want to stress though is the importance of starting off with forms that are as simple as possible, and fleshing them out as forms (so that you grasp their 3-dimensionality rather than leaving them as 2D shapes), then build up your complexity from there. For the most part you are doing this correctlym but there are a few key areas where you aren't. A good example of this is the scorpion's tail. Don't be afraid to let your simpler forms interpenetrate, as this is generally the better approach. Once you've got them interpenetrating, you can establish the actual area where they intersect (in the scorpion's case, I drew ellipses where the various sections of the tail connect). This generally helps you achieve more solid forms from the get-go, whereas starting off more complex will often result in forms that fall a little flat.

Aside from that, great work! Keep it up and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-09 19:10

Good lord these are beautiful. Your forms and constructions are solid (and while I can see you potentially skipping a step here and there, it's very clearly because you can already visualize the lines you would have drawn, leading to no decrease in solidity or overall quality, which is ultimately what we're meant to be working towards). Your proportions also demonstrate strong observational skills, and your line weights really go a long way to bring these drawings to life. I also enjoyed the light touch of texture - you didn't overdo it there, and in fact your decision to only hint at it here and there really helped bring the use of weight and value to the forefront, resulting in a lot of very interesting drawings.

Keep up the fantastic work and consider this lesson complete! Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-11 21:56

There's some good here, and some less good. Your sense of construction is definitely coming along, but the general solidity of your forms is undermining the overall quality of the result. One thing that I always stress is the importance of being convinced of the solidity and volume of the forms you've got on the page before moving onto the next pass - so if you're laying in your initial masses, make sure you're convinced of their solidity before moving on. If you don't quite feel it, add a well-planned contour line or two to help reinforce that illusion.

When adding forms, especially on the initial stages, make sure that they're simple - any complexity will undermine that solidity, so you always want to build up the simplest level of detail first, then go back over it to add greater complexity. Looking at the spider legs on this page, those forms definitely got away from you. It's important to be drawing those kinds of things as very simple tubes/sausages in your first pass.

Looking at the top jumping spider's abdomen, you seem to have drawn it in a little roughly, then drawn it again a little tighter on top of that. While this does follow the process of drawing in various stages, I want you to try and avoid situations where you straight up replace a form you've already drawn. You can manipulate them by carving into them, cutting chunks away (which means being aware of the form that's being cut away, like if you were subtracting a sphere from the side of a cube, you'd understand that it was a sphere being cut out). What you can't do however is just ignore what's already been put down. In this particular case, I would have simply gone with the original form you drew, reinforced its solidity a little bit and kept going.

The only other thing I want to mention is that you're getting rather scribbly - you should be planning each mark you put down, and applying the ghosting method to ensure that you do what you can to nail it. You're jumping into your mark making a little too eagerly - you'll benefit from holding yourself back and forcing yourself to go through that all-too-necessary planning.

I've said a lot here, but I do think you should be able to move forwards to the next lesson and apply the points there. So I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-11 22:32

Secretly I put everyone through this torture because I had to go through it myself. If anyone becomes a successful artist, it won't be without the pain of staring at creepy crawlies!

Your work is generally very well done. Your forms and constructions feel quite solid, but don't fall into the trap of becoming overly stiff. Your use of line weight really helps to tie everything together. I especially liked your wolf spiders, though for some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I prefer the first attempt to the second.

The area I think you should direct a little bit more focus towards (and this is completely normal, just a little nudge in the right direction but it's something everyone struggles with) is proportion. Just keep flexing your observational muscles and consider how the different masses of a given critter relate to one another in terms of size and how far apart they are. This will improve with practice, of course.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. Oh, and I fixed your flair - I had accidentally typoed the ds1 flair tag.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-15 00:58

I'd say in general you demonstrated some serious growth between the last lesson and this one. You were doing a decent job then, but your grasp of form and construction has been knocked up significantly, and continued to improve over the course of this homework set.

In general you're exhibiting some serious confidence, and no fear in regards to drawing through your forms and doing everything you need to in order to fully understand how those forms sit in 3D space. Beyond that, you do a great job of ultimately organizing those lines with additional line weight to really bring the drawing together in a cohesive and solid manner.

Honestly, the fat scorpion made me burst out laughing - I'm glad that you accepted your mistake and kept going forward with the drawing - the result is obviously proportionally hilarious, but in many ways it's actually believable that this scorpion is just a fatty who needs to hit the gym.

I don't really have much to offer in way of critique - you're moving in the right direction, and making great headway. Just keep doing what you're doing and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-20 19:59

Looking pretty good! I'm impressed with the quality of your constructions and your general sense of how things fit together and how the forms sit in 3D space, especially considering that your last submission was quite a while ago. Most people tend to forget a lot of the previous stuff if they don't keep up with it regularly.

I do have a few recommendations that you can apply as you move forwards:

• Draw a little more deliberately. Right now from what I can see, you're not planning all that much before each mark, so they tend to come out looking just a little bit sloppy. This definitely does have an impact on how solid your forms look

• Don't try and jump ahead too early. For example, this beetle. It's not badly done, but remember that this homework is not about drawing pretty pictures, but rather to improve your understanding of form and construction. Going through each constructional step and drawing through your forms will strengthen your understanding so when you do try to draw cleaner things in the future, you'll be able to visualize the lines you're skipping more easily, and won't have to rely on them being present as much.

• If you want to create a solid, black shape (a core shadow or whatever on a form) design the shape then fill it in completely. I can see that you tended to use hatching to fill your shapes on, and this tends to come out sloppy, with some unintentional little slivers of white poking through and increasing the amount of visual noise in there. Mind you I'm not talking about the lines you used to fill in the shadow underneath the wasp - this was a fairly unique and obvious stylistic choice, and that's perfectly fine. It's the things that don't look entirely deliberate that you want to avoid - sloppy hatching of any sort is something you should avoid, and hatching in general is more often than not going to convey that you didn't really want to consider what other textures may have been present on that form.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-10-22 18:42

I'll be honest - when received your submission, I was immediately a little worried due to how recently you'd submitted the last one. My concern is that it was unlikely that you'd given yourself enough time to really absorb and digest the information in the lesson. Looking at your work, this seems to be the case.

