You're definitely not wrong - you have gotten quite rusty. At the very least, it is extremely important that you keep up with the exercises from lesson 1 and 2, picking two or three each day (or every few days) to do as a 10-15 minute warmup. If you leave those exercises behind you, it's inevitable that your technical skills will suffer.
Another thing I noticed is that you pretty much never draw through your ellipses, which is something I stressed a lot early on, and something I insist you do for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons.
So your first few pages aren't great. You're not putting a whole lot of thought into the constructional aspects of some of these things, thinking about how these forms actually sit in 3D space and how they interact with one another. The bear on the top of that third page isn't bad, but (aside from the lack of drawing through most ellipses) the additional forms you've added along the back aren't terribly convincing. After you completed lesson 2, I did add an additional exercise to it, the organic intersections. I strongly recommend that you go back and try that one out, as it should help with this sort of thing.
In the polar bear on the next page, you jumped in way too complex, too early. Your ribcage mass doesn't actually reflect the ribcage, and you didn't build an initial sausage connecting the ribcage and pelvis. The result is that it feels much flatter and less solid, and relies WAY more heavily than it should on your observational skills (which admittedly are pretty good, considering that I could identify it as a polar bear - ... i do hope it is a polar bear).
By the time you start on those birds, things start getting better. Somewhat. You're still not thinking enough about 3D forms - you should be thinking about how the neck connects to the torso (as I discussed in the intro video), and this is something you skip all the way down until you hit your horses. These are again, a step in the right direction. Getting more three dimensional, thinking more about forms and construction, and while your proportions are off here and there, that is perfectly normal at this point.
In general, you do seem to loosely grasp the concepts by the end of the lesson, but I do want to see more of this from you. Four more pages - make sure you watch the video again, go through the demos, and think in 3D. Build your sausage-torso-form, think about how everything fits together, where things connect to one another, and DRAW THROUGH YOUR ELLIPSES!
The first two pages are pretty messy, but you seem to start getting a hang of it in the last two. There's plenty of room to improve, and your approach to fur isn't great (your raggedy lines aren't designed at all, you should go back and watch the intro video where I talk about fur and how the tufts should be carefully designed), but you're making headway.
I'll mark this lesson as complete - keep at it, but you're free to move onto the next lesson.
Lovely work! I especially like the personality and energy that comes from your use of line weight - it helps to both organize your linework and to really give each drawing its own character. I did notice that you do have a tendency to be somewhat more... I don't want to say sloppy, because that's not the word. Perhaps fluid? You think more on the page, but not so much that I'd consider it to be a bad thing. If you pushed it too far in that direction, you would get sloppy, but as it stands here, it merely focuses more heavily on gesture. As it stands, I'm perfectly fine with you continuing with that approach, as it works for you right now and produces good results. Don't let yourself go further down that path though, as it can start to have negative impacts on your ability to convey solid form beyond a certain point.
I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one and keep up the excellent work.
Thank you. Have looked at my old attemts, thats a progress I got here! I really like what these lessons became 3d forms based. In terms of gesture and solidity I am aimed at your examples. I struggled with sloppiness and definitely don't want it to return.
Hello Uncomfortable, a little question on the white pelican demo, there's a a line you drew approx a little bit under half of the neck all the way down, which at first I thought it was part of those adding muscles - part. Which afterward you didn't quite use the entire line to build the pelican with but instead, you drew inside of it.
I was mostly wondering the reason for that, or more of a mindset of it, as this lessons seems to be much more step by step construction based as opposed to earlier ones like insects and this lesson seems pretty hard for me, so I'm just trying to understand certain steps, to see if I could use them myself to make things a bit easier.
Was this done just to have an approx how the front body goes, without fully committing to the line, or was it a mistake that you drew it that far from the body and fixed it afterwards?
Also I could contribute a little while asking a question!
There's a word missing a letter in the lesson paragraph "These are often easier to wrap your head aroud than smooth curving surfaces, especially in situations with a lot of foreshortening and perspective."
Really minor thing and probably not worth mentioning, but thought why not, there's no harm I guess :P
Was this done just to have an approx how the front body goes, without fully committing to the line, or was it a mistake that you drew it that far from the body and fixed it afterwards?
This is correct - it was a mistake, and I decided that I hadn't quite committed enough to it to follow through, so I just acted like it wasn't there. Later on in the process, when I started reinforcing my line weights, I put more emphasis on the correct line, so that this erroneous one would feel less significant.
Also thanks for catching that typo! I've gone ahead and corrected it.
[deleted]
2016-09-28 04:06
I need to ask how to determine both accurate proportions and the locations of unseen joints.
I've tried to draw this bird two times and each time the proportions are terrible. It looks like in your relevant bird demo you use the two ball bases as just bases and just ignore them as "final" lines (especially the torso ball) when you further develop the overall form. Is this the secret to animal drawings?
Also, I can't help but notice that both bird demos are for large birds in profile, with clear and obvious heads, necks, and torsos. The small bird linked isn't in profile nor clearly separated into three masses. I'm not asking for a demo, but are there any tricks to drawing a twisted and condensed bird like this? I'm going to reattempt, but I think it's like trying to sharpen a diamond with copper at this time.
E: Third time was better but the proportions were still out to lunch. I didn't use the head base as the final line, yet used the torso base as the final line.
Unfortunately the answer really is just "make a shit ton of mistakes". That's really how you learn to improve your sense for proportion, and to learn what joints tend to exist where. For the most part, it's mileage.
I wouldn't say I ultimately ignore my initial ball masses - I certainly don't, but they tend to get wrapped up in other forms, masses and details. Their existence is very important, however - as when sculpting, you need a base form to build off, that's what these masses represent. They don't have to be directly visible in the final construction in order to have value.
You didn't ask for it, but here's my demo of that bird. It came out kind of shitty, because you're right - it is a tough pose, and its joints are pretty muddy. One important thing to keep in mind though is that it doesn't look implausible. Look at the drawing alone, it's a bird. Bring in the reference image, "why is that asshat teaching a drawing course!"
If you want to draw a specific breed of bird, then the best way to do that is to draw a SHIT ton of images of that bird from different angles. That's what studies are. There was actually an assignment in a class I took years ago on form language where in order to learn what really makes an object identifiable (in terms of shape, form and proportion), we had to draw pages and pages of that object. In my case, I did a 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500:
The drawings were rough and poorly done, but there was a lot of value in doing them. I got to learn what actually looked like that object, and what didn't. At the end, we did another page of drawings where we took those proportions and played with them - maintaining a general flavour of the original object, but seeing how far we could take it before that link was severed: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QbExno2j4X4/UwsVB_ZDz-I/AAAAAAAAHHA/9pOO883wvbE/s1600/sketchbook_20140212def.jpg
Long story short, here we're focusing on constructing things that are believable. Proportion is VERY important to that, but you will find that with practice you'll get better at falling within the realm of plausibility. Once you're able to do that, you might not be able to draw "Sparrow specimen 41A" with perfect accuracy, but you will be able to construct a sparrow in a variety of poses with some loose reference.
From there, if you want to be able to draw with that kind of precision, then you'd move onto practice more targeted observational drawing stuff, which you can build on top of the construction you've learned here. That is of course outside of the scope of this course (because I'm pretty bad at being hyper accurate with my drawings).
[deleted]
2016-09-29 04:40
Wow, I didn't expect this much of a reply! Sort of disappointed that draw more is the solution, but I guess it's always a solution.
I guess knowing where to place and when to build onto the ball masses is an experience thing too. You seemed to use the head ball as a final line but the body ball wasn't, whereas mine was opposite. I'll post mine as part of the homework submission. Thanks for creating a demo, it helps show the different solids.
I'm not personally aiming for drawing precisely or even realistically in the long-term. I'm sure that these lessons will help anyways but the end goal isn't to do photo recreations or sketches, but is rather to do comics or cartoon-style drawings. What I did in the bottom of the page (yet to be submitted) is more similar to what I'm hoping to do in the future.
As always, thank you for the detailed reply. I updated my Patreon to reflect your efforts, which are worth more than the monthly fee.
Nice work! I do think you're starting to get a solid grasp of construction, the use of form, and so on. I'm very pleased to see that you went back and dug back into the previous lesson material, since I'd updated it. I hope those videos helped clarify some things that may not have been as clear previously.
One thing that really caught my eye was the vulture's wattle (the fleshy scrotaly thing that hangs off its neck). In your previous submission, you drew this yak, with a very saggy belly/fur/whatever area. In that drawing it felt very flat and didn't really seem to have any volume to it. Your vulture's wattle however very clearly has that sort of solidity, that sense of 3D form to it. It's little things like this that I look for that show a student is really starting to grasp the illusion of form, and that the student is actually fooling themselves with it.
You also seem to have made some headway with that difficult bird drawing, so congratulations on that.
Ultimately I think fur is still your mortal enemy at this point - you have a tendency to go overboard with it (like the ram). I'm glad to see that you fought the urge to go nuts on its torso (actually in that area the internal little bits of suggestion are well done), but along the silhouette you'll have to continue to work on keeping yourself back. Less is more, a thousand times over. Just a little tuft here, an little bit of fur poking out there, and you're done. The rest can be smooth lines. Of course, this is texture, and that's a whole other bucket of worms that everyone struggles with for quite a while.
What's important to me right now is that you're really grasping form and construction. I think you're ready to move onto the next lesson - admittedly that lesson will still be quite challenging to you, because moving from organic forms to purely geometric ones is still a leap. It's an important one though, that I think will ultimately reflect upon how you construct everything in the future. Just grit your teeth and push through it - I have no doubts that you will, and that you'll come out all the better for it, just as you have with the challenges posed in this lesson.
Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete.
[deleted]
2016-10-12 02:56
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate the responses. You're right that fur and other textures are not easy for me. I think it's partly from the method of drawing: having a defined, smooth solid that has fur or other material applied to it should overwrite the smoothness, but with a 1/0 pen it's not possible to sort of draw the solid lightly with a textured material on top afterwards. You can sort of see this with the moth where I was able to have light pencil lines for the solids and dark pencil lines for the materials.
It's time for my own responses so hopefully they stay below 10,000 characters.
Drawing| Image| Commentary
---|---|----
Ground Squirrel| summitpost.org| This was the first animal drawing I made. Unfortunately it wasn't a large bird, nor a large upright mammal. It was a little rodent. For some reason most of the animals I drew were rodents, even though I used statistically random entries from Wikipedia's List of Animals by Common Name. I drew three ellipses: one for the head, chest, and pelvis, and connected them with a spine. I drew too small and used way too many lines for fur. I wasn't and am still not sure how to show color. Proportions were off. I tried to fix the furry texture problem below the drawing and sort of figured out what I explained above.
Ground Squirrel| wikipedia.org | This went a lot better. I still used three ellipses, and the proportions were still off, but the fur texture was better. This squirrel didn't have color. Even though the texture was better, I knew it was continuously bad and kept trying to fix it below. Your method of individual tufts works for large animals like wolves with 10cm hairs, but isn't accurate for squirrels with 0.5cm hairs. I pointed at two balls where I used both your individual, planned method, and my continuous method. Even though both don't look good, my method felt natural and seemed better as opposed to your method which seemed forced.
Ground Squirrel | wa.gov | Still with the three ellipses, still struggling with fur. It probably didn't help that my first animal was one with such poorly defined solids. I tried to focus on feet and hands, as well as tails and fur below the drawing. The feet and hands went alright, but the tail and it's fur didn't.
Ground Squirrel | summitpost.org | Still with the three ellipses, but accurately proportioned this time. All squirrels live on rocks.
Ground Squirrel | wikipedia.org | Still with the three ellipses. Less accurate this time, with still a focus on furry textures, feet, and tails. I remember coming back the next week for another drawing, looking at another ground squirrel since I knew I hadn't drawn a single good one, and deciding to move on for a less loose animal.
Sea Lion | a-z-animals.com | So I transitioned from a ground squirrel to a water squirrel. More hazy solids. Still three ellipses. Better texturing since it wasn't fur. Somehow better proportions.
Sea Lion | wikipedia.org | Still three ellipses. I found that there was something more difficult to texture that fur, and it was water. Still it seems impossible with pen, and online resources for pure pen show waves or a choppy surface, not splashes like in the whale drawing or calm subsurface water like in this photo. I wasn't and am still not sure how to transition from dark to light surfaces, while maintaining texture on all. It would be a gradient in reality, but with a black and white pen there's no gradient.
Sea Lion | can't find first image and oregonzoo.com | For the top drawing it was a sea lion with rolls of fat. I don't know how to show that on a solid base, just like fur, since it totally modifies the solid. This sea lion happened to have both fur and fat, making it impossible for me to texture. This was the first drawing I used a circle for the head too. I couldn't figure out how to show the front view properly without adding too many lines. For the bottom drawing, it went okay. I tried my best at shading but couldn't commit to solid black. It looks rough for this reason. The proportions were off like always too, but not that bad this time.
Swift | wikia.com | This bird was rough. Almost all the images of a swift are not in profile. This one was a rare profile view, but it still didn't turn out. First I proportioned it badly, then added feathers terribly. Online tutorials say to do basic shapes with lines through them, or just basic shapes, but they both depend on a variable lineweight that I don't have available. I tried to draw a basic feather after trying feathery textures below, which worked out alright, yet the repetition of a single feather throughout a drawing like this would be impossible.
Viper | can't find image | For these vipers, I tried to first draw a swoop for the alignment, then add ellipses for the solid. This didn't work since I couldn't accurately connect the ellipses. The scale texture went poorly, but continuously I'm not sure how to complete a texture with a total of 4mm room to draw. The details of individual scales aren't possible on this scale. My note asks how to proportion and color with a 1/0 pen, which are still problems for me.
Viper | can't find images | Same problems with proportions and solids for these vipers. The bottom drawing went better since I had more room for textures and mistakes.
Kangaroo Rat | wikipedia.org | This drawing went alright, surprisingly. The proportions were sort of bad but okay. I drew the solids with a single line, instead of multiple lines or, so the furry textures looked better. The turkey legs still looked bad partially due to the 1/0 of pen, if the hidden edges were lighter it'd be obvious they don't exist above the fur. Again I tried two furry textures, one below the head with your method and one one the back with my method. I like my method better, it looks more realistic for small animals.
Kangaroo Rat | wordpress.com | The proportions on this drawing were off. The textures were bad. Like I wrote down, with pen it's just one fuck up and it's over. My favorite part of this drawing is how the fingers turned out.
Swift | audubon.org | This drawing went better. The proportions were alright and texture was too. I was feeling like nothing was going though recently, so this session was pleasant.
Zebra | wikipedia.org | Finally my random animal choosing method chose a standard, demoed animal. The textured fur on this animal went poorly, but the contour stripes went well. Having a regular, large, well-defined animal made a big difference in the difficulty of the drawing.
Zebra | can't find image | Same as previous. Tried focusing on hooves and tails below, and it was alright.
Earthworm | quotesgram.com and can't find image| For the top drawing: Similar to the snake, I made an alignment with ellipses. This time I connected the ellipses better and it went okay. From this drawing onwards, I sometimes used side space to try a detail instead of the actual drawing, making the final drawing seem better. This was the case for the ribbed part of the worm, as I tried texturing it on the side first. I also had to figure out how to add cartoon eyes on before committing. For the bottom drawing: same idea as above with the alignment and connected ellipses. I was careful to draw the knot in such a way that I didn't connect ellipses where they were hidden behind another section, and it turned out a lot better for this reason.
Quelea | can't find image | Shame I can't find the image since I want to compare my drawing to the image. I think I got the feather texture better this time, and proportions were okay, and so forth. It turned out alright. I predrew feathers and talons before finalizing them on the actual drawing.
Looks like I'll have to return after some netflix for the conclusion of this exciting table! 18/45 drawings completed. I had other things I wanted to do tonight but I still want to review all my drawings.
[deleted]
2016-10-12 05:14
Drawing| Image| Commentary
---|---|----
Tahr| wikipedia.com| This one was tough for me, what with all the fur and muddy solids. I proportioned it wrong, the image was low quality too. Of all this, I like the horn and eye detail I added on the side. Everything else with the furry texture was poor.
Tahr | stealthfilms.co.nz | This animal is 100% fur and that's really what my problem was. It's not clear where the solids end and the fur starts. I couldn't figure out the frontal view for the head either, too many solids on top of each other. Again, the horns were okay. The furry texture and entire rest of the animal was not.