The biggest thing that jumps out at me is that you're drawing more from memory than from observation. When you look away from your reference image, even within a couple seconds, your brain will immediately start throwing away key information, making your resulting drawing appear very cartoony. It also tends to throw your proportions way off, as these generally require a lot of close studying to consider how different components relate to one another in size. Come to think of it, I believe I actually mentioned this in regards to textures in my last critique.

Overall, you need to slow down and give yourself the chance to really soak in the information in the lesson.

There was one drawing that I liked a lot, though, and I think it's important that I point that out. The fly on page 5 is fairly well done. The individual forms feel solid, I can see how the legs attach to the thorax, and the legs themselves don't feel stiff, but they also feel like they're three dimensional. The only thing that's missing is that you should have drawn ellipses between the three major masses to mark out where exactly they intersect. When two shapes (2D) intersect, they do so at a point (1D). When two forms (3D) intersect, they do so in a shape (2D). If two balls intersect, they'll intersect in an elliptical shape. Actually marking out this shape will really help solidify your understanding of how those two forms exist in relation to one another.

I want you to try this lesson's homework again. Take the time to go through the material slowly and carefully, and don't forget that you need to be doing exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly as a warmup (picking two or three each day to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto that day's work).

Uncomfortable

2016-10-30 17:41

Your use of construction is coming along great. I especially like the solidity of this one. Now while that is enough for me to mark the lesson as complete, there is something significant that I want to point out, that you need to work on above all else: your line quality.

You're chicken scratching. Instead of planning, preparing and executing each individual line using the ghosting method, you're roughly scratching your lines along with short segments. This isn't the case for all your lines, but it is definitely present and it's a terrible habit that you need to break, and it's more than likely happening because you may still be drawing from your wrist rather than your shoulder. You should be applying the ghosting method to everything. What you're doing right now is more thinking on the page, rather than in your head.

Another issue that I'm seeing is that once you've laid down some rougher linework, you come back and clean it up by replacing your initial lines with darker strokes. Basically you end up with two phases - one phase of lighter, more confident, but somewhat poorly planned marks, and one phase of stiff, overly careful, darker ones. The approach focuses on sketching, then replacing the sketchy lines with clean ones. It too is a bad habit.

Instead, what I want you to do may seem similar, but the manner of thinking is different. Draw your initial lines without trying to hide them. Don't worry about their weight too much, just don't make them needlessly faint or needlessly heavy. Focus on drawing well planned lines using the ghosting method, and focus entirely on using those lines to create individual solid forms. Don't get caught up in the details of the object you're drawing, just focus on the rudimentary, simple forms.

Once you've got your construction laid out, then you can start thinking about which lines you want to emphasize by adding some line weight to them. Keep in mind that you're not replacing your linework - you're drawing more attention to the lines that already exist (and in turn taking attention away from other marks). It's important that you draw with a confident pace at all times. At no point should you be drawing your forms from the wrist (or really from the elbow for that matter, as it's easy to slip from drawing from your elbow back into drawing from your wrist).

Anyway, like I said - your constructions are good, so I am marking this lesson as complete. You need to make sure you break that chicken scratching habit (which I'm sure you can, as you're not chicken scratching every mark). Also, I want to reiterate the importance of keeping up with your lesson 1 and 2 exercises. I'm not sure if you have been, but you should be incorporating them into a warmup routine, picking two or three exercises from those two lessons each day to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto the day's work.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-07 22:38

Definitely missing a lot of what was covered in the lesson. This might help (also I'll be sharing this demo with the rest of the community as the issues you're struggling with are difficult for a lot of people). There's two major points that I outline there - first of all, your forms aren't solid. Or rather, they're not really forms - none of them read as three dimensional objects, they're mostly 2D shapes. The other point is something I raised before - you're still working from memory. You're not studying your reference closely enough.

The approach we use relies very heavily on breaking things down into small units - add a simple organic form. Pile another organic form onto it. Draw a line from here to there. Wrap a contour line around your form. And so on. Each and every one of these units should be informed by you looking at and studying your reference. There's a whole lot of information contained there, but you're not acknowledging it in your choices.

Now, your drawings do improve somewhat over the set. Your last two spiders are alright (though their pedipalps feel very flat where they're supposed to connect to the rest of the head). Still, you need to work harder at really nailing this form thing down.

Give the homework yet another try.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-24 20:17

You're definitely moving in the right direction. You've got a few really nice demonstrations of construction and form - the fly on page 2's very nicely done, and the beetle at the end and the hornet on page 3 definitely stand out. There's definitely room for improvement, but what's important is that I'm seeing a distinct budding of understanding.

The grasshopper definitely does come out rather flat - this is actually not an uncommon thing that I've noticed, a lot of people tend to do that though I'm not entirely sure why.

I do think that you have a bit of a tendency to tend a little more towards the cartoony - this is likely due to letting yourself slack off a little bit in terms of carefully observing your reference, most notably after you're finished with the core of the insect's body. It's the legs that tend to look oversimplified, as though you haven't really paid them enough attention when it comes to studying their features before drawing them. I also agree with your notes next to the flea - drawing small isn't going to be helping you here, you definitely want to give yourself as much room to think through these spatial problems as you can.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you think of the drawing as having several phases or passes (where you build up various levels of detail, starting with your initial masses, then connecting them, then adding more forms, etc.) you should be sure that you are convinced of the solidity of your construction at the end of each phase. If it occurs to you that, "oh that'll look more believable and solid once I add more forms and details", definitely stop yourself and think about what you can do to reinforce the illusion of form immediately. If each phase ends with a solid result, you will end up with a much stronger construction in the end.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-11-26 23:52

I definitely think you're demonstrating some improvement, and an increasing grasp of construction and the use of form. There's definitely room for growth of course, and I have a few tips that should help in the long run:

• I'm seeing a lot of faint, delicately drawn and rather timid marks in your drawings. This is something you should avoid. It's pretty normal for people to want their initial lines to be more hidden and have less of a footprint in their final drawing, but drawing timidly has the tendency of undermining the integrity and solidity of a given form. Draw every mark with confidence and don't worry about hiding some of them. After you're done your overall construction, you can come back to add more line weight to emphasize the important marks. This will ultimately have the effect of making some marks recede and become less noticeable. Always remember though that the point of the drawings we do for these lessons is not to have a pretty drawing in the end - the process is our focus.