Pangolin | naankuse.com | The proportions on this were okay and so was the texture of the scales. This was the first time I used the cheaty hatch that sends the hidden legs back. I guess that in color, these legs would be darker or in shadow, but in pen it seems cheaty. It worked though. The looping tail didn't work.
Pangolin | focusingonwildlife.com | This pangolin went alright excluding the tail. The texture was fine too at a larger scale, but when reduced by half or more, it starts getting too dense. Pencil made it easier. It seems to me that having a larger drawing really makes a difference as it allows you to have both more detail and thinner lineweights. As shown later it also allows more inaccuracy. In this drawing, for example, I liked the detail of the claw, but there was no way I could replicate it on the larger drawing since it would be too dense.
Hybrids | n/a | This page went alright, I think. I combined the best drawings I had and they ended up strangely okay. If I continued the texture throughout the body, it would have turned out better.
Komodo Dragon | n/a | I started this drawing but gave up due to bad proportions. I noted that the head ball called the cranium is not literally the brain but instead a round head base.
Bandicoot | animalsadda.com | I started with shit proportions and couldn't fix them. So the final drawing was bad.
Bandicoot | animalsadda.com | Redid in pencil with somewhat better but still bad proportions. Maybe it's just a rough photo, or I was having bad luck.
Kangaroo Mouse | insureandgo.com | Same as the above but in pencil. Twice as good since pencil allows lighter solids. I only erased once but having lighter lines helps immensely. For pen it's like go 100% or go home. No inbetween. I'm so afraid of ruining the precious time I've spent on a pen drawing that I wobble and wave around the pen, even after ghosting methods. With pencil, the knowledge that it's not permanent gives more confidence and truth. I drew a bird at work today in five minutes with pencil and it turned out great (no photo), but if it was in pen I'd have wasted my whole lunch just getting a couple circles and connectors in that aren't accurate.
Yak | flikr.com | I know you said that the solids on this drawing aren't solid, and it's only partially true. The true, meaty solids are solid. The giant footlong fur on the stomach is not solid, since it really should all be textured off the original meaty mass. Hardly any solids are clear from the photo except the back, and everything else was a guess.
Leaves | can't find photos | I tried my best on these leaf texture details, but the demo for a leaf texture literally takes up twenty times the amount of space than one of these leaves. I can't get that amount of detail on a single 4x2 space and the texture/drawing loses because of it.
Stems | n/a | These stems are similar to the snakes and worms above. A base alignment with connected ellipses. They were okay, but the best one was with variable lineweight pens.
Ragweed | can't find photo | This drawing had the same problems as always. Too small scale, bad proportions, thick solids and bad textures.
Yellow Cornflower | wikipedia.org | Again with the lineweight problems. Solid solids but textures aren't good. I can't make solid solids without thick lines, and thick lines make textures look bad.
Yellow Cress | naturespot.org | Again with the same problems. Density, proportion, 1/0 of pen. I displayed the accuracy problems that come with small scales at the bottom of the page, and it couldn't be truer. I wrote down in a novella that I think I get the whole concept behind these drawings but it's the pen/scale that makes it tough. I promised to do three drawings: one in pen, one in pencil, and one digitally, and see how they turn out.
Black Tail Crab Spider | bugguide.net | So there's literally one terrible photo of this spider that exists. I tried my best to reproduce this photo but couldn't get the proportions right. I noticed that most of the demos don't actually reproduce the photo but create a similar drawing. Instead of trying to reproduce the photos, after this drawing I started to try and create a similar but new drawing. Also, the leg details on the side of the page look fine to me. It seems that the demos used sketchy lines and impossible lineweights, as well as fixing the solids after initial balls. When I drew this spider I send you a message of a pointless comment I was going to post but stopped.
Daddy Long Legs | naturesport.org | This drawing went better. I was sure that it would go shit since the scale of the legs were so small, but I tried my best to make parallelly leg lines that turned out alright. The texturing was simplified due to the scale and I think it worked alright.
Himmleman's Plume Moth | wikipedia.org | This moth turned out alright because it was in pencil. No other reason. I erased five times and used grey and lighter lines.
Quelea | mothership.sg | This bird was super difficult to draw, as mentioned in the original comment. The proportions are way off on this one.
Quelea | mothership.sg | Third try of this bird and it worked out better. I abandoned the initial solids and used built-on bits for the rest. I tried to detail the beak and eyes but couldn't very well. Feather details were above me again.
Silverfish | wikipedia.com | This classifies as an animal somehow but is drawn like an insect. It turned out alright.
Vulture | wikia.com | This vulture turned out alright. I liked the texture on part of the wing. Again I abandoned the original solids and it turned out better. The feather explosion would look better if the solids were lighter.
Urial | can't find photo | The proportions on this were really far out. I still don't know how to do frontal views of the head without making a big mass of lines. The details on the eyes and horns were okay, but again I suffer from small scales.
Humpback Whale | wikipedia.org | This whale went okay. I really couldn't figure out how to do the water texture, and had the same problems as always with line thickness on solids and texture.
I had to delete some entries since I went over the 10,000 character limit again but it's under this time. Some table entries may seem strange and discontinuous for this reason.
45 pages and four months later, another lesson is passed. I'll look at the next one soon.
so i made 39 pages, but that is as if i have drawn three picture on each pages so not that many. This album contains the selected ones that i think better than the others: http://imgur.com/a/1Fw9W
Wow, 39 pages - that's some dedication. I've listed the ones I find to be the strongest in the set below. You'll find that there's some overlap with your own selection, but the lists are a little different.
Overall your work is coming along well, but in general you need to slow down. Your approach tends to be a little erratic, and you could stand to put more thought into the execution of each individual mark, focusing on exactly the task at hand instead of thinking ahead to how that section relates to the rest of the drawing.
When constructing anything, the most important part is to focus on creating solid, 3D masses at every stage. I actually did a quick demo for another student that relates to this point, you can find it on the top right of this page. Basically, if at any given point something you've drawn still reads as a 2D shape, you need to reinforce it until you believe that it is three dimensional. Contour curves can help with this, just make sure that each one you place is well thought out, and that you're not wasting lines.
Wasting lines is definitely an issue - remember that we're not really sketching and discovering our animal as we go - we're constructing, so we need to do so with deliberate, well-planned marks. Planning a mark well doesn't necessarily mean it's going to come out perfectly, but it does increase the chances of it (so long as it's then executed with confidence), and it does mean that after you've made the mark you need to pause and consider whether or not it achieved what you were after.
Also, in terms of using hatching, yours tends to be rather sloppy in most places. I'd leave it more towards the end of a drawing when you're fully aware that you do want to, say, push the back legs further back, or whatever else you might want to do with them. At that point, make sure you keep the lines tight and parallel. I wouldn't use hatching anywhere else though - it definitely is not an effective tool for creating texture, and risks flattening out areas where you might not mean for that to be the result.
As you push through the set, I find that you spend more time drawing, and perhaps less time observing your reference carefully. This is a really important point - you don't want to fall into the trap of drawing things from memory. You should be looking back at your reference regularly, every few seconds, and you don't want to ever fall under the impression that you know what goes where.
Anyway, in general you're making good headway, and at this point you're moving in the right direction. There's plenty of room for improvement, and that will come with practice. I'm certainly going to be marking this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. Don't forget to return to this material frequently, review the lesson and get a little more practice in with animals every now and then.
In many ways, I think the drastic shift in the next two lessons will be quite challenging to you, but it will also really solidify the importance of construction. What you learn there will reflect back on these animals and I feel that your ability to build them up in a way that feels believable and solid will improve.
I hope you enyoy your september break and let's have a fresh start with this new way of working. I'm thinking about going for helping your with your work by donation soon.
Not bad! In general the biggest thing your work shows me is that you have some very strong observational skills. In many cases, your use of construction is coming along very nicely. In general though, I do get the sense that you're applying construction a little lightly in certain places - that is to say, you focus less on establishing solid forms and then building upon them, and use those initial lay-ins as more of a loose suggestion, then going on to rely more upon your strong observational skills to fill in the gap. In other cases (and in many of your more successful drawings), you adhere more strictly to those lay-ins.
The problem of relying too heavily on your observational skills is that the resulting construction will tend to feel flatter.
The first thing I'd like you to work on is drawing your construction steps with greater confidence - right now it's clear that you're trying to draw them to be a little more faint, so they don't interfere with your final drawing. This inevitably also makes them feel less important and less valuable, on a subconscious level. Instead, you want to confidently establish these things as actual masses and solid forms that exist within the world. Before you move on from them, you want to absolutely ensure that you interpret these things to be three dimensional and solid - if you don't, a couple of well placed contour curves can help. This goes for every step - don't move on until you buy into that illusion that what you've drawn is solid and has mass and volume to it.
Your use of texture is looking fantastic - there's a lot of great variation here, and you've tackled most of them with a high degree of success. Keep up the good work on that front.
I'd like to see you do two more pages of animals, focusing more on what I've mentioned above. After that, I'll mark this lesson as complete, and you can move onto the next one.
Oh, one last thing - if you ever combine a spider with a camel again, I will ban you from this subreddit! YOU MONSTER.
I tryed to focus on the volumes as you demand. It was hard because I am at some point switching to visual reproduction what is no more constructive drawing. I tryed to fight it and I think it workes the best on the tarsier and the snail.
By the way I'd like to work on the lesson 6 and 7 till the end of the year. I'm considering about giving you a ponctual donation via paypal because in december because I'm living for a one year road trip so it won't be much interesting for me to support you on patreon since I won't be able to folow classes after december. Will you correct my submission with a paypal donation ?
Usually I'd wait until you actually pledged/donated/whatever before giving the critique but this appears to be a fairly easy one. These are looking pretty solid and reasonably well constructed. The only thing that jumps out at me is the torso of the giraffe - the final result is totally fine, but you have a big long ellipse where you've connected the pelvis and ribcage. That should be more of a sausage - an actual 3D form with weight and solidity to it, rather than just a loosely drawn shape.
As for your question, it's completely fine to do individual paypal donations (just make sure they're broken up into one each month instead of paying a lump sum). Alternatively, you could pledge now and then cancel your pledge after December 1st. Plenty of people pledge for a limited time, so that's not a problem on my end. I guess you might be worried that you might forget though. The patreon thing is generally easier for me (keeps my records more organized), but it's not a big deal either way. The paypal email address is listed on the give back page (it's also the same email that's on the bottom of every page on drawabox.com).
Hi, lesson 5. The first four pages are new. I got very sloppy last time around, and I hope this kind of makes up for it - If not, just say the word.
Naturally I'm going to practice doing animals a lot more, without the pressure of presenting them here looming over me. I actually used a couple of days to "warm up", with a bunch of quick drawings of various animals, trying to apply what I learned from the lesson and focusing on construction. Then I noticed that I had hell of a problem with muzzles and the like, and did a 100 animal heads ^((Again, trying to focus on construction, boxy 3d form with planes and how it intersects with the cranium etc)). Still having a hard time with it though, as you can well see with the stag and squirrel. I guess it wouldn't hurt trying to do a couple animal constructions every day from now on, until it kinda feels easier?
As for fur, any tips for when it's very bushy? I found that overdoing with "tufts" gave a very straggly look, so I guess it's a matter of balancing that with simple, smooth outlines of the "core" of the form?
Generally really nice work, especially with your newer stuff, though there's a lot of nice construction across the whole set. I especially loved your stag head construction here, so I think the added practice really helped improve your grasp of that boxiness, and how the various rudimentary forms interact with one another to create a more complex skull.
As far as the bushy business goes, if you were going for a stylized look that squirrel's tail would be just fine. The problem is more that the spikey tufts are massive, to the point that it really pushes the bounds of reality. Keeping your tufts smaller, but applying the same sort of diligently and purposefully designed shape language you used here would help considerably.
Looking down at your older anteater work, that's a good example of how not to tackle furry silhouettes - those bastards were really furry, so you had a lot of work cut out for you. I'd say that because of the amount of work, you likely got a little sloppy and fell into the trap of trying to apply the same repetitive motion across the board. The trick to keep be mindful and intentional with each tuft, and not to rely on randomness or repetitive action when drawing. Alternatively if you look at the right side of the squirrel drawing, you've got a few little bit clearly designed tufts coming off it, with smooth areas elsehwere - but it still manages to look quite bushy and furry. It's not entirely necessary to go crazy on the whole thing in many cases, and can be just as effective if not more to imply a lot of your fur. That tail's definitely a special case though.
Anyway, you're doing great - I think you're taking a little more of a negative view of your work than you should - these things do take a great deal of practice and more importantly, time, to sink in. 100-animal-head challenges are definitely good, but don't push yourself so hard that you break.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Looking at your drawings, I get the distinct feeling that you're reaaaaally eager to jump into detail with these ones. I'm guessing you really like animals, and are very eager to really flesh them out! Unfortunately this also means that your underlying constructions could use some work. There's some drawings that are pretty good here, but I feel that it's more your observational skills that help them stand on their own. In the case of the frog though, most of it's actually pretty good because you are starting to get a more subconscious grasp of form and 3D space - but we can't skimp on those constructional steps just yet.
The most important thing is that at every given stage of construction, you ensure that every single form you've put down on the page feels solid. As it stands, right now you're drawing loose ellipses - focus on drawing balls and solid organic masses. If at any point a form doesn't feel solid, a well planned/prepared contour line can help solidify it.
I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings, but this time I want you to include absolutely no detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction. No fur, no wrinkles, no features, nothing like that. Just focus on your forms and how they all fit together. I also recommend that you give the intro video another listen, and go through the demos again. It often can take several read throughs for this material to sink in.
Much better! Your constructions are feeling considerably stronger, and your forms feel much more solid. You do need to work on your proportions (the lion's a bit odd, and the wolf's proportions are more similar to those of a horse) but in general that's a pretty common thing that people improve on over time and with practice. What's important is that in regards to construction, you're moving in the right direction.
I figured it'd also help to talk a little bit about the fur. I really like the fact that you're focusing primarily with building up that detail around the silhouette. When you draw those tufts of fur however, make sure you draw each spike separately, rather than as a continuous line. When it's continuous, there's often a tendency to make it more of a wave, which makes it somewhat repetitive. Try to make the tufts more organic and a little smoother, generally less spiky and stiff. Again though - right direction, just keep that in mind as you move forwards and things will improve with practice.
Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.
Really great work! I'm absolutely in love with your 'lumpy' aesthetic - it gives a fantastic sense of the volumes and forms in each construction, and it makes them feel especially tactile. I just want to reach out and touch them. In general they also happen to have a lot of character to them - those boobies look loveably daft. I guess that's really how the animals are, but you've done a great job of capturing that.
I have only a couple of things I'd like to point out. Firstly, try not to cut the legs off your animals - it tends to make things look really uncomfortable. I get that in those reference images you don't actually see the feet, but in such a situation I'd either guess based on previous knowledge of what their feet are probably like, or find other reference just to fill in the blanks. You can add grass afterwards, but drawing the leg to completion will really give you a fuller sense of how it all fits together, and will ultimately play a big role in the decisions you make that are visible. It's similar to the idea of drawing through a box to get a sense of how it sits in 3D space.
The second point.. actually it's not an issue, as it's not prominent across all your drawings. It was just about the stiffness of your bears' legs. It helps to flesh the whole leg in as more of a 2D shape to capture that sense of gesture before exploring its form. You did a good job with the other drawings.
Lastly, I wanted to just mention that I love this drawing. Great form, great line weight, great motion. So keep up the fantastic work, and consider this lesson complete!
They deserve it, the friggin' jerks. I'm not even jokin- wait, no, I'm thinking of gazelle. Many years ago I went on a safari in Tanzania and gazelle would just hang out in the dirt paths that the cars travelled on. When you'd come close, a third of them would go left, a third would go right, and then the remainder would just kind of jerk around unsure about which direction to go.
Whoa... Oh hey, once I went to northern Finland and there were all these herds of reindeer in the road and they would just NOT CARE about the part where cars were trying to drive through them. I bet it's an ungulate thing. Damn ungulates.
P.S. "Ungulate" is a word I learned this lesson while wikipediaing how the fuck animal legs work. Did you know ungulates are called unguligrade because they WALK ON THEIR FINGERNAILS? I just, I don't even, OWWWW. OW.
I used to have this habit of standing on the toes. I think it's because I'm very short, so I automatically did that to gain a little extra height when standing around. When people started noticing, they were.. horrified.
You are too kind -- but thank you! Work has been hella busy lately, so I haven't had time for much actual lesson progress...which just means I've been churning out pages upon pages of ellipses. Can't go wrong with a quick ellipse break. ;)
Feeling a bit mixed about this one. Not sure what it is but sometimes when I draw I feel like I've made some progress and I can tell I have gotten better, then other days I'll draw and feel like I've gone backwards? Or even gotten worse. =P Not sure if that's normal or not.