• Draw bigger. Construction is very much a spatial challenge, and when you give yourself less room to think through such spatial problems, your drawings will stiffen up. People tend to draw smaller when they feel less confident about what they're doing, feeling as though it'll let them hide their result - unfortunately it has the negative impact of generally making them perform worse.

• Don't worry so much about detail - spend most of your time on construction, making confident, purposeful and intentional marks.

You're moving in the right direction, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-01 21:39

Might have taken a while, but it was clearly worth it! Your work here is looking fantastic. Lots of solid forms, great construction, and the little details especially towards the end of the set are subtle, but add a lot of dimension and interest. The only recommendation I have is to think just a little bit more before the strokes where you're adding detail. You're thoughtful and intentional when constructing your forms which is great, but in a few places you tend to get a little looser with your details, which tends to bring the overall aesthetic appeal of the drawings down a touch. An example of this is with the beetle that comes before the water boatman.

Anyway, generally you're doing great. Keep up the fantastic work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-07 19:14

That point wasn't particularly important, so don't worry about it. In general I'd be more worried about any possibility of drawing too small, but it seems that you've done pretty well.

Looking through your work, you seem to be doing a good job in terms of approaching construction and building up your forms in successive passes. Your forms are generally conveying a decent illusion of form, and you seem to understand how they relate to one another (as demonstrated by your ability to compound forms together to increase complexity).

One minor point that I'd like to raise is that you shouldn't forget to add some sort of drop shadow shape or something to that effect in order to help ground your object. You don't need to fill it in (and probably shouldn't) but just creating the outline of the shape will help place your object in an environment, rather than letting it float arbitrarily on the page.

Another thing I noticed is that when you approach detail and texture, you tend to think of detail as being a collection of details - if the surface is bumpy, fill it with individual bumps. This will result in your textures getting quite noisy and distracting. Instead, try to remember that none of these details actually exist with outlines - what you see of them is really the result of little shadows being cast by them. These shadows can combine with neighbouring shadows to create larger, solid areas of black. This also means that in areas that are particularly strongly impacted by light, those shadows can get blasted out entirely - sometimes you'll have lines that disappear because of this, and then reappear a little further along. These are quite effective and visually pleasing, because our brain understands that the line/form/whatever continues in the area where it vanished, but it reduces the amount of visual noise we must contend with.

Because of this matter of 'visual noise', it's important that when you want to fill an area in, you do so solidly, not leaving little slivers of white that can increase the contrast of that area. For more information on texture, you can take a look at the notes on the texture challenge.

Anyway, you're doing pretty well so far - I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-11 18:26

Nice work! You're demonstrating a solid grasp of the forms that come together to create these complex objects - the fly and the devil's coach horse beetle (man what an awesome name) are especially impressive, though the pincers on the latter are a bit weaker. I also kind of disagree with your assessment that you went overboard with texture. I think you struck a pretty good balance, and it wouldn't be terrible if you had gone a bit further with it too. Still, I'm very pleased with your results. The material in the next lesson should also give you some tips on different ways to handle furry textures (as opposed to adding stray hairs here and there).

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one when you're ready.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-14 00:38

Pretty nice work! You've got some solid examples of how to approach construction, building up your basic forms. There is room for improvement, but you're generally heading in the right direction.

One thing that jumped out at me immediately was the timidity with which you approached drawing your cast shadow shapes. The shadows themselves aren't particularly significant, but the way the lines were executed (lots of gaps, etc.) made me at least want to bring it up. Try to be more deliberate and preplanned with everything you draw - the rest of your linework was done well, so make sure it carries over into everything.

There were a couple drawings I really liked - the fly being one (simple, but really solid construction), and the one between the ant and the wasp. The latter demonstrated a growing sensibility as far as texture goes - the little deliberate marks along the legs were a very nice touch, and the conscious decision to leave the abdomen more bare was a good one, compositionally.

In general you're doing well, so keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

OlcheMaith

2016-12-21 18:09

P.S. Sorry for the bad quality! I saw just now how bad the lighting was..

Uncomfortable

2016-12-22 01:42

Your use of form and construction is coming along quite well. One thing that jumps out at me though is that in favour of having more notes/explorative sketches and such, your actual insect drawings end up being quite small. The downside to this is that it means the smallest mark you can make relative to the overall size of you drawing isn't going to be that small (resulting in some sloppy texturing like here and here), and even more importantly it leaves you with less room to think through spatial problems, which can in turn result in some shoddy construction work.

That said, you're generally doing pretty well. I especially liked this one, both for its solid use of form and awareness of volume, but also for the little bits of texture that are very clearly made up of highly intentional marks (rather than scribbling or randomness that can be seen in some of the ones I linked above).

Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-23 02:28

Pretty nice work. I can see your understanding of form and construction improving between your drawings, and by and large your results feel tangible and solid. I can say with confidence that you're absorbing the main focus of these lessons wonderfully, and that you're certainly ready to move onto the next lesson.

I do want to mention however that I noticed that while your texturing is interesting, I see hints here and there that you're rushing through it a little bit - but not in the way I generally tend to see from students. You're not relying on the same repetitive approach to all textures, there's distinct differences between the various kinds of surfaces you're capturing. You're also considering how fur exists in tufts, and are allowing details to cluster together into large dense areas of black. The only thing that's off is that once you identify what kind of marks you want to put down, you rush through the actual execution of them a little bit. Most people will rush through both steps - deciding what to put down, then putting it down. Yours are considerably more advanced, since you are devoting a fair bit of time to the observational portion. Just try and be as deliberate with your mark making, consider each stroke separately and try not to cut corners.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-12-30 00:52

I'll be frank - generally when students come to me with a big long self-critique, I ignore it. Admittedly it's partially because it's time consuming, but more than that it's because I don't want my own view of your work to be tainted, and I don't want to end up in the situation where I second guess whether or not I want to point something out because you've already mentioned it. So I'll leave it to you to compare your self-critique with my own, and will jump right into it.