Had some trouble getting distracted by the details for sure and I did get a bit crazy with fur on some of these. I think I managed to squash that a bit later on but it is pretty hard.
To start with, your drawings are beautiful. You have very strong observational skills, and in some cases you're exhibiting some nice construction. In general though, you're not really applying construction in the way that I espouse in my lessons. Construction is about actually building up really solid, unassailable forms. Forms that at every step of the process exist in 3D space and must be dealt with in one way or another. You can't draw a form by putting a mark down and then say that form doesn't exist - instead you must somehow interact with it either by carving a piece away (which means being conscious of the form being cut away, like when cutting a hemispherical-scoop out of a box you're aware of the spherical form itself that is being subtracted), or by adding more form to it. The issue that I'm seeing here is that you are treating your initial lay-ins much more like suggestions, rather than concrete forms.
A really good example of this is on the first page - that second vulture head, you've got the clear ellipse/circle you drew when starting out. It doesn't actually fit inside the resulting head. It's approximate, it's a suggestion.. it's like you drew the circle, then drew a vulture's head on top. The vulture's head is really nice, but unfortunately if I asked you to turn it 20 degrees, you'd probably struggle with it, since that's not what the photograph you're referencing shows you. This is why it's so important that we actually think of that head in terms of a network of simple forms, because we know how to rotate a ball, we know how to rotate a box, so we can jam a box into a ball and then rotate them together. With a few more forms, with a little bit of carving, we can get a fairly complex head while still understanding how it would look from different angles.
Your details are beautiful, of course - you really have a knack for capturing them, and implying lovely detail while controlling the amount of density of information spread out across the whole drawing. There's no real issue there.
What I'd like you to do is, I want to see three more pages of animal drawings. I don't want to see any detail on them at all - focus entirely on construction. Every step of the way, before moving on, I want you to ensure that you are fully convinced that the things drawn on the page are solid and three dimensional. The initial masses of the cranium, the ribcage, the pelvis, should be solid organic forms (or a ball in the cranium's case). Then expanding from there, you should merge the ribcage/pelvis into yet another solid sausage form, and connect the cranium to the torso with yet another solid form. If you don't feel the forms are solid, if you can't imagine turning the form in 3D space, add a couple well placed contour curves until you are confident of that. Then move to add more forms, to break down more complexity.
Remember not to sketch - your drawings aren't sketchy, of course, but when you make a decision - like the placement of a ball, or something - you have to stick with that decision. The odd line, sure, if you drew something and didn't actually go so far as to turn it into a solid-feeling form and you realized it was horribly wrong, sure. You can leave it aside, but anything beyond that you really need to deal with, especially if it's already a solid part of the world.
I struggled a lot with the hippo oddly, as I thought it would have been similar to doing the rhino which I didn't find anywhere near as problematic. I did 12 pages of hippos and I still can't seem to draw one. :P
Pretty well done! For the most part your construction is coming along well, though I did notice that here and there you have a tendency to change the 2D shape of some animals' torsos without actually following the constructional approach of attaching more organic forms. Here's what I mean.
I really, really liked your dogs by the way - the feel very solidly constructed, and you've captured a lot of their lively energy.
I'll go ahead and move onto the next lesson, so feel free to go onto the next lesson.
I reeeally struggled on this, especially at first. Just to be upfront, I've continued the sketchy lines, and flew in the face of your notes about fur, however I feel I improved in these aspects toward the tail end.
I reaaaally can't stress the importance of... you know, not ignoring my instructions :P Since you understand that you should not be approaching fur in the way you did, and that you should be drawing deliberate, planned strokes rather than being rough and sketchy, I won't touch on those any further.
There's some good here, but overall I think you're moving too quickly. You're very interested in getting into details, and as a result you're not spending a whole lot of time on the construction of your animals, and your proportions are all over the place. A lot of what I'm seeing is the result of you drawing from memory, rather than observation. Remember that within a couple seconds of looking away from your reference image, your brain starts throwing away large chunks of what you saw, simplifying it into symbols. It's imperative that you look back at the reference image after every couple lines to refresh your memory.
One thing I did like was the heavy emphasis on form in your moose drawing. Still way too sketchy, and the leg construction is quite weak, but the head and neck feels solid. This drawing also demonstrates one major issue that is present in many of your drawings - absolutely do not cut off the feet, and when you do cut something off, never leave the form open-ended. Cap things off, otherwise they will flatten out.
So, what do I want you to do now? First, I want you to go back and reread the lesson, the demos, and rewatch the demo recordings as well. Then I want you to do four more pages of animal drawings, with absolutely no texture or detail. Focus entirely on construction, break everything down into forms and spend a lot more time actually observing and studying your reference. Don't let yourself fall into the trap of working from memory. Also try to be a touch more deliberate with your linework, and plan things out more. Some instructors will encourage you to be more exploratory and sketchy, but for these lessons it's imperative that you follow my instructions to the letter and not blend them with things you've learned elsewhere.
I'm having trouble applying line weight, and a lot of sketchiness occurs as a result. Working on the superimposing lines exercise again in the meantime. The 1st image is pretty close up, using a dying pen, however the rest of the drawings take up the entire page.
I tried to focus on thinking in 3D, and careful observation - I think I improved there, but I frequently found myself "switching off".
I'll mark this lesson as complete, but there's a few things I want to bring your attention to:
At every step of the constructional process, you need to make sure you feel confident that what you've drawn feels three dimensional before moving forwards. That means that if you've connected your ribcage and pelvis into a sausage form, but it doesn't feel entirely 3D, do something to reinforce that illusion of form. Usually this means adding a contour curve or two.
Don't draw lines and then ignore them - whatever you've created at the end of a given step is like solid stone. It cannot be ignored, it has to be carved or have more forms added to it.
You tend to draw your ribcages too small. For most animals, it's going to take up something like half of the torso, if not more. Think of it this way - the ribcage houses the lungs, the heart, and so on. These are massive organs, they're not all going to fit in the space between the front legs.
You still need to pay a lot more attention to your reference images. This will improve over time, but you've got to force yourself to constantly look back, not to work from memory, and to pay attention to the proportions of things, how individual forms and objects relate to one another. You definitely are improving, but you've a long way to go.
When it comes to limbs, you've got to think in terms of segments. For example, the legs on your horse don't have any break points establishing joints. They have bends, but these bends are not as concrete as the closing of a segment would be. Dealing with the legs in terms of shape rather than form is fine, but you still need to close off those shapes in order to ensure that you are building up from simple to complex. A whole leg of three segments is a lot more complex than each individual segment being represented by its own self-enclosed shape.
Anyway, keep at it. You're free to move onto the next lesson, and I do think that the next lesson will be quite challenging for you. If done properly, it will force you to think more in terms of solid, simple geometry being combined together to create complex objects. The subject matter we've been dealing with so far has been largely organic, which gives a lot of leeway in terms of making those kinds of decisions, letting students get by without thinking as much in terms of individual rudimentary forms. If that same approach is applied in lesson 6, things will not feel solid. Make sure you watch the intro video and follow the demos closely and carefully.
Greetings! I come bearing animals of wildly varying quality. I apologise for there being a ton of dead space around the actual drawings. Imgur doesn't want to let me edit them for some reason :/
You're definitely hitting a lot of major important points with this work. Your form and construction is coming along well. There are a few things I want to mention though.
Firstly, you have a tendency to get really cartoony with your animals' legs. Keep in mind that there is a difference between this and basic simplification. When things get cartoony, it usually means that you're not observing and studying your reference enough - it tends to happen when you work more from memory. Your brain tosses out important bits of information very quickly, within a few seconds of looking away from your reference, resulting in only oversimplified, symbolic representations of what you saw remaining in your mind. It's imperative that you look back at your reference regularly - like after every mark or two that you put down.
Of course, learning how to properly observe and study is the development of a skill like any other - it comes with time and practice, so gradually you'll find yourself noticing much more of what's in front of you. Just make sure you give yourself the chance to see what's there.
Overall your use of form is quite good - I really liked the bird on the first page, as well as your second springbok (the first one made me burst out laughing, it looks like it was on stilts). You're definitely moving in the right direction here.
The only thing in regards to form that I wanted to stress was something I saw in your first giraffe drawing. For the additional hump on its back, near the neck, you added an additional form. You did the same thing for the second giraffe drawing, but the second one's result was considerably more solid - reason being, the first one has little bits of line jumping from one solid form to another, but where they themselves are not inherently supported. It's like stretching a bedsheet across two chairs that are a couple feet apart. You can tell that there's nothing underneath, and that trying to stand on top will end badly. These transitions aren't always avoidable - they're still there in your second giraffe drawing, but because you minimized them there, it feels considerably better built.
Anyway, there's definitely a lot of room to grow here, but you're making good progress and you're heading in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Overall your sense of construction is coming along great. Drawing through your forms, looking at how the different forms connect to one another, and so on. There is of course plenty of room for growth, but this comes from continued practice, and develops over time. The biggest thing as far as what develops over time is your observational skills - you definitely do need to keep pushing yourself to study and look at your reference more frequently. Try not to draw more than a mark or two without looking back at your reference. Try to think about how your reference breaks up into those different forms, and how those forms relate to one another.
One thing I see you struggling with is definitely fur - I've got a handful of demos on it, but I really recommend that you look at this one and this one. The most important thing to remember is that your tufts of fur have to be designed - you can't rely on randomness, each bit needs to be drawn with consideration. Don't draw continuous lines for multiple tufts - draw each spike separately, and consider the variation in their thickness, curvature, angle, etc. And don't go overboard with them - a few here, a few there is enough. Focus more on building up those tuft shapes along the silhouette of the form as well, as this is where they'll have the greatest impact.
Another point that I think will help a lot is to draw bigger. A lot of your drawings are actually coming out quite small relative to the overall page. When you draw smaller, you end up with less room to think through spatial problems - construction is all about spatial problems, and understanding how forms relate to one another. Limiting how much room you have can result in a lot of stiffness and clunkiness to one's drawing.
Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Half a page at minimum - don't be afraid to go bigger than that. Remember that you want to get a sense of how each form sits in 3D space, and you want to make sure that it feels solid. If you need to draw bigger to feel that, then draw bigger.
As for your other question, it's not really a matter of how much practice or confidence you need - give it a shot regardless. You will make mistakes, you will encounter failures, but that is how you will grow and learn. In fact, it is a very good way to force yourself to think in terms of those objects as forms - just make sure that you are considering the individual forms, and not getting caught up in the detail of the object you're trying to draw.
This one was really fun! Espacially the hybrid one. I still need a calling name tho.. :P
Important Note:
I've been running out of sheets in my sketchbook, so I decided I'll use the toned one instead and as I'd just gotten my first Copic Ciaos, I tried them out. Of course I still need to learn how to use them but I had some fun experimenting with values. Also added some crayon, because why not? (You tell me if there is any problem with it!). But I always made sure that was the last thing I did:
Construction
Line weight
Values
a little Color.
edit: I just saw that my flair doesn't show the 250 Boxes Challenge I reached in with my first lesson.
As you progress through the set, your sense of construction and your use of line and form definitely improves considerably. By the end of it, I'd say you've gained a pretty decent grasp of how to make the different forms fit together believably. The only problem I'm seeing remain however is that you're still a little bit too focused on the details. Focusing on details during the detail phase is totally fine of course, but the problem occurs when we start thinking ahead - when we're dealing with the construction phase, and our mind wanders to the various more complex bits we'll be adding soon.
I'd say that when doing these exercises, you should avoid adding colour and values entirely. The more you pile onto your expectations of your drawing, the more your mind's going to be split as you tackle it. Keep in mind that these exercises are all about construction and form. That isn't to say you can't do other drawings where you play with colour and whatnot, but don't mix them up. Another thing to keep in mind is that we don't actually care about what the resulting drawing looks like - we don't care if we're creating a pretty final drawing. We care about the process itself, and what it teaches us. We care about actually drawing with the confidence and boldness to make the mistakes that allow us to learn and grow. Keep that in mind as you move forwards.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - make sure that for future homework that you submit to me, you focus only on what the lesson asks for.
The first part of your work - specifically the birds - is quite well done. Your bears are so-so, with their legs and heads starting to get rather weak, and that trend continues through the rest.
Overall your torsos aren't bad, but when it comes to the heads and legs, I don't feel that you're really paying enough attention to your reference image. There's a lot more drawing-from-memory (therefore drawing what you think you remember seeing, not what you're actually seeing), and as a result things tend to get way too simplified.
I'm usually quite okay with legs being more gestural and starting off as 2D shapes . That said, as you can see in this demo, I believe it's very important to clearly cut those 2D shapes at each joint, rather than leaving the shapes to be complicated. Always remember - simple to complex. By complexity, I'm referring to the kinds of details that involve a lot of change of direction in your line.
As far as construction goes, most of your heads are pretty well done - it's more about making sure you study your reference more carefully, and look back at it constantly. Don't draw for more than a second or two before turning back to your source, as your brain will immediately start simplifying everything it collected, reducing it to a sort of cartoony state (rather than the sort of simplification we were talking about before).
I'd like you to look through the lesson once more - watch the intro video, read through the notes and demos (and the less formal demos under the 'other demos' tab), then try two more pages of animal drawings. I think that if you can push yourself to observe your reference more carefully, you'll be able to do considerably better. Also, make sure that you're still keeping up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly as part of a warmup regimen - picking two or three exercises each day (or as often as you can) to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto that day's work.
On the earlier lessons, I generally always end up spending weeks on drawing a single plant until I end up with the version I'm satisfied with. But after reading here and there, how the point isn't to show you pretty drawings, I've generally submitted pretty early works without too much finetuning to indicate my "real" ability better, I suppose.
Last pages has lots of cat species there, as through out the lesson I never really understood how to draw their face, so I felt like throwing in some practice while I got the chance to. (Any tutorials HIGHLY appreciated.
That aside, thanks a lot in advance! My older submissions can be easily found on the reddit post history as I don't really use this account for much, so if you want to peek at them to see if there's any improvements that would be really nice! :D
You're doing a pretty good job of developing your sense of construction, and you definitely improve considerably over the set. There is one big issue that I'm noticing however that is holding you back quite a bit - you have a tendency to draw small. You don't do this all the time, but generally when you try to squeeze two animals into one page, both of them end up feeling very cramped and the construction as well as the line economy tends to suffer.
Ultimately I think this is why you're struggling with those feline heads. They're definitely moving in the right direction, but when working in such small spaces, you're limiting the amount of room you have to think through the spatial problems. Your line weight also ends up feeling much heavier, resulting in very clunky drawings with little to no nuance.
Beyond that, it's really a matter of spending more time observing your reference. You're doing a great job of identifying and breaking down the forms in the overall body, and the head is no different. It just happens to exist at a smaller scale, so you're going to have to give yourself more room for it.
Anyway, I'm confident that you'll be able to practice this on your own without going astray, as you're doing well already. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
There's a lot of interesting work here, but one thing that becomes very clear to me is that you're distracted yourself by thinking of the end result far more than the actual underlying construction. You're too focused on detail.
Firstly, I see some drawings where you seem to do a constructional study, then do the same drawing without construction, focusing on detail. Don't do this - if you're going to add detail, add it on top of the construction, as that construction is necessary to uphold the solidity of the overall object. You're a long way off from being able to draw these things without the constructional phase, and I worry that you'll toss construction aside far too early if you continue down that path.
Now, while there are some drawings with fairly weak construction, there's a few that I really liked. For instance, the tiger on the bottom right of this page is excellent.
As far as texture goes, this bird has a lot going for it, but it's also very noisy. You should be more willing to let the areas that get dense become a single solid black area, as I explain in the 25 texture challenge. As it stands, the viewer's eye doesn't know where to focus because there's so many high-contrast areas. The blank areas on the bird's chest are nice, but you need the same sort of thing for your darks.
While in that drawing you've got a lot of careful, specific and deliberate marks used to denote feathers, in later drawings you tend to be much more sloppy, relying far more on randomness and almost scribbling to create texture. While it surely is less time consuming, you need to be deliberate with your details. Now you don't necessarily have to bury your drawing with detail, and you can get away with hinting just a little here and there, but those marks need to be carefully crafted and designed all the same.
That said, I don't want you to focus on texture right now. I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings with no detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction, observing your reference more carefully and trying to maintain proper proportion.