Overall I see a growing understanding of how to convey form throughout your work, but I very much see that being overshadowed by the urgency with which you jump into complexity, often dealing with the initial phases of construction (simple block-in of form) too timidly.

Long story short, you're too preoccupied with the final drawing. You are - whether consciously or not - highly concerned with the idea of creating a pretty drawing at the end, and as a result you purposely try to draw quite faintly when it comes to your initial block-in. This results in those initial forms being not quite as solid as they could be.

Your drawings still turn out pretty decently for the most part, because you're compensating for this with a fairly strong sense of form and volume, as well as fairly decent observational skills. That's not going to be enough to carry you forever, though, so we need to make sure that your ability to go from simple to complex is sorted out.

When it comes to texture, you're employing a variety of approaches. Experimentation is definitely a good thing when it comes to detail and texture. The main thing I want to call out is where you tend to use hatching, cross-hatching or somewhat random/scribbly lines to fill in space. These rarely correspond with actual textures that exist on the objects you're drawing, and tend to look sloppy no matter how you slice it. Try to avoid having little erratic bits of white in a sea of black (the contrast becomes quite distracting), and try to avoid any lines that don't look deliberate.

As far as deliberateness, the vinegaroon is quite nicely done (aside from the claw where you applied hatching lines), though I'd say you definitely went overboard with texture here. The centipede showed some more comfort with leaving areas either solid white or solid black, though perhaps could have used a little bit more texture in the transitional areas between them. Overall, you'll be working towards finding a solid balance between overburdening your drawings with detail and not quite being detailed enough to establish focal areas. That's the main point though - you want to guide how the viewer's eye passes over the drawing, so use focal areas as way-stations for the eye's journey. If you cover everything with an equal amount of information, the path will be unclear. If your use of detail lacks a solid hierarchy in terms of one area being more demanding of the viewer's attention than another, then they'll be free to roam on their own and will likely get a little lost.

One other thing to keep in mind when it comes to texture is that under no circumstances should the texture overwhelm the construction and the form. They should reinforce it instead. This often means holding yourself back from adding more detail in a given area.

I want to see three more pages of insect drawings, but with no detail or texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on building up the construction from the simplest possible forms that need no support for their solidity, then breaking those forms down and building up detail in successive passes. Do not draw overly timidly or lightly, and don't try to go out of your way to half-hide things - you can sort out your lines and organize them using line weight later, as I do in my demonstrations. And at the end of each pass, ensure that what you've drawn would feel solid and sturdy were you to leave it at that stage and move on.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-02 18:52

Through the course of this set, you do seem to be improving on your understanding of construction and form. This fly in particular was very well constructed - one thing that some of the earlier drawings lack is capturing a sense of solidity at the end of each and every pass. That is, when we construct our objects, we start out simple, then go over it in successive passes to break down forms to greater levels of complexity. It's important that at the end of each pass that what we've drawn thus far feels three dimensional and conveys the volume and solidity of the final result. That is, as opposed to finishing off a pass feeling somewhat flatter or less solid, and expecting to fix this when adding greater complexity. So, when you're done with a pass, ask yourself whether the elements present on the page feel like they're three dimensional, whether the illusion of that is conveyed and whether or not you buy into it when looking at the image. If not, apply some of the tools we've learned in previous lessons (contour lines for example) to reinforce this before moving onto the next pass.

Now form is of course my greater focus, but as far as texture goes you seem to be a little less deliberate with the marks that you place on the page. You rely on a lot on scribbly hatching, and when you try to fill an area in with black your approach is quite blobby and uncontrolled. It's important that you plan every mark out carefully and that your decisions reflect what you've observed and studied from your reference image. Keep in mind that far more time should be spent observing than drawing - don't spend more than a second or two to put down marks before looking back at the reference, as you will very quickly forget specific details that you had observed previously. Our memories are quite weak, especially at this stage, so we need to rely heavily on transferring information more directly.

You do have plenty of room to improve, but you're going in the right direction so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-06 01:09

Augh those ticks are positively disgusting. I definitely think there are areas where your work improved in the new ones, but there are some qualities that you seem to have dropped. In some of your older constructions, there's a sense of confidence where you're establishing your forms. In the new ones, the forms are certainly solid for the most part, but they feel more stiff - the older ones are more organic, though at times perhaps a little less solid.

This raises a question - in the time between attempts, have you been continuing to practice the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as warmups, or have you just kind of left them in the past? It's important to continue doing them in order to keep sharpening your technical skills, as they will get rusty. Many of the exercises from lesson 2 especially will help you work towards getting back those lively, organic feeling forms.

I am however going to mark this lesson as complete, as you are demonstrating a solid understanding on a theoretical level. You do need to work on chipping off the rust though, so definitely get on that.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-13 00:35

You've clearly approached your drawings with a great deal of study. There's some good things here and some that are a little less so. In my eyes, your strongest drawing is this fly. The forms are clear and quite solid, and you clearly build up from simple to complex. The head's a little flatter, but this is likely because you started ignoring the underlying construction (the initial lay-in of the ball for the head).

Overall, one thing I see you doing is that you're quite faint and delicate with your initial block-in of form, and then your subsequent passes seem to be focused more on creating a pretty, detailed picture, rather than one that is solid. In some cases this leads you to add detail where the underlying construction does not support it, and in others it leads you to ignore that underlying construction in favour of something you see in your reference image (the fly's head).

The most important thing to remember is that we are not here to draw pretty pictures - we are here to learn how to construct solid objects, and how to manipulate form. Each phase - initial block-in included - should be drawn confidently, not stressing over what you want to hide or cover-up later on. Furthermore, each pass should end with something that feels solid. The initial masses you lay in - these are not shapes, they are solid 3D forms and if they don't feel that way to you, reinforce them with a contour curve or two. Make sure that you believe that they are three dimensional so that the forms you add in later passes can wrap around them properly, since you have already fooled yourself into buying into that illusion.

You have a lot of drawings that have good qualities and bad, rather than some drawings that are outright terrible, and others that are fantastic. This is because you understand construction and you're clearly capable of it, but you're getting distracted and your goals are misinformed. Don't concern yourself so much with the pretty picture at the end of the road. Focus on the exercise you're doing.

Lastly, don't use hatching or crosshatching so liberally - or really, at all. People tend to use it instead of really looking closely at the images they're studying, and it serves as an excuse not to really take your time and observe. For example, you used it all over your moth, but it ended up looking quite sloppy and poorly executed, as far as texture goes. Other textures, such as the cracked surface on the abdomen of this spider were drawn with more careful and closer observation, and came out much better.

I want you to do four more drawings, but I don't want to see any detail or texture. Focus entirely on construction, and leave the notes aside this time. Make sure your drawings aren't cut off along the edges of the page, but try and take up as much of the page as you can. Draw everything confidently, and don't worry about hiding things. You can come back later with additional line weight to clarify overlaps, but this happens afterwards and should not be present in your mind while drawing the initial passes.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-23 23:32

Your sense of construction is definitely improving, especially over the course of this set. Your use of texture, and the general balance of detail-dense vs rest areas is also improving considerably. It's clear that things went a little wrong with your ant (it ended up way too noisy and random), but then skipping forward to the wasp at the end, your use of texture is much more controlled, especially on its thorax, and you're making far better use of blank space to give the eye somewhere to relax. In this manner, you're building up focal areas and leading the eye around.

I'd say that there are still signs of randomness, and you'll want to get rid of that entirely, but things are getting much better. On the wasp, you've gone a bit crazy on the legs with this needless scribbling of lines. They don't contribute anything, but they do produce a lot of visual noise which distracts the viewer and detracts from your intended focal points.

In general, you pretty much never want to rely on any sort of randomness or scribbling when it comes to texture. Every texture has some manner of rhythm, so even if you're looking at fur, it's going to flow in some way, so you need to take the time to pick and choose your lines, attempting to capture more the flow than the innumerable strands of hair. In the next lesson, we cover how to approach fur a little more.

Back to construction, there is one thing I noticed that I feel it is important to point out. From the looks of it, you tend to start out by very loosely roughing out your three initial masses, but then you immediately ignore them. I do understand why - being loose initially helps to situate things, and lets you figure out your proportion a little more easily before really committing. This makes sense, and I won't tell you to stop doing it altogether.

What I do want to say however is that it's important to start picturing the things you lay down as being solid 3D forms, rather than semi-abstract marks on the page. For example, if you draw a circle, think of that circle as an actual, tangible sphere. Since it is a solid sphere, you cannot simply ignore it - you need to deal with it in some manner, when working it into your construction. If you want to cut a piece away, you need to consider your cut as being yet another solid form that you're subtracting from it, rather than simply saying "well i'm drawing a line here and ignoring what that circle initially was". By having this sort of structured, tangible approach to carving your constructions, you're going to find that you'll push the solidity of the overall drawing much farther. It does however rob you of certain degrees of freedom (you now need to deal with the problems that emerge).

Anyway, overall you're doing quite well, and are already showing major improvements over the first set of plant drawings you submitted for lesson 3. Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-25 22:17

Your use of the constructional methods, and your capturing of form is coming along great. Each drawing feels tangible and demonstrates a strong understanding of how each component exists in 3D space, and how they connect to one another. I don't have anything to complain about on that front, so keep up the good work.

I did notice however that on the texture side of things, it looks like you're pretty much only looking at using hatching lines - this is a common shorthand people tend to use when they're not quite taking the time to really study their reference images and observe the wide variety of textures present. Hatching works great on things like boxes, because they pretty much have no texture, so hatching adds a bit of grit to it. In truth though, hatching lines only speak to a small subset of textures that exist, and more often than not they don't correlate to what actually exists on the object.

Take a look at this demo. If you look at your reference images closely, you'll notice a much wider variety of surfaces present on these insects, along with different ways the little bumps and pits and other features are arranged and clustered. There's a lot that can be pulled from these things, so you've definitely got some room to grow in that regard.

Anyway, my main focus is of course construction and you're doing great on that front. Consider this lesson thoroughly complete and feel free to move onto the next one. Additionally, if you are interested in playing with texture, you may want to look at the 25 texture challenge where I present some extra resources and lesson material on that front, as well as a particularly time consuming exercise. If you choose to try that exercise out, do it alongside your other lessons, as opposed to trying to grind it all out immediately.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-27 00:08

You're doing quite well thus far. I totally understand your concern with proportions - I don't see anything here that looks particularly out of whack, but proportions themselves are among the challenges that we deal with gradually as we continue to train our observational skills.

I think your use of the constructional method is improving here considerably, especially in how you reinforce your major masses with contour curves, and how you are mindful of how these different forms intersect with one another. The only thing I noticed that went contrary to that was a really minor point - on that last page, where you've got those big butterfly wings, you went back to capturing rather complex edge detail (ignoring the internal patterns, but the edges of each wing) without first establishing it at its simplest level to get the flat form of that wing down as it would exist in 3D space. Additionally, where another wing is partially blocked by the one on top of it, you should still be drawing that wing in its entirety (so as to again, capture how it sits and flows through 3D space).

Anyway, keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete! Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-02 21:07

Lovely work! Your constructions are solid, and your use of those large black areas in combination with texture really pushes your drawings to the next level. In general I would be a little wary with your tendency to use hatching lines in some way or another when it comes to the actual texturing - keep in mind that there are a lot of textures in the world, and most of them are not hatching based. Take a little more time to study the way in which light plays off those surfaces, and try and identify the textures that are present there. It's good to go in deciding not to use any hatching in order to force yourself to think more about what other ways you could potentially depict that visual information.