Unfortunately it's largely a matter of practicing more. Our observational skills are poor when we start out, and they improve as we do more and more studies. There's no real way around that.
Much, much better. There's still room to grow (especially with those elephants' legs and feet), but that'll come with continued practice. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Excellent work. In general, your drawings demonstrate a very strong underlying understanding of form and construction. In certain cases your actual linework speaks to a slightly more rushed, almost sloppier approach, but the decisions you make when drawing make it clear that in your mind's eye, you understand what you're doing.
That said, I do want to try and warn you against being quite so quick and reflexive with how you make your marks - at least while you're doing these lessons with us. Reason being, if you allow yourself to work sloppy, you may slip further down that slope, and your grasp of space may slowly erode.
Since the constructional method follows a series of successive 'passes' where you start simple and then build up and break down form, always keep this in mind: at the end of each constructional pass, what you have in your drawing should always feel solid and three dimensional.
A good example where this is not really the case is here, especially the pig on the left. The three major masses (cranium, rib cage, pelvis) feel more like flat circles/ellipses than solid three dimensional balls. The ribcage especially is quite weak. Furthermore, we don't grasp how the legs connect to the torso, and because of this they have a tendency to flatten out somewhat.
Additionally, when drawing any mark, make sure it's deliberate and planned. Looking at the lower right rabbit, we can see two sets of contour curves along its torso (specifically around where its ribcage would be), that seem to perhaps fall a little short of properly wrapping around the 3D form. This calls the solidity of the whole form into question. Another point relating to this is the fact that you're doubling up a lot of those contour curves. Stylistically it actually looks quite nice, but as far as this exercise goes, it speaks to you drawing by reflex again.
Now it's very clear that you're quite good at drawing animals, and that you have a very solid grasp of whatever methodology you may have learned beforehand. You even have a reasonably solid grasp of how to draw solid looking 3D objects - but I want to see a few very solid examples that you understand how to construct with clear, deliberate forms and linework before I mark this lesson as complete.
Give me just two more pages, and focus on following through the constructional steps that I demonstrate in demos like this oryx. See how clear I am about how things connect to one another?
You have a tendency to draw more from observation (than form-construction). Your observational skills and even your understanding of 3D space are already well developed, so just show me that you can apply the methodology covered in the lesson and I'll mark this lesson as complete.
You definitely improve considerably over this set. Your dogs are especially well done - those two on the last page demonstrate a strong understanding of construction and form, and how all of them relate to one another. All the while you've managed to capture their energy and gesture quite well.
Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.
While I agree with you that the results are so-so, I think I see a lot of signs that you're really grasping the concepts of the lessons (as far as construction goes), and the rest is really a matter of training your observational skills.
I see a lot of solid combinations of forms, and I'm quite pleased with your propensity towards piling on more organic forms to flesh out the bulky muscles of your subjects. On the flipside, you do have a tendency to get quite cartoony - this often happens when we get too caught up in our drawing, and stop looking at our reference as much as we really should. Always remember - you should be looking and studying way more than you're drawing. Only draw for a second or two before forcing yourself to look back at your reference. Don't work from your memory, as this is where the cartooniness emerges.
You have a particular tendency to oversimplify when dealing with heads, though you do show some improvement on this front throughout the lesson.
Another thing I'm noticing is that your linework is a little on the stiff side, so you'll want to loosen up a little and perhaps draw somewhat larger. It's difficult to gauge what size these drawings are at, but I generally find that when you draw larger, things tend to feel a little more organic and less cramped.
Anyway- I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, because you have definitely grasped what I'm trying to teach here. You have a lot of room for growth, of course, so you'll want to keep practicing, especially when it comes to the observational side of things. Keep up the good work!
Thanks! I've been fighting the stiffness, but progress is very slow on that front. Is this something that I can expect to naturally improve over time? I've been keeping up with practice every day for at least an hour, but given that I started from scratch, it's probably going to be a long road.
And yeah, my observation skills are definitely very, very insufficient. I've been trying to focus more, but it's surprisingly hard. I figured that once I've finished your lessons, I'll look for some other material focusing on the observational side of things, though that'll be far in the future.
You're on the right track, over all. That stiffness will improve, so long as you're always reminding yourself to draw big, draw from the shoulder, and apply the ghosting method, executing each mark with a confident stroke.
Oh wow, it sure has been a while! I definitely appreciate that you've continued to support drawabox through patreon over all this time.
So the first thing I want to point out is that you're demonstrating some very strong observational skills here. Your details and textures are generally quite well done, and in general your drawings are looking quite good. That said, I think it's rather clear that you're applying the constructional side of things a little more loosely than the lesson demands. This isn't particularly abnormal - I see it quite a bit from students who have plenty of previous experience. I could easily let you skip on forwards from here since you know how to draw animals, but you've come to me to learn how to construct them, so we'll take some time to focus on that.
So what I'm seeing is that you lay in your initial head/ribcage/pelvis sections of the body fairly well, but instead of focusing on establishing those masses as solid three dimensional forms, you jump ahead too early and start putting in more complex details with no underlying structure to support it all. You make up for this with your strong observational skills, but ultimately this doesn't teach you a lot about how these animals would look if, say, the viewing angle was changed slightly, or if the pose of the animal were adjusted.
The first step is to focus on 2D vs 3D, in terms of those initial lay-ins. You drew many of your initial forms more as 2D shapes. The two geese at the bottom of this page are an exception - you can see that the torsos are more reinforced and read distinctly as three dimensional forms. This is a good start. The one in the bottom right corner definitely has its issues though - the head is more guesswork than construction, and we have no real sense of how the legs connect with the torso.
Defining connections between forms in a more explicit manner is a great way to better grasp how all of the basic forms fit together. Granted, doing so means drawing more lines that don't contribute to the final pretty drawing, but always remind yourself that we are not pursuing pretty drawings as an end result. These are all exercises, and their purpose is to train you to think about these things as objects that exist in 3D space. Drawing in the manner in which the various basic forms intersect with one another will help you begin to shift your thinking in that direction.
On the lesson page, you'll see an additional section labelled "Other Demos", under which you'll find a bunch of more informal demonstrations. Make sure you go through them, like the oryx demo. This one in particular shows how I gradually build up the construction, only adding forms when what's already in the drawing is able to support it, and avoiding adding information that has nothing to hold it up.
I'd like you to do three more pages of animal drawings, with a bit of a twist - I don't want to see any detail or texture. That's your biggest strength, and I think you rely on it a bit much to cover up the lack of construction. By removing that, I believe you'll be forced to contend with the areas where you are weakest.
Wow, thank you for the detailed critique! I really appreciate what you are doing here and I'm glad to see your Patreon support picking up.
I knew that my 3D constructions were weak, but I didn't know how to fix that. You are right that I want things to look good, so I tried not to worry about that so much in these new! drawings. Happy to do more if required.
These are certainly moving in the right direction. Now once you're able to combine your strong observational skills with these kinds of constructions, you should find the solidity and believability of your drawings increase.
One minor thing to point out - in your first page, I noticed that when you drew the muzzles of the animals, you weren't really defining how the box-like muzzle form connects to the cranial sphere. Make sure you're always aware of how things connect as you did with the bears (though the bears were done a little more from memory, and could have used more strict observation).
Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
You're definitely moving in the right direction, but what I'm seeing right now shows very loose and therefore unconvincing construction, then wrapped up with more focus on detail and pure observational drawing to compensate for the lack of solid structure underneath. More than anything, it's a matter of convincing you of the solidity of the simple forms you're drawing - to gradually change your outlook on all this from drawing loose shapes on a flat page to manifesting, and then moulding and carving solid masses within three dimensional space.
So you've read through the notes about construction, and you understand already how we draw in successive passes - starting from simple to complex. I can see that you have a grasp of this already, so that makes this explanation a little simpler. Here's an additional rule I want you to follow:
At the end of each and every constructional pass, you must be convinced of the solidity of the forms you are working in. This means that you cannot be perceiving and treating them as loose ellipses and lines that can be undermined and adjusted at a whim - you need to hold in your mind the illusion that these things are firm and unyielding.
Our animal drawings begin with laying out the three major masses - cranium, ribcage, pelvis. Therefore, at the end of the first pass, you must have three solid three dimensional masses. If you don't feel convinced of this, then try reinforcing them with one or two contour lines as needed. Don't go overboard, and focus on the illusion of it. Think of it a little bit like a magic image (not even sure if people remember what these things are anymore), where you need to squint and adjust your own perspective before the image reveals itself from the otherwise abstract pattern.
Once you yourself are convinced of this, then all of a sudden it becomes that much harder to just whimsically ignore certain facts about the forms you're dealing with. If you believe in the lie you've constructed, you can no longer just will something to be changed - you need to carve into it, or build on top of it, which are inherently constructional acts.
Even if you're cutting a chunk away from something, you need to imagine that what you're cutting away is itself a form - like if you have a ball, you might imagine another box to subtract from it.
Another thing I mentioned above is that you tend to rely heavily on more purely observational detailing to make up for what your construction is missing. This, along with the visible difference in the kinds of lines you use to draw detail vs. construction, makes one thing clear - you're still focusing too much on the final result of the drawing.
Don't think about creating a pretty drawing in the end. This, like everything else you've done up to this point, is an exercise, nothing more. Just like the rotated boxes exercise, just like the tables of ellipses, they're just exercises. It just so happens that these have a face. Don't let it distract you.
Draw each and every line with full confidence - don't try to keep your construction lines faint and timid. Afterwards you can come back to add line weight to organize those lines, but your main drawing should not be concerned with keeping things pretty. Be mindful of your line economy, of course, but if you've decided that you're going to put a line down, draw it confidently.
Now, I'd like you to do another four pages of animal drawings, with one caveat - don't draw any detail whatsoever. Focus only on construction. No texture, no fur, no little feathery frills, just construction. Oh, and spend more time looking at your reference images - I see a lot of really strong demonstrations of a keen eye, but I also see a lot of areas that have gone sharply towards the cartoony where you're clearly working more from memory than from observation.
And to clarify something I realize might be confusing - I've mentioned observation in two ways here, one positive, one negative. Observation itself is important, but never go directly from "i see this" to "i draw this". You must first see, then you must understand (from a constructional standpoint) and then you may draw what you understand.
Back to observing more - as a rule, make sure you're not drawing for more than a second or two before you go back to observing.
One last thing - this demo specifically does a good job of stressing the importance of construction, and confidence of line. I don't try to hide anything. Whatever masses and forms I see in my reference, I try to grasp what they are, and then I build them up in my drawing. No concern for the prettiness of the final result.
Definitely better. Your proportions certainly do need work (as is more or less expected), but by the end of these new drawings you're demonstrating a stronger grasp of how construction should be applied, and a better sense of how these different forms connect to one another to build up more complex objects. There's plenty of room for improvement, but you're back on the right track.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6.
I see strengths, and I see weaknesses. The weaknesses are actually not uncommon - much of this critique will be a repetition of something I mentioned to another student yesterday, largely relating to treating the things we draw as being solid, unyielding forms, rather than abstract, or intangible loose sketches that can be altered with a thought and a mark.
Before we get into that though, I want to point out how loose and sketchy you tend to get. In some places, you even fall into the hole of chicken-scratching, which is something you need to force yourself to stop. It's a terrible habit, and it extends from the problem of thinking less and drawing more, which is more prevalent in this set.
Every mark you put down should be the result of conscious planning and forethought. Never reinforce a line reflexively after having drawn it. Never put down two marks where one would have sufficed. And lastly, don't let yourself get caught in the trap of overly energetic sketching. It's not that it's an unacceptable way to draw - it's got many strengths, the results tend to be packed full of gesture. The problem is, however, that it's not what I'm teaching you. I'm teaching you to plan and to construct.
Now through many of your bird drawings, I do get the sense that you do have a certain degree of awareness of the 3D forms you're working with. Your warblers especially demonstrate a nice sense of volume to them. The one in the bottom right of page 3 has a torso that feels strongly three dimensional, very much due to that contour ellipse that we can see quite prominently. It gives a nice cross-section that really sells the illusion.
A major problem however is that I also see signs across the set that when you lay in your initial masses (head, ribcage, pelvis) you see these as being loose approximations that will inevitably be ignored as you continue to work through the drawing.
Instead, I want you to hold true to this rule: at the end of every 'phase' of construction (in the sense that we gradually build up our objects in phases or passes, building up the complexity from simple to complex), I want you to fully believe and grasp the fact that what you've drawn thus far is solid and three dimensional. That means that the initial shape you put down for the cranium is not a shape at all - it's not a simple circle, it's a solid ball. If you don't feel convinced of this (and you may well not), you can reinforce these forms with contour lines, as you did with that warbler I mentioned before. Don't be frivolous with these contour lines, of course - add them only where necessary, and plan them before executing.
Next, when you add a form, to this construction, I want you to know explicitly how those two forms connect to each other. With many animals, you'll find that the ribcage and pelvis can be wrapped together to form a big continuous sausage form - but the neck that comes down from the cranium similarly connects to the torso sausage, but it does so in a distinct ellipse of intersection. They don't flow directly from one to the other, but rather there is a point of intersection where their flow becomes slightly disjointed. It is a matter of understanding where the flow breaks and where it continues that allows you to piece these constructions together in a way that is believable.
I see in your drawings a real urge to jump right into carrying over all the details you see in your reference image. For example, with your first rhinoceros drawing, its head seems to go from a big ellipse to its cranium, almost straight into all of the detail of the rest of its head. The biggest of your beagle head studies is certainly better, in how you've wrapped the muzzle against its cranium, and you've put thought towards the curvature of all those surfaces, but you would have benefitted more from considering the muzzle as a simpler, box-like form, hinged against that cranium, then expanded on its more nuanced curves later. Just figuring out and separating the different planes of that muzzle is an important step that you skipped over.
I'm also catching that your drawings are generally quite small, resulting in cramped, stiff drawings (like your deer) in a sea of blank space. You've got plenty of room to work, so you need to be taking advantage of it. Spatial problems require that sort of space, especially when your sense of 3D space is only just developing.
Lastly, your approach to texture is very scribbly and haphazard. This does relate back to your loose, sketchy approach thus far, but there's more to it than that. I see a lot of rather sloppy hatching, which is almost always a sign of "i don't want to take the time to really study what kind of textures are present here, but i don't want to leave it blank." It's something we all do at a point, but a good rule of thumb is that if you feel the urge to put hatching down on a drawing of an actual, real object (not just an anonymous box), it's probably a mistake. There's very few surfaces for which hatching actually matches the texture that is present.
I'd like you to do five more pages of animal drawings, but this time I want you to leave any and all detail or texture out of it. Focus entirely on gradually building up your construction, and being mindful of the solidity of the forms you're working with at every step.
Always remind yourself that you're not just drawing shapes on a page - every form you create is something you've summoned, it is solid, tangible and unassailable. If you want to adjust that form, you cannot simply change place a mark and move on - you need to actually cut it, or build on top of it with more forms. The very act of cutting or carving a form means being aware of the opposite form that you are subtracting from it. For example, if you have a ball, and you want to cut out a quarter of it, you'd actually have to hold in your mind a box that intersects with that ball, to represent the cut itself.
Here's a demo worth studying closely. In drawing this oryx, I take care to build up form gradually, always mindful of my intersections (a big one is how the legs connect to the torso at the shoulder), and I am never timid or shy with my line work, even if things start to get a little ugly. I can always come back afterwards to reinforce my line weights and help organize my mess - although of course, this is after all just an exercise, and the prettiness of the end result is irrelevant.
Well done! Some of your proportions are all over the place, but your constructions feel considerably more solid. Even the llama at the end (which is admittedly still a little too loose) is feeling more tangible.
My only suggestion at this point is just slow down a little bit and spend a little more time planning out your individual strokes. This should bump up the solidity of your constructions overall. This is gonna be pretty important for the next lesson, because hard surface objects are way less forgiving than organic matter.
Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Do you think there's value in practicing a contour focused approach with pencil, to work on observation skill? I'm sure you spent many years drawing with a variety of tools before you were taught this method of approach to drawing. I haven't spent any time really drawing, so maybe I could learn more from this course, if I had stronger observational skills.
2.I'm confused about the concept of "planning a stroke". I want to put dots all over the page, to help me plan out strokes, but I don't think thats really what you mean. For me, I have to see the two wrong strokes side by side, to see the right stroke between the two. Which is why I used so many extra lines previously. Do you know what I mean? Any tips in that regard?
On the first point, no. Pencil will make you more erratic and less focused, due to its forgiving nature. Working in ink forces you to think and consider your actions, which is exactly what you need to be doing to develop your observational skills. Pencil makes you draw more, ink makes you draw less. What you need to do is draw less and observe more, so obviously the latter suits the task better.
As for planning a stroke, I do mean applying the ghosting method. Dots are perfectly fine for lines that need to be straight, but in general it's a matter of ghosting through the drawing motion and developing that muscle memory before executing. If you look at your contour curves, they're sloppy and inaccurate.
Previously I really stressed the importance of drawing with confidence to achieve smooth strokes - and I still do, of course. But ghosting and planning is the other side of that same coin, because confidence alone leads to smooth strokes with no accuracy. Ghosting beforehand allows you to achieve accuracy while continuing to execute your marks with confidence.
Don't stress about what you cannot do right now - just because you cannot visualize the stroke you want to achieve now does not mean that it will forever be so. You haven't gone through a fraction of the mileage required to establish your own limitations, so for the time being, assume that you will eventually achieve it all.
A lot of people like to strategize around their shortcomings - they will consider what they know about their problems and try and come up with potential solutions for them. At face value, that's a laudable thing - until you consider the fact that students at this stage are doing so with only a little bit of understanding available to them. These strategies can only be developed when one is able to see all of the variables at play - to develop a strategy based on what you spy through a keyhole is to run blind into the night.
Now that I've crammed togehter just as many mixed metaphors as I possibly could, I'll leave you to it. For now, just focus on visualizing and planning before each mark to improve your accuracy and the effectiveness of your lines and move onto the next lesson.
Oh, and make sure you continue to do the lesson 1/2 material as warmups.
Do you do a lot of measuring of reference images, or real life subjects? Not necessarily with a ruler, but for example with your fingers, or your pen? I would think to answer that you would have to think way back to your first years drawing.
Part of me feels like I should be able to draw accurately without planning(measuring), that no one actually checks every line relative to every other line consciously, but more unconsciously. But at this point I feel like if I'm going to draw accurately I really need to be consciously measuring and checking everything with relative measurements.
Since doing that is quite challenging and takes concentrated effort, well, forget about the pencil, but maybe there would be value in focusing on just that: accurately drawing contours with pen. What do you think about that?
I never measured references much. My sense of proportion developed very slowly though. There's no reason to think that you'd somehow be able to achieve proper proportions without measuring and without the opportunity to make loads of mistakes and learn from them. You only feel that way because you watch other people do it - other people who've spent all that time practicing.
Ultimately measuring and checking is what will make your proportions improve faster. It's not that it will immediately make your drawings perfect, but it will speed things up, at least as far as proportion goes. There's other roles that observation plays (like in terms of texture and detail) which will develop separately.
At the end of the day, my lessons teach you how to construct, so while I'll point out when proportions are off, I don't focus on it that much (since in my experience, it's the sort of thing that takes time to develop an eye for). My goal is that you should be able to construct something that feels tangible and solid - even if its proportions are a bit wacky.
As for your last question - no. By doing studies of plants/insects/animals/etc. as you have done here, you're practicing a wide variety of skills together, in a way that each one plays off the next. Practicing these things in isolation should be limited to your warmups (which is exactly what lessons 1-2 do).
If all of your practice is focused on one area, then things will fall out of balance.
Your questions lead me to one of my own: are you in some kind of a rush?
Haha. No I'm not in a rush. Okay I think I will spend more time measuring. Somehow I felt like that was cheating, or, not in the right spirit of drawing, that it should be more flow-y. I hope I can improve quickly though! ...and that's your cue to say, "don't worry, you won't" eh?
In general, these are really, really well done. They're a touch loose, and a touch sketchy, but you demonstrate a very strong grasp of form and how everything exists in 3D space. Often times people with a looser, sketchier style focus entirely on replicating the 2D images they're working from, resulting in something that feels flat and poorly put together. Yours do not fall into that category, and so I regard this as more of a stylistic choice.
As far as that goes, I do still want to recommend that you slow down a little and put a little more thought before your strokes (try to avoid haphazard scribbly hatching like in the cast shadow of this drawing - it just looks bad). There's always a difference between energetic sketching and plain sloppiness. Same goes for this horse, where its coat is really messy. Fur and hair follows a particular rhythm, and generally when people approach it in this manner they tend to be avoiding trying to consider the flow of detail. Rushing is never the answer!
As far as construction goes, I have only one critique and it relates to the issue you raised. Heads/faces. What I noticed distinctly is that your constructional forms - like the cranial ball mass, the boxier muzzle, etc. tend to float together a little loosely, rather than fitting together like pieces of a puzzle.
Take a look at this squirrel. If you look at the cranial ball, and the top half of the muzzle, they're clearly made to fit together, but there's a distinct sense of space there between them. Try to keep these constructions more snug and deliberate, it will help push the solidity of your drawings much further.
I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. You know what you're doing, and you're doing it quite well, but I feel like you need to find your balance between energy and sloppiness, as there is a clear distinction between the two though it may often feel like they are one and the same.
You will definitely find that the next two lessons will be more challenging, considering your current approach. In this sense, they will either force you to change your mindset towards thinking more, and being more deliberate with your mark making, or you will find them extremely frustrating. Ultimately organic subject matter (animals, insects, plants) tend to be pretty forgiving. Geometric, hard-surface objects are really, really not.
So as you get into the next lesson, be more patient, and allow yourself the room and time to think through each and every stroke.
Well I'll try to change the way I add detail (especially the fur/hair). Regarding loose or sketchy do you mean I need to practice more on making my lines more confident?
For sure I have found the lessons have gotten more and more complex. But that is just a part of learning that I accept so I won't be deterred.
Your lines are plenty confident - what they need is more thought and planning prior to execution. You've got a lot of lines that feel wasteful, reflexive, and unplanned.
Here's my lesson 5 submission: http://imgur.com/a/uFjtY I tried to avoid drawing over my construction lines so much like you suggested (although I did end up adding fur silhouettes to a lot of them). I also tried switching to sheets of A3 printer paper instead of my sketchbook - I think that helped with confidence a bit.
Bit of a mixed result in the end - for a lot of these I felt like I got a few proportions wrong or put a couple of lines in the wrong place which spoiled the whole thing. This might be one of the best things I've ever drawn, though :D
Your first couple pages of birds are pretty well done, and this page of cats is quite impressive, especially the big one. The way you've constructed that body is bang on - you're very aware of how the different forms fit together, how the legs connect to the torso, and how the additional volume you've piled onto its back lays across the forms beneath it. You've approached the head with more guesswork than you should have, but the rest is well done.
Assuming your work is in chronological order, things tend to get somewhat worse as you push along. I'm not sure if you're losing focus, or if it's a matter of needing to reflect upon the lesson material more frequently. I can definitely imagine that when things get spread out over several days, it becomes very necessary to reread the lesson at the beginning of each session.
As you noted, proportions become a pretty significant problem through the set (it's more than just a few - you need to spend a lot more time observing your reference image, assessing how the different forms relate to one another in scale, always looking much much more than you draw), but in general your form construction gets weaker as well.
I want you to do another four pages - start by rereading the material and rewatching the intro video. Then, when you do the four pages, I want you to stick to construction only. No detail, no fur, no texture, just focus on establishing your forms and figuring out how they connect to one another.
You've made it clear that you're fully capable of doing this stuff, but somewhere along the lines you allowed yourself to lose focus and get sloppy. I'm sure you'll do better on this next attempt.
Thanks for the feedback - I went back and rewatched the lesson video, and decided to spend some more time on badgers/elephants since I'd had some particular trouble with those. Still not particularly happy with the results - it felt like there was a lot of fur on the badgers which made it hard to figure out where to put forms. With the elephants I felt like I was losing confidence in the lines, although I think I did a bit better with proportions this time. Anyway, here's some more pages: http://imgur.com/a/ueW8r and the photos I was trying to draw from for reference: http://imgur.com/a/nRrf6
You're definitely nailing it in this page. Your elephant's still got some definite weak points. You're definitely minding your forms, though the legs are very wobbly and as a result don't feel particularly solid.
Honestly though... elephants are challenging to say the least. I tried to do a demo for you, and struggled immensely. Here you go.
Anyway, I think you're doing well enough to merit lesson completion. Be sure to keep practicing this stuff, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.
You're certainly moving in the right direction, and are gradually developing a greater sense of form and volume, but I do see some areas where you can improve.
Overall, think of this process as though you have a bunch of forms that you're actively sticking together. This means requiring an awareness of how those forms fit together, and being sure not to skip the steps of determining these areas of connection. For instance, how do the goats' legs connect to their torsos?. The one on the right side does a good job of capturing how the neck connects to the torso, but this is also missing form the one on the left.
For the initial masses, your 'ribcage' mass does not generally come particularly close to actually lining up with the animal's actual ribcage. You'll find that it generally makes up about half of the torso in most animals, but you're only cramming it all the way to the front, which throws off your overall construction.
Don't ever let yourself work from memory - we do this naturally, even when working from reference, where we'll spend longer periods of time drawing without returning to our reference. For yourself to look back and refresh your memory every second or two. If you don't, your brain will quickly oversimplify what you previously saw, rendering it somewhat useless. This is important both in the areas of establishing believable proportions (observing how the different major forms relate to one another in terms of scale), and also when it comes to capturing more detail.
I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings. In these drawings, don't get into any texture or detail. Focus entirely on construction, on building up those forms and the relationships between them. I believe you're making good headway, but I think that if pushed in the right direction, you'll be able to do much better.
[deleted]
2017-03-06 22:47
Pudus are actually the world smallest deer, not goats. I hope you don't get in trouble for that if you travel to Chile q:
This is definitely more in line with what I'm after. There's certainly more room for growth and development, but that will obviously happen over time and with practice. For now however, I can clearly see a stronger grasp of construction and how all the forms fit together. In general, your forms are feeling reasonably solid too.
The biggest thing to work on at this point is observation - that is, working less from memory, studying your proportions more closely, and so on. This is pretty normal for this stage, though.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. One important thing to mention on the subject of the next lesson - it's highly recommended that you go through the 250 box and 250 cylinder challenges before tackling it.
Sorry it took so long, time has been scarce, and my inability to just do as much as I can and continue later has been ever present. And it didn't help that I decided to get into Overwatch either..
A drawing was always preceded by a warmup. A couple of the warmups ended up not having an animal drawn after it, due to taking too long searching for good references and ending up not drawing anything.
Before we get into the animal drawings, here's a couple points you should keep in mind for those warmups:
Draw through your boxes, as mentioned in the 250 box challenge. This will help push your grasp of how each box sits in 3D space.
Don't reinforce lines by reflex immediately after drawing them. Plan, prepare, execute, then stop. Every mark you put down should be preceded by forethought and use of the ghosting method. If you make a mistake, that's fine, leave it be. Getting into the habit of correcting them by reflex is not a good idea.
It's great that you're doing warmups, but don't limit them just to boxes and cylinders - you should be doing exercises from both lessons 1 and 2, having them on rotation instead of focusing on just one or two things. Otherwise you end up missing out on important things like the use of contour lines, and so on.
For your animals, overall it's clear that you're developing a sense of construction and form. There are a lot of important issues that I can see however that do undermine your attempts and have a negative impact on your results.
Your linework is very hesitant, resulting in stiffness/wobbling rather than the smoothness and confidence that is required to convey the illusion of solidity. It's clear to me that you're afraid of making mistakes, and as a result you choke upon execution in order to put more focus on accuracy. Always remember that the smooth flow of your linework is the first priority, and accuracy comes in second. You need to be drawing the majority of your lines from your shoulder, not your wrist, and need to be doing so with a confident pace after a period of preparation with the ghosting method. Don't concern yourself with drawing some lines faintly - draw everything with the same confidence, then come back later to add line weights to help sort things out.
You're not giving yourself much room to work. Your drawings tend to be very small and cramped. As construction is largely a spatial problem, not giving your brain enough room to think through how all of the forms relate to one another is a great way to end up with really stiff linework, and forms that don't feel convincing. It's common for students to respond to the overwhelming nature of drawing an actual object or animal by drawing smaller, but this inherently leads them to perform worse. Instead, the better choice is to respond with - as I've mentioned many times already - confidence.
You're working a lot from memory. That is to say, you spend too much time looking away from your reference, focusing on drawing. The moment we look away from our reference, our brains quickly process and oversimplify what we had previously seen, reducing it to cartoons and symbols. This is something that improves with practice, but only if you absolutely force yourself to return your gaze to your reference continually, spending no more than a second or two drawing at a time. This has an impact through every phase of a drawing, from laying in your early masses (to establish accurate proportions) to communicating more complex details.
I'd like you to try another six pages of animal drawings, but this time do not go into any detail. Focus entirely on constructing solid, confident forms. Make sure that at the end of each and every construction 'phase' that the forms you've laid down feel solid to you. You need to be convinced of that illusion that you're trying to sell to others. Students often feel that they'll be able to capture that solidity later on, in the next phase, but this is never true - solidity is something a drawing has from its earliest conception. Through every step, it can only lose that solidity, rather than gain it. If when you consider moving onto the next successive pass, you don't feel like your forms are solid, try using the tricks you've learned in previous lessons - like contour lines - to reinforce them.
I did want to mention that the raccoon/platypus hybrid was interesting. It definitely shows the hallmarks of not much observation (the feet for instance are flat and symbolic), there are many parts of the construction that show a developing sense of how the different forms fit together. This exercise is a great way to test that, since you're forced to put together components from different animals, and therefore must give thought to how they all connect.
I have a couple of questions that might help me as I continue.
I do try to draw from the shoulder as much as I can, but end up with shaky, uncertain lines due to it. And my first instinct is to go over the line again, until it looks less shaky in my mind. But basically, draw a line and let it be, no matter how shaky or misplaced it ends up?
When you say room to work, do you mean I shouldn't plan for having more than one drawing per page? Would it be better to turn the page sideways (like the brontosaurus) and have the page dedicated to a single drawing?
Should I still draw parts of animals, such as head or feet, in higher detail in order to study them?
Is measuring distances as pen-caps a good idea in your mind? It seems to work well for the bigger picture, such as the body masses, but less effective on feet and eyes.
Is there any trick to draw less symbolic details, because I did try my best to try to replicate what I saw.
Yes, leave your mistakes alone regardless of how bad it is. There are always more drawings you can do, the one you're on now is just a drill - it doesn't have to be perfect, or even good. The mistake has been made, it cannot at this point be unmade. That said, the use of the shoulder doesn't cause the wobbling - it's rather how you use it. Make sure you reread the notes on the ghosting method, and try to work on reducing any hesitation while drawing - even if that results in your line being off target. Your first priority is that the line be smooth and even - accuracy is below that.
Turning your page sideways would work, but in general your sketchbook is very restrictive in its size. Try getting some loose printer paper (8.5x11) and work on that.
No, as I mentioned previously, focus entirely on construction. The problem is that it's very easy, when aiming for a 'detailed' drawing to get caught up in those details and distracted by them. Students tend to spend less time and focus on their construction phase and end up trying to fix the underlying mistakes by adding more details. Focus entirely on form.
I don't really see why it would be a problem, but that depends on how exactly you're using them. The appropriate way to use a tool to measure proportion is to hold up your drawing utensil and capture some 'measurement' (usually holding your thumb against the pen, so the measurement is between the pen tip and your thumbnail), then seeing how many times that measurement fits into other components. For example, by doing this one might discover that the head fits into the torso X times.
The important thing is to constantly ask yourself questions about how things fit into the rest of the construction. We tend to quickly get symbolic when we stop regarding the forms that are present, and just start pasting details on like stickers (with out any sort of grounding). One common metaphor is that when beginners draw an eye, they just stick it on. They instead need to consider that the eye lids are built on top of an eyeball, which in turn is set into an eyesocket, which is in turn defined by the brow ridge and the cheekbone. Everything is connected, so you need to lay in the foundation of a detail in form rather than simply see the detail and draw it. Other than that, there are no tricks to this - it's a matter of continued practice, forcing yourself to continually look at your reference, and learning not to trust your memory.
As far as construction goes, I think you're doing a pretty solid job. You're fleshing out your volumes, working from simple to complex, and are careful enough in your observation to identify the different forms that are present and generally do a decent job of getting your proportions down.
I do have a slight concern that you may be limiting yourself by drawing a little small, but this is debatable. Your forms don't actually suffer quite in the same way they would if your scale was really a big problem but I think where it does start to come in as a factor is where we get into details. Since you're trying to cram a lot of information into a very small space, it tends to come out very clunky. Additionally, the limited space really has an impact on your ability to really wrap your head around the marks you want to put down.