As for the brushpen, that's actually what I recommend when anyone asks, so no harm there! It's definitely a great tool to use, and often times a regular fineliner just won't cut it when it comes to covering large areas with black.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-02-11 00:54

You're doing well as far as constructing individual volumes that feel three dimensional. That said, I think there's definitely room for improvement. One thing that stands out to me is that your drawings tend to be quite small. It's difficult to judge since the images are cropped, but the scale implied by your handwriting definitely lines up with a lot of the common issues that come up with people draw too small.

The biggest problem with drawing small is that it really limits the amount of space that we have to think through the spatial problems we're dealing with. Of course, construction is nothing if not problem that challenges you to think about how all the different forms you're drawing relate to one another in space. Giving yourself much more room to work and think will help in this regard.

Another issue I'm seeing is that there are some signs that you need to work on developing your observational skills a little more. I'm seeing a great deal of (unintentionally) drawing from memory. This is a common problem that occurs when we look away from our reference too long. The large amount of information that we see initially is thrown out very quickly by our brains in an attempt to simplify and understand it.

It's important to get into the habit of drawing for no longer than a second or two before looking back at your reference image and refreshing your understanding of what you're looking at. We naturally come into this with a tendency to fill in gaps with our imagination (without realizing it), so that's something we want to force ourselves to avoid by continuously looking back.

As a rule of thumb, always push yourself to draw less, and look more.

I'd like you to try another four pages of insect drawings, keeping in mind what I've mentioned above. Also, I have one question... why does your fly have eyelids?

Uncomfortable

2017-02-11 23:15

Think of it as sharing the arachnophobia I've developed after critiquing all of these goddamn insects.

You're doing a pretty solid job with your constructions. Lots of clear volumes, you're clearly aware of how everything connects together, and you're applying the methodology of building things up from simple to complex quite well.

I especially liked the scorpion on the top left of this page. You can absolutely see how it sits in space, with its backside being physically further from the viewer, and the tail coming back around. The other one's okay too, but I feel the heavy stippling on its torso and the way you've handled the deep shadows along its side serves to flatten it out a bit.

You've also got some interesting character to some of these. The mantis on the bottom right looks like he's got something to hide.

I'd say the only thing I'd like to see as you move forward is for you to lighten up on your line weights a little. Variance is great, but I think there should be an upper limit on how thick you're willing to let your lines get (not including areas where those lines bleed into larger shadow shapes). Really thick lines start to feel more graphic and cartoony, and can also flatten things out.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-13 23:44

Fantastic work. Really solid constructions, great use of line weight, and the little touches of detail here and there really make your house flies pop. I'm also pleased to see that you were playing around with different ways of tackling certain problems (like creating a sort of grid-texture over your housefly eyes) and ultimately reflecting upon where those experiments worked out and where they didn't.

My only recommendation for now is this - take a look at the drawings on this page. Notice how you've kind of drawn your initial construction more faintly, then gone over it with a more precise, careful, darker line? Try to avoid this in the future. Your drawings are more successful when your initial construction is more confident, and it's difficult to achieve that kind of confidence when you're worrying about drawing faintly, or when you're trying to match lines that already exist.

When it comes to adding line weight, it's really just about reinforcing lines that already exist. You've done this quite well with your scorpion and your house flies, so stay on that path.

Aaaaand I just realized I actually already mentioned that in your lesson 2 critique. Just keep following what you're doing with the house flies, those were definitely the more successful of the lot.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-02-17 20:54

So my first concern is that the lesson asks for 2 pages of pure constructions, 8 pages of full drawings. So to start with, what you've submitted here falls quite a bit short of the requirements of this lesson. I will be asking you to submit it again with the missing pages.

There are some pieces of advice I have to offer however as you complete the remaining pages.

• You're drawing much too small. As we learn about construction and thinking about how different forms relate to one another, our brains require plenty of space to think through these spatial problems. By working small, our drawings end up cramped and clumsy, and our spatial awareness tends to be stunted.

• A lot of what I'm seeing is the drawing of 2D shapes. In many ways you're applying some degree of construction well, but not in a three dimensional sense. Your drawings tend to come out flat. As construction is a matter of building up complexity in successive passes, I want you to keep one rule in mind - at the end of each pass, you should be fully convinced in the solidity, the volume, and the three dimensionality of every form you've drawn thus far. If you yourself are not convinced, then you must fix this before continuing onto the next pass of adding complexity - be it by adding contour lines, or using whatever other trick you've learned in previous lessons. It's very easy to feel that, "well this isn't solid now, but once I've added more detail, more information, more forms it will become more solid." This is entirely untrue, however. Solidity is something that starts at the very base level, and it cannot be introduced in later steps - it can only be lost. That illusion of solidity and form is something that you need to be convinced of as you draw - because when you buy into the lie, you will make little subconscious decisions that help further convince your viewers. For example, if you believe you're drawing a sphere (not a circle), and then you draw a line along the surface of that sphere, your stroke will curve naturally, wrapping around it, because your grasp of the reality within your drawing will demand it. If you are not convinced, however, your line will cut straight across (or at least, won't wrap around convincingly).

• Another point I want to raise is completely related to the previous one - when you have added a form to your construction, its solidity implies a few things. If it's solid, it cannot be changed or adjusted as easily as drawing a new line with no further consideration. If you look at the spider in the top right of this page, you'll see how you simply drew new lines for the abdomen, disregarding what was previously there. This change paid no respect to the solidity, the resiliency, the unyielding nature of that form (admittedly it was flat and unsolid, so of course we both regard it as something flimsy and easily adjusted, but let's pretend that it was solid). If a form is solid, your brain forces you to treat it as though it is real. So how do we adjust a solid organic form? We must cut and carve it - an action inherently different from just willing the form to change. To cut something means to actually be aware of the form that is being removed. If you have a sphere, and want to shear off a portion, you are forced to deal with both the part that remains, and the piece that has been cut off. Even moreso, you could imagine an entire cube intersecting and being subtracted from that sphere. The point is, to carve something solid, you're actually thinking about what actions need to be undertaken, what new 'virtual' forms need to be considered in order to make the cuts you want.

• Lastly, you're not observing your reference enough. You have a tendency to draw from memory. While some may consider this to mean not using reference at all, we very easily slip back to relying more on our memory even when the reference is right in front of us. The fact of the matter is that as soon as you look away, your brain will try to oversimplify and toss out the majority of the information you gleaned from looking at the object. If you allow it, you will end up drawing more from your simplified, largely useless memory of the thing, rather than from the object itself. While we learn to rewire how our brain processes information by simply doing a LOT of observational drawing, we can reduce this effect by forcing ourselves not to draw for more than a second or two before looking back at our reference. Always remember - draw LESS, and look MORE.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-19 19:52

So I can see some good things here, but they're diamonds in the rough and are getting obscured and buried by other things. One of the major good points in this set is that I can see you very purposefully trying to hold true to the idea of form, especially when it comes to the individual components you're using for construction. For instance, in isolation the thorax, the abdomen, etc. feel convincingly three dimensional.

There are two major components that get in the way however. The first and foremost is detail - I think you need to focus much more on the construction side of things, and simply leave detail, texture, etc. alone for the time being. It's very easy to shift our focus more towards detail, and perhaps not invest as much of that thought and planning towards the earlier, considerably more important phases.

The second point is stressing observation - I see a few key signs that you may not be spending as much of your time observing and studying your reference as you need to be. As a result, some of your drawings end up being done a little bit more from memory, from what you're convinced something looks like, rather than being directly from your reference. Now this can and will happen even after just a few seconds of looking away from the photograph. Our brains go to town on the information we've just gleaned, trying to organize and simplify it all, and throwing away a great deal of important stuff.

We do inherently get better at controlling this over time, and recording the important stuff and throwing away the superfluous, but when we start out we're just not built for it. In order to work towards that goal, we need to force ourselves to study and observe as much as possible, and to draw only for a second or two before looking back at our reference. By constantly forcing ourselves to refresh our memory and not rely on information that's been 'processed' too much, we keep looking back. The biggest rule I try to encourage people to keep in mind is this: always look more, draw less.

Now this whole observation thing plays a biiiig role in detail and texture, but it also places an important role in construction, because it governs the proportions we use (keeping an eye on how the different components relate to one another in size), and the different forms that we believe are relevant and present.

Keeping what I've said here in mind, I'd like you to do another six pages of insect drawings. Take them only so far as the end of the construction phase - no texture, no detail, etc. I don't want to see any patterning on wings, shells, etc. Focus entirely on form.

Secondly, pay special attention to how those forms should be connecting to one another, and how they relate to one another in space. Spend lots of time studying and observing these relationships, instead of jumping in immediately and drawing them as they come to you.

Thirdly, when you draw a form, make sure that you yourself buy into the illusion of its solidity. You need to be convinced that what you've drawn is not a 2D shape on a flat page, but rather a glimpse at something solid and firm.

Lastly, as always, push yourself to draw larger.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-19 20:15

I do definitely see some good here, but there's a few things we definitely need to sort out. Before we get into anything specific to your actual drawings, there's a particular manner of thinking I want you to try and immerse yourself in from now on. I've actually cut/pasted this from a critique I wrote for someone else, but it's an extremely important thing to keep in mind at all times:

We all know that the constructional method is about starting simple and building up complexity. Following this line of thinking, I want you to keep one rule in mind - at the end of each pass, you should be fully convinced in the solidity, the volume, and the three dimensionality of every form you've drawn thus far. If you yourself are not convinced, then you must fix this before continuing onto the next pass of adding complexity - be it by adding contour lines, or using whatever other trick you've learned in previous lessons. It's very easy to feel that, "well this isn't solid now, but once I've added more detail, more information, more forms it will become more solid." This is entirely untrue, however. Solidity is something that starts at the very base level, and it cannot be introduced in later steps - it can only be lost. That illusion of solidity and form is something that you need to be convinced of as you draw - because when you buy into the lie, you will make little subconscious decisions that help further convince your viewers. For example, if you believe you're drawing a sphere (not a circle), and then you draw a line along the surface of that sphere, your stroke will curve naturally, wrapping around it, because your grasp of the reality within your drawing will demand it. If you are not convinced, however, your line will cut straight across (or at least, won't wrap around convincingly).

When you have added a form to your construction, its solidity implies a few things. If it's solid, it cannot be changed or adjusted as easily as drawing a new line with no further consideration. If a form is solid, your brain forces you to treat it as though it is real. So how do we adjust a solid organic form? We must cut and carve it - an action inherently different from just willing the form to change. To cut something means to actually be aware of the form that is being removed. If you have a sphere, and want to shear off a portion, you are forced to deal with both the part that remains, and the piece that has been cut off. Even moreso, you could imagine an entire cube intersecting and being subtracted from that sphere. The point is, to carve something solid, you're actually thinking about what actions need to be undertaken, what new 'virtual' forms need to be considered in order to make the cuts you want.

Getting into your drawings specifically, I feel that the first point applies quite heavily - you tend to jump into the next phase of construction a little bit too early, and end up with a lot of information floating around but without fully understand what it is you're constructing and how it all fits together. This also ties into the importance of observation - we need to spend the vast majority of our time studying our reference image rather than drawing it, so that as we construct it, we can fully understand how everything is interconnected.

A good example is in this drawing. There's a few concerns here:

• The first thing that jumps out at me is that I can't quite pin down where the center of this creature is - like, a center line that would allow us to cut it into two symmetrical halves. There's a lot of business going on on its back, but they feel like they might be misaligned somewhat. Actually drawing in a concrete center line on your overall masses when starting out your construction, and then being mindful of it, would help considerably.

• How exactly do its legs connect to its body? Or more importantly, where? The points of connection feel a little arbitrary to me. Insects usually have much more going on at the points where their legs connect to their torsos, so it seems to me like not much investigation was done in terms of how that area should be constructed, and instead it was left unexplored.

• I do very much like how well you fleshed out the volume of its main torso. The use of contour curves was quite strong, and as far as that goes as being a solid form, it's very believable

• The head is less so - you started off with an ellipse, but immediately changed your mind and modified it without properly carving it, resulting in a less believable form. The initial ball mass serves no real purpose, and may well not have been there at all. When it comes to constructing heads like this, try to relate that ball mass to a specific core part of the head, rather than encompassing the entire thing. You can easily build off that core mass, but if it's an all-encompassing thing, it can be quite tricky to carve it down properly.