For example, if you look at how you approach fur (and even grass in some areas), it's really not more than little scribbles. This is in part due the scale, but in general you also need to make more of an effort to try and design your strokes more intentionally. Generally we keep our contrast and visual density down by only adding key details here and there, accentuating the silhouette and whatnot, but since we're relying on very few marks to carry the weight of the responsibility of communicating all of this information, those marks need to be planned, designed and very specific. For example, look at this demo. Notice the marks around the ball, and how they're not a simple repetition of the same zigzag? Each tuft is designed at least to some degree (though it gets sloppy towards the bottom).
Now generally I would mark the lesson as complete, but I'm going to go a little off script here and ask you to do two more pages. Take up as much of the page as you can with each drawing, and focus on some furry animals. Lets see how you can do with the additional advice I've given above.
To be honest, it's not a big change from your previous set. Your application of fur is still rather scribbly and noisy, more focused on the quantity of little furry marks rather than the quality of each one. That's effectively what I was saying last time - you have to design each curving tuft of fur as though it was a little character in a crowd. As it stands, I cannot pick out any one such character amongst the furry silhouette. Notice how in this demo (also from the other demos section in the lesson) you can pick out individual tufts? I mean, sure some of them are a bit repetitive, but they're not muddled scratches. They're distinct, they stand on their own, and they each contribute something to their localized area of fur.
Try again, and this time try and really force yourself to draw less fur. I'm noticing that you've got a bit of a trend where you probably try to incorporate my advice, but whenever you feel dissatisfied with your results, you try to correct it by simply adding more. That is not a viable solution, as it makes a mess. Strategize, hold yourself back, and if things go wrong, don't just pile on more linework. If necessary, leave the drawing alone and try again.
Also, yes: bigger is generally somewhat easier to work with.
Finally finished mine, I said last time that I was gonna do the texture challenge at the same time as doing this lesson but (as you might notice from my textures) I haven't done it yet. Also some drawings are cut off, but that's me messing up and not my scanner. http://imgur.com/a/lag1t
You've definitely got a good start as far as construction goes, but there's two things I'd like to point out.
It's very clear to me that you do have a pretty decent grasp of form and space, but overall you're being a little too loose and approximate with your how much you respect the solidity of the forms you're drawing. The first point I want to make is that the marks you put down are not just arbitrary 2D shapes - you're constructing individual, solid, tangible three dimensional forms. By the end of each successive pass of the constructional method, you should end up with a construction made up of forms that actually feel as though they occupy three dimensional space, rather than just being marks on a flat page.
While drawing these marks, focus on establishing that illusion of form (make this reflect in how you draw the various ellipses, being sure to draw through them and keep them reasonably tight rather than being overly loose), and if at the end of a pass you do not feel convinced of their solidity, apply some of the tricks you learned in previous lessons, like contour lines.
Now, there are times where you'll want to make adjustments to a form that you've already included from a previous pass. In this case, don't simply act like it's not there and draw something new on top. As these forms are solid and tangible, you must work with them. Instead of outright replacing a shape, you must carve and cut the existing forms. The difference is that when cutting away at something that already exists, you must be particularly aware of the piece that is being cut away and how it sits in 3D space.
The other point I wanted to raise is that you have a strong tendency not to give much regard to how limbs connect to the torso - you've been stamping them on arbitrarily more often than not. The way you should be doing it is how you approached it in your bear drawing. Actually flesh out the connection between the torso and the shoulder mass.
Lastly, as you noted yourself, your approach to texture certainly needs work. This isn't as much of a concern for me since my focus lies on construction, but there is a suggestion I can offer. When drawing fur for example, we obviously try not to cover the entire surface and focus on the silhouette of the form. The thing is however, as we are using far fewer strokes, the importance of each individual mark goes up considerably, as it is being used to communicate far more information.
As such, you need to design those tufts of fur along the silhouette much more deliberately. What I'm seeing here is almost always a sort of repetitious pattern rather than the result of forethought and planning. You're basically saying, "okay I want some fur along this edge", and then you go into autopilot. Don't allow that to happen - repetition will make your textures feel stiff and boring, and generally won't go very far in terms of actually capturing the look you're after.
I'd like to see four more pages of animal drawings - three of the pages should be construction only, and the fourth can have texture included if you like.
All four are construction only. Also FYI, I honestly never really understood how to draw from the shoulder but I decided to look more into it today and I think I've corrected my technique a bit. It does feel a lot more awkward and clumsy as I'm not yet used to it, so if you notice a difference between the dik-dik and the seal then that's probably it.
Definitely an improvement, but here's a few things to keep in mind:
Draw through your ellipses. Uneven ellipses don't read as solid balls, drawing through them helps keep them a little more even.
In some of these drawings, you've gotten a little lax once you reach the head. For instance, the rhino's whole muzzle should start off as a boxy form coming off the cranial ball, with clearly suggested planes (top, front, side). You more or less just arbitrarily placed its mouth/nostrils/eyes without much grounding in form.
The bunny is actually generally pretty good (mostly due to the simplicity of its forms - remember that simplicity helps convey 3D form much better. The only issue I see is that there's no clear sense of how the head connects to the torso.
While there's definitely room for improvement, I think you're moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. I think you'll find the next lesson to be quite different (in terms of the shift from organic subject matter to more geometric, hard surface objects). My hope is that it will continue to instill a strong regard for the solidity of objects, and the importance of building things up as form, rather than breaking away from it and drawing strictly what you see without any foundation to support it.
Really solid work. I especially liked your work with the hens - you've definitely got a solid understand of 3D space. I do happen to see areas where I would generally ask students to be more clear and concrete with their constructional elements (defining clearly how the tube of the neck connects to the torso, for instance - something you generally skip). In your case, it's still not something I'd necessarily overlook, but it is obvious that in your mind you are able to visualize this relationship between forms. My only concern is that down the line, you don't want to end up getting sloppy, losing that grasp on your forms and ultimately having nothing more concrete to fall back on. Ultimately the long-long-long-term goal is to transfer a lot of drawn construction to more visualization (so drawings that are more than just exercises don't get cluttered with unnecessary linework), but it really doesn't hurt to continue to express those details more concretely in simple studies and exercises.
As far as texture and detail goes, you're doing great. While I generally warn students away from abuse of hatching lines, it's because it's difficult at early stages to grasp how to properly use it. It's clear that where you've applied it, you've done so with clear understanding of how it impacts the read of the various volumes. You've done so in key points where you've strategically flattened some things out for effect, or where you've been able to accentuate those volumes. The short of it is - keep it up, you're doing good.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, but I definitely recommend putting more of your base construction marks down so that every time you do these studies/exercises you're reinforcing the spatial models you hold in your head.
Constructionally, there's some good stuff here, but there are fundamental problems with your observation. Your natural response to being overwhelmed by detail/complexity is to stop looking at your reference and to work strictly from memory. Here are some examples:
There are other examples, but I feel these make my point. You cannot simply draw what you think you know. At this stage you do not have enough experience with these various subject matters to trust anything that you feel you already know about how they're put together.
It's not abnormal to have proportions that are off at this point, but a lot of these examples show that you're not thinking through your approach enough.
That aside, while there are some decent examples of construction like these dogs (ignoring its weird leg business), there are a lot of areas where you're just flat out skipping steps and being sloppy. For example, a lot of your torsos have no contour curves to help reinforce the volume (these aren't always necessary, but yours read kind of flat most of the time). At the same time, you're going crazy with contour ellipses on your flamingo and ostrich necks, to the point that most of the contour ellipses don't serve any purpose. Don't just throw them all over - think about what they're doing. Never just apply a 'trick' without considering how it helps your drawing, or whether or not it's needed. You're also not defining a lot of areas where the neck connects to the torso (which leads to a rather flat neck).
I want you to try this lesson again. Reread the material, rewatch the videos/demos, and follow along with them. I've also got a lot of extra material under the "other demos" section of the lesson that you should look at. It is very clear, looking at your work, that you missed a great deal of the lesson content.
When you redo the work, DO NOT INCLUDE ANY TEXTURE OR DETAIL WHATSOEVER. Focus entirely on construction. You are getting distracted by the details, and it's actually fairly common for beginners to feel that they can rely on that later phase to strengthen construction that is weak.
Uncomfortable
2016-09-18 04:34
Old thread got locked, submit your homework here.
ChevalierFaible
2016-09-22 23:57
I took a break after lesson 4 so I'll be the first to admit I'm a little rusty. Sorry for the bad attempt at a beaver's head :(
http://sli.mg/a/1vSxrJ
Uncomfortable
2016-09-23 22:31
You're definitely not wrong - you have gotten quite rusty. At the very least, it is extremely important that you keep up with the exercises from lesson 1 and 2, picking two or three each day (or every few days) to do as a 10-15 minute warmup. If you leave those exercises behind you, it's inevitable that your technical skills will suffer.
Another thing I noticed is that you pretty much never draw through your ellipses, which is something I stressed a lot early on, and something I insist you do for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons.
So your first few pages aren't great. You're not putting a whole lot of thought into the constructional aspects of some of these things, thinking about how these forms actually sit in 3D space and how they interact with one another. The bear on the top of that third page isn't bad, but (aside from the lack of drawing through most ellipses) the additional forms you've added along the back aren't terribly convincing. After you completed lesson 2, I did add an additional exercise to it, the organic intersections. I strongly recommend that you go back and try that one out, as it should help with this sort of thing.
In the polar bear on the next page, you jumped in way too complex, too early. Your ribcage mass doesn't actually reflect the ribcage, and you didn't build an initial sausage connecting the ribcage and pelvis. The result is that it feels much flatter and less solid, and relies WAY more heavily than it should on your observational skills (which admittedly are pretty good, considering that I could identify it as a polar bear - ... i do hope it is a polar bear).
By the time you start on those birds, things start getting better. Somewhat. You're still not thinking enough about 3D forms - you should be thinking about how the neck connects to the torso (as I discussed in the intro video), and this is something you skip all the way down until you hit your horses. These are again, a step in the right direction. Getting more three dimensional, thinking more about forms and construction, and while your proportions are off here and there, that is perfectly normal at this point.
In general, you do seem to loosely grasp the concepts by the end of the lesson, but I do want to see more of this from you. Four more pages - make sure you watch the video again, go through the demos, and think in 3D. Build your sausage-torso-form, think about how everything fits together, where things connect to one another, and DRAW THROUGH YOUR ELLIPSES!
ChevalierFaible
2016-09-24 20:43
Thank you for the critique, here are my four new pages, don't you go easy on me!
http://sli.mg/a/MSIOOJ
Uncomfortable
2016-09-25 02:39
The first two pages are pretty messy, but you seem to start getting a hang of it in the last two. There's plenty of room to improve, and your approach to fur isn't great (your raggedy lines aren't designed at all, you should go back and watch the intro video where I talk about fur and how the tufts should be carefully designed), but you're making headway.
I'll mark this lesson as complete - keep at it, but you're free to move onto the next lesson.
ChevalierFaible
2016-09-25 03:06
Thank for the fast reply, I will keep working on it.
smashedpixie
2016-09-23 19:40
Hello, Uncomfortable.
It was a challenge. Lovely week. Here is my submission: http://imgur.com/a/ONK1Y .
Also, thumbnails became better.
Uncomfortable
2016-09-23 22:34
Lovely work! I especially like the personality and energy that comes from your use of line weight - it helps to both organize your linework and to really give each drawing its own character. I did notice that you do have a tendency to be somewhat more... I don't want to say sloppy, because that's not the word. Perhaps fluid? You think more on the page, but not so much that I'd consider it to be a bad thing. If you pushed it too far in that direction, you would get sloppy, but as it stands here, it merely focuses more heavily on gesture. As it stands, I'm perfectly fine with you continuing with that approach, as it works for you right now and produces good results. Don't let yourself go further down that path though, as it can start to have negative impacts on your ability to convey solid form beyond a certain point.
I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one and keep up the excellent work.
smashedpixie
2016-09-24 18:05
Thank you. Have looked at my old attemts, thats a progress I got here! I really like what these lessons became 3d forms based. In terms of gesture and solidity I am aimed at your examples. I struggled with sloppiness and definitely don't want it to return.
dencontrol
2016-09-24 20:17
Hello Uncomfortable, a little question on the white pelican demo, there's a a line you drew approx a little bit under half of the neck all the way down, which at first I thought it was part of those adding muscles - part. Which afterward you didn't quite use the entire line to build the pelican with but instead, you drew inside of it.
I was mostly wondering the reason for that, or more of a mindset of it, as this lessons seems to be much more step by step construction based as opposed to earlier ones like insects and this lesson seems pretty hard for me, so I'm just trying to understand certain steps, to see if I could use them myself to make things a bit easier.
Was this done just to have an approx how the front body goes, without fully committing to the line, or was it a mistake that you drew it that far from the body and fixed it afterwards?
Also I could contribute a little while asking a question!
There's a word missing a letter in the lesson paragraph "These are often easier to wrap your head aroud than smooth curving surfaces, especially in situations with a lot of foreshortening and perspective."
Really minor thing and probably not worth mentioning, but thought why not, there's no harm I guess :P
Thanks in advance!
Uncomfortable
2016-09-25 02:44
This is correct - it was a mistake, and I decided that I hadn't quite committed enough to it to follow through, so I just acted like it wasn't there. Later on in the process, when I started reinforcing my line weights, I put more emphasis on the correct line, so that this erroneous one would feel less significant.
Also thanks for catching that typo! I've gone ahead and corrected it.
[deleted]
2016-09-28 04:06
I need to ask how to determine both accurate proportions and the locations of unseen joints.
I've tried to draw this bird two times and each time the proportions are terrible. It looks like in your relevant bird demo you use the two ball bases as just bases and just ignore them as "final" lines (especially the torso ball) when you further develop the overall form. Is this the secret to animal drawings?
Also, I can't help but notice that both bird demos are for large birds in profile, with clear and obvious heads, necks, and torsos. The small bird linked isn't in profile nor clearly separated into three masses. I'm not asking for a demo, but are there any tricks to drawing a twisted and condensed bird like this? I'm going to reattempt, but I think it's like trying to sharpen a diamond with copper at this time.
E: Third time was better but the proportions were still out to lunch. I didn't use the head base as the final line, yet used the torso base as the final line.
Uncomfortable
2016-09-28 22:22
Unfortunately the answer really is just "make a shit ton of mistakes". That's really how you learn to improve your sense for proportion, and to learn what joints tend to exist where. For the most part, it's mileage.
I wouldn't say I ultimately ignore my initial ball masses - I certainly don't, but they tend to get wrapped up in other forms, masses and details. Their existence is very important, however - as when sculpting, you need a base form to build off, that's what these masses represent. They don't have to be directly visible in the final construction in order to have value.
You didn't ask for it, but here's my demo of that bird. It came out kind of shitty, because you're right - it is a tough pose, and its joints are pretty muddy. One important thing to keep in mind though is that it doesn't look implausible. Look at the drawing alone, it's a bird. Bring in the reference image, "why is that asshat teaching a drawing course!"
If you want to draw a specific breed of bird, then the best way to do that is to draw a SHIT ton of images of that bird from different angles. That's what studies are. There was actually an assignment in a class I took years ago on form language where in order to learn what really makes an object identifiable (in terms of shape, form and proportion), we had to draw pages and pages of that object. In my case, I did a 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-umK2bLbFSyc/UwsU8kQTbJI/AAAAAAAAHGo/g39HHGD9UFg/s1600/sketchbook_20140210a.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vhoxmWBCZkU/UwsU9cM0hfI/AAAAAAAAHGw/uf3PfNNBRT0/s1600/sketchbook_20140210b.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6rSgnT2kcew/UwsU-7c5jyI/AAAAAAAAHG4/rbtSl-l-q1g/s1600/sketchbook_20140212abc.jpg
The drawings were rough and poorly done, but there was a lot of value in doing them. I got to learn what actually looked like that object, and what didn't. At the end, we did another page of drawings where we took those proportions and played with them - maintaining a general flavour of the original object, but seeing how far we could take it before that link was severed: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QbExno2j4X4/UwsVB_ZDz-I/AAAAAAAAHHA/9pOO883wvbE/s1600/sketchbook_20140212def.jpg
Long story short, here we're focusing on constructing things that are believable. Proportion is VERY important to that, but you will find that with practice you'll get better at falling within the realm of plausibility. Once you're able to do that, you might not be able to draw "Sparrow specimen 41A" with perfect accuracy, but you will be able to construct a sparrow in a variety of poses with some loose reference.