I'd like you to do another six pages of insect drawings, keeping everything I've said here in mind. I don't want you to go into any detail/texture - focus entirely on construction.

One last thing - I notice that you have a habit of not drawing through your ellipses. Draw through each and every one you do for any of my lessons, without exception.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-21 00:29

So there is definitely some improvement. There's also a ways to go, and I'll outline some of the areas you'll need to work on before I can mark this lesson as complete, but in comparison to your last submission you're doing considerably better.

Before we get into my critique, since your last submission was three months ago, I want to mention just in case that you should still be keeping up with the material from lessons 1 and 2 as warmups, picking two or three exercises at the beginning of each session to do for 10-15 minutes. These need to be done regularly, or you will forget them, and you will get rusty. That's just a fact of life.

So the biggest improvement I can see is that you're paying more mind to the forms you're drawing. Before they felt like flat, flimsy 2D shapes. Now most of them feel more solid, at least in isolation. I do see some issues with some of your contour curves (those on the praying mantis' thorax and other parts are not curving correctly, you may want to take a look at these notes), but generally you're doing much better than before.

Another issue I did notice is that you're not drawing through your ellipses. I stressed this back in lesson 2 - it's not optional, you need to do it for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. Two rounds of each ellipse is generally considered ideal. This will keep your linework confident and smooth. Right now you're stressing too much on your accuracy, leading to linework that is quite stiff.

This relates to another issue - I'm seeing a lot of cases where you're drawing your initial construction trying to be as faint as possible, then you go back around it with darker lines. This is a bad habit. You should be drawing each mark you put down with full confidence, not trying to hide them or cover them up. Both steps that you're undertaking really damage the integrity of your linework - by drawing timidly, you're not able to put the right energy and smoothness behind each stroke. Then by trying to cover up those lines with darker "final" marks, you're stressing being super-accurate to match up with your previous marks, and as a result, they end up being stiff.

You cannot allow yourself to be afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes happen - they WILL happen, it's an inevitability. We aren't here to draw a bunch of pretty drawings. Each one of these is just an exercise, a drill, we're just grinding away. So make sure you draw each form using the ghosting method - that means planning and preparing to build up your muscle memory beforehand, then executing the mark with a confident pace so as to keep your brain from micromanaging.

Now, afterwards - once the drawing is complete - we do add line weight. This is not the same as what you're doing. We're not replacing or "cleaning up" our existing lines, we're merely emphasizing the ones that already exist to help clarify overlaps or draw attention where it needs to go. I describe this in these notes. Keep that in mind - we're not replacing, merely emphasizing what's already there.

I've probably mentioned this point a few times - continue to work on your observational skills. Some of your proportions here are decent, but I noticed that with several others, the ant for example, still need work. Now this is perfectly normal, but I do feel the need to stress it repeatedly. Spend most of your time studying your reference image, considering how the different parts of the object relate to one another in scale. Only draw for a second or two before returning your gaze to your reference to refresh your memory. Your memory is very, very fallible and cannot be trusted. Your brain wants to oversimplify everything into a cartoon - this will get better over time as we rewire those basic brain processes through these studies, but it takes a lot of time and practice.

The last point I want to raise is something I've mentioned to quite a few students over the years, in regards to construction. I'm pulling it directly from another critique, so keep in mind that it applies to you in varying degrees, but everything applies to an extent, so take it to heart.

We all know that the constructional method is about starting simple and building up complexity. Following this line of thinking, I want you to keep one rule in mind - at the end of each pass, you should be fully convinced in the solidity, the volume, and the three dimensionality of every form you've drawn thus far. If you yourself are not convinced, then you must fix this before continuing onto the next pass of adding complexity - be it by adding contour lines, or using whatever other trick you've learned in previous lessons. It's very easy to feel that, "well this isn't solid now, but once I've added more detail, more information, more forms it will become more solid." This is entirely untrue, however. Solidity is something that starts at the very base level, and it cannot be introduced in later steps - it can only be lost. That illusion of solidity and form is something that you need to be convinced of as you draw - because when you buy into the lie, you will make little subconscious decisions that help further convince your viewers. For example, if you believe you're drawing a sphere (not a circle), and then you draw a line along the surface of that sphere, your stroke will curve naturally, wrapping around it, because your grasp of the reality within your drawing will demand it. If you are not convinced, however, your line will cut straight across (or at least, won't wrap around convincingly).

When you have added a form to your construction, its solidity implies a few things. If it's solid, it cannot be changed or adjusted as easily as drawing a new line with no further consideration. If a form is solid, your brain forces you to treat it as though it is real. So how do we adjust a solid organic form? We must cut and carve it - an action inherently different from just willing the form to change. To cut something means to actually be aware of the form that is being removed. If you have a sphere, and want to shear off a portion, you are forced to deal with both the part that remains, and the piece that has been cut off. Even moreso, you could imagine an entire cube intersecting and being subtracted from that sphere. The point is, to carve something solid, you're actually thinking about what actions need to be undertaken, what new 'virtual' forms need to be considered in order to make the cuts you want.

I'd like to see you do another four pages of insect drawings - as I said, you are definitely making progress, but I am not going to let you move forwards until I am confident that I've done my job correctly. I'm sure you'll get there, so keep pushing through.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-27 23:41

These notes are rather haphazard, but there you go. I'm genuinely concerned that upon completing lessons 1 and 2, you stopped doing those exercises entirely, instead of incorporating them into a regular warmup routine as recommended at the very beginning of lesson 1. In particular, you really need to work on the skills developed in the organic forms with contour lines exercise - focusing on establishing simple shapes and turning them into solid 3D forms. You have a tendency to develop your simple shapes and break them into more complex shapes, but without ever properly establishing the illusion of three dimensional form.

Give my notes there a read, brush up on your warmup exercises and then give it a third try. Four pages, construction only, no details.