From there, if you want to be able to draw with that kind of precision, then you'd move onto practice more targeted observational drawing stuff, which you can build on top of the construction you've learned here. That is of course outside of the scope of this course (because I'm pretty bad at being hyper accurate with my drawings).
[deleted]
2016-09-29 04:40
Wow, I didn't expect this much of a reply! Sort of disappointed that draw more is the solution, but I guess it's always a solution.
I guess knowing where to place and when to build onto the ball masses is an experience thing too. You seemed to use the head ball as a final line but the body ball wasn't, whereas mine was opposite. I'll post mine as part of the homework submission. Thanks for creating a demo, it helps show the different solids.
I'm not personally aiming for drawing precisely or even realistically in the long-term. I'm sure that these lessons will help anyways but the end goal isn't to do photo recreations or sketches, but is rather to do comics or cartoon-style drawings. What I did in the bottom of the page (yet to be submitted) is more similar to what I'm hoping to do in the future.
As always, thank you for the detailed reply. I updated my Patreon to reflect your efforts, which are worth more than the monthly fee.
Uncomfortable
2016-09-29 13:15
I'm glad it helped. And thanks for the bump, it's much appreciated!
[deleted]
2016-10-11 05:29
Another month, another attempt. Continuous from the previous thread.
Uncomfortable
2016-10-11 22:53
Nice work! I do think you're starting to get a solid grasp of construction, the use of form, and so on. I'm very pleased to see that you went back and dug back into the previous lesson material, since I'd updated it. I hope those videos helped clarify some things that may not have been as clear previously.
One thing that really caught my eye was the vulture's wattle (the fleshy scrotaly thing that hangs off its neck). In your previous submission, you drew this yak, with a very saggy belly/fur/whatever area. In that drawing it felt very flat and didn't really seem to have any volume to it. Your vulture's wattle however very clearly has that sort of solidity, that sense of 3D form to it. It's little things like this that I look for that show a student is really starting to grasp the illusion of form, and that the student is actually fooling themselves with it.
You also seem to have made some headway with that difficult bird drawing, so congratulations on that.
Ultimately I think fur is still your mortal enemy at this point - you have a tendency to go overboard with it (like the ram). I'm glad to see that you fought the urge to go nuts on its torso (actually in that area the internal little bits of suggestion are well done), but along the silhouette you'll have to continue to work on keeping yourself back. Less is more, a thousand times over. Just a little tuft here, an little bit of fur poking out there, and you're done. The rest can be smooth lines. Of course, this is texture, and that's a whole other bucket of worms that everyone struggles with for quite a while.
What's important to me right now is that you're really grasping form and construction. I think you're ready to move onto the next lesson - admittedly that lesson will still be quite challenging to you, because moving from organic forms to purely geometric ones is still a leap. It's an important one though, that I think will ultimately reflect upon how you construct everything in the future. Just grit your teeth and push through it - I have no doubts that you will, and that you'll come out all the better for it, just as you have with the challenges posed in this lesson.
Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete.
[deleted]
2016-10-12 02:56
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate the responses. You're right that fur and other textures are not easy for me. I think it's partly from the method of drawing: having a defined, smooth solid that has fur or other material applied to it should overwrite the smoothness, but with a 1/0 pen it's not possible to sort of draw the solid lightly with a textured material on top afterwards. You can sort of see this with the moth where I was able to have light pencil lines for the solids and dark pencil lines for the materials.
It's time for my own responses so hopefully they stay below 10,000 characters.
Drawing| Image| Commentary
---|---|----
Ground Squirrel| summitpost.org| This was the first animal drawing I made. Unfortunately it wasn't a large bird, nor a large upright mammal. It was a little rodent. For some reason most of the animals I drew were rodents, even though I used statistically random entries from Wikipedia's List of Animals by Common Name. I drew three ellipses: one for the head, chest, and pelvis, and connected them with a spine. I drew too small and used way too many lines for fur. I wasn't and am still not sure how to show color. Proportions were off. I tried to fix the furry texture problem below the drawing and sort of figured out what I explained above.
Ground Squirrel| wikipedia.org | This went a lot better. I still used three ellipses, and the proportions were still off, but the fur texture was better. This squirrel didn't have color. Even though the texture was better, I knew it was continuously bad and kept trying to fix it below. Your method of individual tufts works for large animals like wolves with 10cm hairs, but isn't accurate for squirrels with 0.5cm hairs. I pointed at two balls where I used both your individual, planned method, and my continuous method. Even though both don't look good, my method felt natural and seemed better as opposed to your method which seemed forced.
Ground Squirrel | wa.gov | Still with the three ellipses, still struggling with fur. It probably didn't help that my first animal was one with such poorly defined solids. I tried to focus on feet and hands, as well as tails and fur below the drawing. The feet and hands went alright, but the tail and it's fur didn't.
Ground Squirrel | summitpost.org | Still with the three ellipses, but accurately proportioned this time. All squirrels live on rocks.
Ground Squirrel | wikipedia.org | Still with the three ellipses. Less accurate this time, with still a focus on furry textures, feet, and tails. I remember coming back the next week for another drawing, looking at another ground squirrel since I knew I hadn't drawn a single good one, and deciding to move on for a less loose animal.
Sea Lion | a-z-animals.com | So I transitioned from a ground squirrel to a water squirrel. More hazy solids. Still three ellipses. Better texturing since it wasn't fur. Somehow better proportions.
Sea Lion | wikipedia.org | Still three ellipses. I found that there was something more difficult to texture that fur, and it was water. Still it seems impossible with pen, and online resources for pure pen show waves or a choppy surface, not splashes like in the whale drawing or calm subsurface water like in this photo. I wasn't and am still not sure how to transition from dark to light surfaces, while maintaining texture on all. It would be a gradient in reality, but with a black and white pen there's no gradient.
Sea Lion | can't find first image and oregonzoo.com | For the top drawing it was a sea lion with rolls of fat. I don't know how to show that on a solid base, just like fur, since it totally modifies the solid. This sea lion happened to have both fur and fat, making it impossible for me to texture. This was the first drawing I used a circle for the head too. I couldn't figure out how to show the front view properly without adding too many lines. For the bottom drawing, it went okay. I tried my best at shading but couldn't commit to solid black. It looks rough for this reason. The proportions were off like always too, but not that bad this time.
Swift | wikia.com | This bird was rough. Almost all the images of a swift are not in profile. This one was a rare profile view, but it still didn't turn out. First I proportioned it badly, then added feathers terribly. Online tutorials say to do basic shapes with lines through them, or just basic shapes, but they both depend on a variable lineweight that I don't have available. I tried to draw a basic feather after trying feathery textures below, which worked out alright, yet the repetition of a single feather throughout a drawing like this would be impossible.
Viper | can't find image | For these vipers, I tried to first draw a swoop for the alignment, then add ellipses for the solid. This didn't work since I couldn't accurately connect the ellipses. The scale texture went poorly, but continuously I'm not sure how to complete a texture with a total of 4mm room to draw. The details of individual scales aren't possible on this scale. My note asks how to proportion and color with a 1/0 pen, which are still problems for me.
Viper | can't find images | Same problems with proportions and solids for these vipers. The bottom drawing went better since I had more room for textures and mistakes.
Kangaroo Rat | wikipedia.org | This drawing went alright, surprisingly. The proportions were sort of bad but okay. I drew the solids with a single line, instead of multiple lines or, so the furry textures looked better. The turkey legs still looked bad partially due to the 1/0 of pen, if the hidden edges were lighter it'd be obvious they don't exist above the fur. Again I tried two furry textures, one below the head with your method and one one the back with my method. I like my method better, it looks more realistic for small animals.
Kangaroo Rat | wordpress.com | The proportions on this drawing were off. The textures were bad. Like I wrote down, with pen it's just one fuck up and it's over. My favorite part of this drawing is how the fingers turned out.
Swift | audubon.org | This drawing went better. The proportions were alright and texture was too. I was feeling like nothing was going though recently, so this session was pleasant.
Zebra | wikipedia.org | Finally my random animal choosing method chose a standard, demoed animal. The textured fur on this animal went poorly, but the contour stripes went well. Having a regular, large, well-defined animal made a big difference in the difficulty of the drawing.
Zebra | can't find image | Same as previous. Tried focusing on hooves and tails below, and it was alright.
Earthworm | quotesgram.com and can't find image| For the top drawing: Similar to the snake, I made an alignment with ellipses. This time I connected the ellipses better and it went okay. From this drawing onwards, I sometimes used side space to try a detail instead of the actual drawing, making the final drawing seem better. This was the case for the ribbed part of the worm, as I tried texturing it on the side first. I also had to figure out how to add cartoon eyes on before committing. For the bottom drawing: same idea as above with the alignment and connected ellipses. I was careful to draw the knot in such a way that I didn't connect ellipses where they were hidden behind another section, and it turned out a lot better for this reason.
Quelea | can't find image | Shame I can't find the image since I want to compare my drawing to the image. I think I got the feather texture better this time, and proportions were okay, and so forth. It turned out alright. I predrew feathers and talons before finalizing them on the actual drawing.
Looks like I'll have to return after some netflix for the conclusion of this exciting table! 18/45 drawings completed. I had other things I wanted to do tonight but I still want to review all my drawings.
[deleted]
2016-10-12 05:14
Drawing| Image| Commentary
---|---|----
Tahr| wikipedia.com| This one was tough for me, what with all the fur and muddy solids. I proportioned it wrong, the image was low quality too. Of all this, I like the horn and eye detail I added on the side. Everything else with the furry texture was poor.
Tahr | stealthfilms.co.nz | This animal is 100% fur and that's really what my problem was. It's not clear where the solids end and the fur starts. I couldn't figure out the frontal view for the head either, too many solids on top of each other. Again, the horns were okay. The furry texture and entire rest of the animal was not.
Pangolin | naankuse.com | The proportions on this were okay and so was the texture of the scales. This was the first time I used the cheaty hatch that sends the hidden legs back. I guess that in color, these legs would be darker or in shadow, but in pen it seems cheaty. It worked though. The looping tail didn't work.
Pangolin | focusingonwildlife.com | This pangolin went alright excluding the tail. The texture was fine too at a larger scale, but when reduced by half or more, it starts getting too dense. Pencil made it easier. It seems to me that having a larger drawing really makes a difference as it allows you to have both more detail and thinner lineweights. As shown later it also allows more inaccuracy. In this drawing, for example, I liked the detail of the claw, but there was no way I could replicate it on the larger drawing since it would be too dense.
Hybrids | n/a | This page went alright, I think. I combined the best drawings I had and they ended up strangely okay. If I continued the texture throughout the body, it would have turned out better.
Komodo Dragon | n/a | I started this drawing but gave up due to bad proportions. I noted that the head ball called the cranium is not literally the brain but instead a round head base.
Bandicoot | animalsadda.com | I started with shit proportions and couldn't fix them. So the final drawing was bad.
Bandicoot | animalsadda.com | Redid in pencil with somewhat better but still bad proportions. Maybe it's just a rough photo, or I was having bad luck.
Kangaroo Mouse | insureandgo.com | I really fucked up the proportions on this one and gave up nearly right away.
Kangaroo Mouse | insureandgo.com | Same as the above but in pencil. Twice as good since pencil allows lighter solids. I only erased once but having lighter lines helps immensely. For pen it's like go 100% or go home. No inbetween. I'm so afraid of ruining the precious time I've spent on a pen drawing that I wobble and wave around the pen, even after ghosting methods. With pencil, the knowledge that it's not permanent gives more confidence and truth. I drew a bird at work today in five minutes with pencil and it turned out great (no photo), but if it was in pen I'd have wasted my whole lunch just getting a couple circles and connectors in that aren't accurate.
Yak | flikr.com | I know you said that the solids on this drawing aren't solid, and it's only partially true. The true, meaty solids are solid. The giant footlong fur on the stomach is not solid, since it really should all be textured off the original meaty mass. Hardly any solids are clear from the photo except the back, and everything else was a guess.
Leaves | can't find photos | I tried my best on these leaf texture details, but the demo for a leaf texture literally takes up twenty times the amount of space than one of these leaves. I can't get that amount of detail on a single 4x2 space and the texture/drawing loses because of it.
Stems | n/a | These stems are similar to the snakes and worms above. A base alignment with connected ellipses. They were okay, but the best one was with variable lineweight pens.
Ragweed | can't find photo | This drawing had the same problems as always. Too small scale, bad proportions, thick solids and bad textures.
Yellow Cornflower | wikipedia.org | Again with the lineweight problems. Solid solids but textures aren't good. I can't make solid solids without thick lines, and thick lines make textures look bad.
Yellow Cress | naturespot.org | Again with the same problems. Density, proportion, 1/0 of pen. I displayed the accuracy problems that come with small scales at the bottom of the page, and it couldn't be truer. I wrote down in a novella that I think I get the whole concept behind these drawings but it's the pen/scale that makes it tough. I promised to do three drawings: one in pen, one in pencil, and one digitally, and see how they turn out.
Black Tail Crab Spider | bugguide.net | So there's literally one terrible photo of this spider that exists. I tried my best to reproduce this photo but couldn't get the proportions right. I noticed that most of the demos don't actually reproduce the photo but create a similar drawing. Instead of trying to reproduce the photos, after this drawing I started to try and create a similar but new drawing. Also, the leg details on the side of the page look fine to me. It seems that the demos used sketchy lines and impossible lineweights, as well as fixing the solids after initial balls. When I drew this spider I send you a message of a pointless comment I was going to post but stopped.
Daddy Long Legs | naturesport.org | This drawing went better. I was sure that it would go shit since the scale of the legs were so small, but I tried my best to make parallelly leg lines that turned out alright. The texturing was simplified due to the scale and I think it worked alright.
Himmleman's Plume Moth | wikipedia.org | This moth turned out alright because it was in pencil. No other reason. I erased five times and used grey and lighter lines.
Quelea | mothership.sg | This bird was super difficult to draw, as mentioned in the original comment. The proportions are way off on this one.
Quelea | mothership.sg | Same as the above but in pencil. Still bad.
Quelea | mothership.sg | Third try of this bird and it worked out better. I abandoned the initial solids and used built-on bits for the rest. I tried to detail the beak and eyes but couldn't very well. Feather details were above me again.
Silverfish | wikipedia.com | This classifies as an animal somehow but is drawn like an insect. It turned out alright.
Vulture | wikia.com | This vulture turned out alright. I liked the texture on part of the wing. Again I abandoned the original solids and it turned out better. The feather explosion would look better if the solids were lighter.
Urial | can't find photo | The proportions on this were really far out. I still don't know how to do frontal views of the head without making a big mass of lines. The details on the eyes and horns were okay, but again I suffer from small scales.
Humpback Whale | wikipedia.org | This whale went okay. I really couldn't figure out how to do the water texture, and had the same problems as always with line thickness on solids and texture.
I had to delete some entries since I went over the 10,000 character limit again but it's under this time. Some table entries may seem strange and discontinuous for this reason.
45 pages and four months later, another lesson is passed. I'll look at the next one soon.
Maxigati
2016-10-02 11:02
Hi!
so i made 39 pages, but that is as if i have drawn three picture on each pages so not that many. This album contains the selected ones that i think better than the others: http://imgur.com/a/1Fw9W
and this has everything:
http://imgur.com/a/hVZ8m
looking forward to hear your thoughts
Uncomfortable
2016-10-02 17:37
Wow, 39 pages - that's some dedication. I've listed the ones I find to be the strongest in the set below. You'll find that there's some overlap with your own selection, but the lists are a little different.
http://i.imgur.com/DwuG8aG.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SynyWiM.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/dqy1Cgb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/9XM5XZz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/hIMmT1r.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UutW9Jz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/fVRloLb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/3cTZNn7.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/rvLCeNv.jpg
Overall your work is coming along well, but in general you need to slow down. Your approach tends to be a little erratic, and you could stand to put more thought into the execution of each individual mark, focusing on exactly the task at hand instead of thinking ahead to how that section relates to the rest of the drawing.
When constructing anything, the most important part is to focus on creating solid, 3D masses at every stage. I actually did a quick demo for another student that relates to this point, you can find it on the top right of this page. Basically, if at any given point something you've drawn still reads as a 2D shape, you need to reinforce it until you believe that it is three dimensional. Contour curves can help with this, just make sure that each one you place is well thought out, and that you're not wasting lines.
Wasting lines is definitely an issue - remember that we're not really sketching and discovering our animal as we go - we're constructing, so we need to do so with deliberate, well-planned marks. Planning a mark well doesn't necessarily mean it's going to come out perfectly, but it does increase the chances of it (so long as it's then executed with confidence), and it does mean that after you've made the mark you need to pause and consider whether or not it achieved what you were after.
Also, in terms of using hatching, yours tends to be rather sloppy in most places. I'd leave it more towards the end of a drawing when you're fully aware that you do want to, say, push the back legs further back, or whatever else you might want to do with them. At that point, make sure you keep the lines tight and parallel. I wouldn't use hatching anywhere else though - it definitely is not an effective tool for creating texture, and risks flattening out areas where you might not mean for that to be the result.
As you push through the set, I find that you spend more time drawing, and perhaps less time observing your reference carefully. This is a really important point - you don't want to fall into the trap of drawing things from memory. You should be looking back at your reference regularly, every few seconds, and you don't want to ever fall under the impression that you know what goes where.
Anyway, in general you're making good headway, and at this point you're moving in the right direction. There's plenty of room for improvement, and that will come with practice. I'm certainly going to be marking this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. Don't forget to return to this material frequently, review the lesson and get a little more practice in with animals every now and then.
In many ways, I think the drastic shift in the next two lessons will be quite challenging to you, but it will also really solidify the importance of construction. What you learn there will reflect back on these animals and I feel that your ability to build them up in a way that feels believable and solid will improve.
Ezechield
2016-10-02 20:24
Hi Uncomfortable, here are my animals.
http://imgur.com/a/E2xoR
I hope you enyoy your september break and let's have a fresh start with this new way of working. I'm thinking about going for helping your with your work by donation soon.
See you around !
Uncomfortable
2016-10-02 21:10
Not bad! In general the biggest thing your work shows me is that you have some very strong observational skills. In many cases, your use of construction is coming along very nicely. In general though, I do get the sense that you're applying construction a little lightly in certain places - that is to say, you focus less on establishing solid forms and then building upon them, and use those initial lay-ins as more of a loose suggestion, then going on to rely more upon your strong observational skills to fill in the gap. In other cases (and in many of your more successful drawings), you adhere more strictly to those lay-ins.
The problem of relying too heavily on your observational skills is that the resulting construction will tend to feel flatter.
The first thing I'd like you to work on is drawing your construction steps with greater confidence - right now it's clear that you're trying to draw them to be a little more faint, so they don't interfere with your final drawing. This inevitably also makes them feel less important and less valuable, on a subconscious level. Instead, you want to confidently establish these things as actual masses and solid forms that exist within the world. Before you move on from them, you want to absolutely ensure that you interpret these things to be three dimensional and solid - if you don't, a couple of well placed contour curves can help. This goes for every step - don't move on until you buy into that illusion that what you've drawn is solid and has mass and volume to it.
Your use of texture is looking fantastic - there's a lot of great variation here, and you've tackled most of them with a high degree of success. Keep up the good work on that front.
I'd like to see you do two more pages of animals, focusing more on what I've mentioned above. After that, I'll mark this lesson as complete, and you can move onto the next one.
Oh, one last thing - if you ever combine a spider with a camel again, I will ban you from this subreddit! YOU MONSTER.
Ezechield
2016-10-10 20:14
Hi, here are the two more pages as your demand : http://imgur.com/a/k1AyG
I tryed to focus on the volumes as you demand. It was hard because I am at some point switching to visual reproduction what is no more constructive drawing. I tryed to fight it and I think it workes the best on the tarsier and the snail.
By the way I'd like to work on the lesson 6 and 7 till the end of the year. I'm considering about giving you a ponctual donation via paypal because in december because I'm living for a one year road trip so it won't be much interesting for me to support you on patreon since I won't be able to folow classes after december. Will you correct my submission with a paypal donation ?
Thank you anyway for your precious help.
Uncomfortable
2016-10-11 14:45
Usually I'd wait until you actually pledged/donated/whatever before giving the critique but this appears to be a fairly easy one. These are looking pretty solid and reasonably well constructed. The only thing that jumps out at me is the torso of the giraffe - the final result is totally fine, but you have a big long ellipse where you've connected the pelvis and ribcage. That should be more of a sausage - an actual 3D form with weight and solidity to it, rather than just a loosely drawn shape.
As for your question, it's completely fine to do individual paypal donations (just make sure they're broken up into one each month instead of paying a lump sum). Alternatively, you could pledge now and then cancel your pledge after December 1st. Plenty of people pledge for a limited time, so that's not a problem on my end. I guess you might be worried that you might forget though. The patreon thing is generally easier for me (keeps my records more organized), but it's not a big deal either way. The paypal email address is listed on the give back page (it's also the same email that's on the bottom of every page on drawabox.com).
Fish_Face_Faeces
2016-10-04 14:28
Hi, lesson 5. The first four pages are new. I got very sloppy last time around, and I hope this kind of makes up for it - If not, just say the word.
Naturally I'm going to practice doing animals a lot more, without the pressure of presenting them here looming over me. I actually used a couple of days to "warm up", with a bunch of quick drawings of various animals, trying to apply what I learned from the lesson and focusing on construction. Then I noticed that I had hell of a problem with muzzles and the like, and did a 100 animal heads ^((Again, trying to focus on construction, boxy 3d form with planes and how it intersects with the cranium etc)). Still having a hard time with it though, as you can well see with the stag and squirrel. I guess it wouldn't hurt trying to do a couple animal constructions every day from now on, until it kinda feels easier?
As for fur, any tips for when it's very bushy? I found that overdoing with "tufts" gave a very straggly look, so I guess it's a matter of balancing that with simple, smooth outlines of the "core" of the form?
Uncomfortable
2016-10-04 20:43
Generally really nice work, especially with your newer stuff, though there's a lot of nice construction across the whole set. I especially loved your stag head construction here, so I think the added practice really helped improve your grasp of that boxiness, and how the various rudimentary forms interact with one another to create a more complex skull.
As far as the bushy business goes, if you were going for a stylized look that squirrel's tail would be just fine. The problem is more that the spikey tufts are massive, to the point that it really pushes the bounds of reality. Keeping your tufts smaller, but applying the same sort of diligently and purposefully designed shape language you used here would help considerably.
Looking down at your older anteater work, that's a good example of how not to tackle furry silhouettes - those bastards were really furry, so you had a lot of work cut out for you. I'd say that because of the amount of work, you likely got a little sloppy and fell into the trap of trying to apply the same repetitive motion across the board. The trick to keep be mindful and intentional with each tuft, and not to rely on randomness or repetitive action when drawing. Alternatively if you look at the right side of the squirrel drawing, you've got a few little bit clearly designed tufts coming off it, with smooth areas elsehwere - but it still manages to look quite bushy and furry. It's not entirely necessary to go crazy on the whole thing in many cases, and can be just as effective if not more to imply a lot of your fur. That tail's definitely a special case though.
Anyway, you're doing great - I think you're taking a little more of a negative view of your work than you should - these things do take a great deal of practice and more importantly, time, to sink in. 100-animal-head challenges are definitely good, but don't push yourself so hard that you break.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Fish_Face_Faeces
2016-10-05 05:34
Once again, thanks a bunch for taking time to give feedback and encouragement.
memedarch
2016-10-12 20:18
hey there lesson 6; https://goo.gl/photos/kh9f45a3YneHCH8C8
Uncomfortable
2016-10-12 23:41
Looking at your drawings, I get the distinct feeling that you're reaaaaally eager to jump into detail with these ones. I'm guessing you really like animals, and are very eager to really flesh them out! Unfortunately this also means that your underlying constructions could use some work. There's some drawings that are pretty good here, but I feel that it's more your observational skills that help them stand on their own. In the case of the frog though, most of it's actually pretty good because you are starting to get a more subconscious grasp of form and 3D space - but we can't skimp on those constructional steps just yet.
The most important thing is that at every given stage of construction, you ensure that every single form you've put down on the page feels solid. As it stands, right now you're drawing loose ellipses - focus on drawing balls and solid organic masses. If at any point a form doesn't feel solid, a well planned/prepared contour line can help solidify it.
I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings, but this time I want you to include absolutely no detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction. No fur, no wrinkles, no features, nothing like that. Just focus on your forms and how they all fit together. I also recommend that you give the intro video another listen, and go through the demos again. It often can take several read throughs for this material to sink in.
memedarch
2016-10-17 21:02
to be honest this was my first time actualy drawing animals, anyway here are the four pages you asked for, i hope these are good enough.
https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipOzQ3q1bPirnvvRQXGdAJjX70XERmu9Bzp4mkrg
Uncomfortable
2016-10-17 21:03
The link doesn't seem to be working. Let me know when you get it fixed up.
memedarch
2016-10-17 21:14
https://goo.gl/photos/8YLnseDitgUp3DyZ7
Uncomfortable
2016-10-17 22:00
Much better! Your constructions are feeling considerably stronger, and your forms feel much more solid. You do need to work on your proportions (the lion's a bit odd, and the wolf's proportions are more similar to those of a horse) but in general that's a pretty common thing that people improve on over time and with practice. What's important is that in regards to construction, you're moving in the right direction.
I figured it'd also help to talk a little bit about the fur. I really like the fact that you're focusing primarily with building up that detail around the silhouette. When you draw those tufts of fur however, make sure you draw each spike separately, rather than as a continuous line. When it's continuous, there's often a tendency to make it more of a wave, which makes it somewhat repetitive. Try to make the tufts more organic and a little smoother, generally less spiky and stiff. Again though - right direction, just keep that in mind as you move forwards and things will improve with practice.
Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.
Tis_Unfortunate
2016-10-17 10:53
lotsa creatures
Still battling the old chicken-scratch habit, with varying success. CONSTANT VIGILANCE O.O
Uncomfortable
2016-10-17 20:59
Really great work! I'm absolutely in love with your 'lumpy' aesthetic - it gives a fantastic sense of the volumes and forms in each construction, and it makes them feel especially tactile. I just want to reach out and touch them. In general they also happen to have a lot of character to them - those boobies look loveably daft. I guess that's really how the animals are, but you've done a great job of capturing that.
I have only a couple of things I'd like to point out. Firstly, try not to cut the legs off your animals - it tends to make things look really uncomfortable. I get that in those reference images you don't actually see the feet, but in such a situation I'd either guess based on previous knowledge of what their feet are probably like, or find other reference just to fill in the blanks. You can add grass afterwards, but drawing the leg to completion will really give you a fuller sense of how it all fits together, and will ultimately play a big role in the decisions you make that are visible. It's similar to the idea of drawing through a box to get a sense of how it sits in 3D space.
The second point.. actually it's not an issue, as it's not prominent across all your drawings. It was just about the stiffness of your bears' legs. It helps to flesh the whole leg in as more of a 2D shape to capture that sense of gesture before exploring its form. You did a good job with the other drawings.
Lastly, I wanted to just mention that I love this drawing. Great form, great line weight, great motion. So keep up the fantastic work, and consider this lesson complete!
Tis_Unfortunate
2016-10-19 12:16
If I had to choose a spirit animal, it'd be the blue footed booby. No question.
Maybe I should give those antelopes booby feet. That'd show them. ;)
Uncomfortable
2016-10-19 13:21
They deserve it, the friggin' jerks. I'm not even jokin- wait, no, I'm thinking of gazelle. Many years ago I went on a safari in Tanzania and gazelle would just hang out in the dirt paths that the cars travelled on. When you'd come close, a third of them would go left, a third would go right, and then the remainder would just kind of jerk around unsure about which direction to go.
Tis_Unfortunate
2016-10-19 14:03
Whoa... Oh hey, once I went to northern Finland and there were all these herds of reindeer in the road and they would just NOT CARE about the part where cars were trying to drive through them. I bet it's an ungulate thing. Damn ungulates.
P.S. "Ungulate" is a word I learned this lesson while wikipediaing how the fuck animal legs work. Did you know ungulates are called unguligrade because they WALK ON THEIR FINGERNAILS? I just, I don't even, OWWWW. OW.
Uncomfortable
2016-10-19 14:23
I used to have this habit of standing on the toes. I think it's because I'm very short, so I automatically did that to gain a little extra height when standing around. When people started noticing, they were.. horrified.
Tis_Unfortunate
2016-10-19 15:25
On the one hand, I'm short too, so I feel ya. On the other...OWWW.
Narwhale21
2017-02-21 10:02
These are amazing! I hope you still draw!
Tis_Unfortunate
2017-02-22 20:13
You are too kind -- but thank you! Work has been hella busy lately, so I haven't had time for much actual lesson progress...which just means I've been churning out pages upon pages of ellipses. Can't go wrong with a quick ellipse break. ;)
[deleted]
2016-10-18 19:51
[Lesson 5 submission] (http://imgur.com/a/abJna)
Feeling a bit mixed about this one. Not sure what it is but sometimes when I draw I feel like I've made some progress and I can tell I have gotten better, then other days I'll draw and feel like I've gone backwards? Or even gotten worse. =P Not sure if that's normal or not.
Had some trouble getting distracted by the details for sure and I did get a bit crazy with fur on some of these. I think I managed to squash that a bit later on but it is pretty hard.
Uncomfortable
2016-10-18 22:11
To start with, your drawings are beautiful. You have very strong observational skills, and in some cases you're exhibiting some nice construction. In general though, you're not really applying construction in the way that I espouse in my lessons. Construction is about actually building up really solid, unassailable forms. Forms that at every step of the process exist in 3D space and must be dealt with in one way or another. You can't draw a form by putting a mark down and then say that form doesn't exist - instead you must somehow interact with it either by carving a piece away (which means being conscious of the form being cut away, like when cutting a hemispherical-scoop out of a box you're aware of the spherical form itself that is being subtracted), or by adding more form to it. The issue that I'm seeing here is that you are treating your initial lay-ins much more like suggestions, rather than concrete forms.
A really good example of this is on the first page - that second vulture head, you've got the clear ellipse/circle you drew when starting out. It doesn't actually fit inside the resulting head. It's approximate, it's a suggestion.. it's like you drew the circle, then drew a vulture's head on top. The vulture's head is really nice, but unfortunately if I asked you to turn it 20 degrees, you'd probably struggle with it, since that's not what the photograph you're referencing shows you. This is why it's so important that we actually think of that head in terms of a network of simple forms, because we know how to rotate a ball, we know how to rotate a box, so we can jam a box into a ball and then rotate them together. With a few more forms, with a little bit of carving, we can get a fairly complex head while still understanding how it would look from different angles.
Your details are beautiful, of course - you really have a knack for capturing them, and implying lovely detail while controlling the amount of density of information spread out across the whole drawing. There's no real issue there.
What I'd like you to do is, I want to see three more pages of animal drawings. I don't want to see any detail on them at all - focus entirely on construction. Every step of the way, before moving on, I want you to ensure that you are fully convinced that the things drawn on the page are solid and three dimensional. The initial masses of the cranium, the ribcage, the pelvis, should be solid organic forms (or a ball in the cranium's case). Then expanding from there, you should merge the ribcage/pelvis into yet another solid sausage form, and connect the cranium to the torso with yet another solid form. If you don't feel the forms are solid, if you can't imagine turning the form in 3D space, add a couple well placed contour curves until you are confident of that. Then move to add more forms, to break down more complexity.
Remember not to sketch - your drawings aren't sketchy, of course, but when you make a decision - like the placement of a ball, or something - you have to stick with that decision. The odd line, sure, if you drew something and didn't actually go so far as to turn it into a solid-feeling form and you realized it was horribly wrong, sure. You can leave it aside, but anything beyond that you really need to deal with, especially if it's already a solid part of the world.
[deleted]
2016-11-05 17:04
Extra animals
I struggled a lot with the hippo oddly, as I thought it would have been similar to doing the rhino which I didn't find anywhere near as problematic. I did 12 pages of hippos and I still can't seem to draw one. :P
Uncomfortable
2016-11-06 17:31
Pretty well done! For the most part your construction is coming along well, though I did notice that here and there you have a tendency to change the 2D shape of some animals' torsos without actually following the constructional approach of attaching more organic forms. Here's what I mean.
I really, really liked your dogs by the way - the feel very solidly constructed, and you've captured a lot of their lively energy.
I'll go ahead and move onto the next lesson, so feel free to go onto the next lesson.
BintsInBins
2016-10-20 21:33
Hi Uncomfortable,
Here's my submission for lesson 5: http://imgur.com/a/Lzrre
I reeeally struggled on this, especially at first. Just to be upfront, I've continued the sketchy lines, and flew in the face of your notes about fur, however I feel I improved in these aspects toward the tail end.
Thanks
Uncomfortable
2016-10-22 17:32
I reaaaally can't stress the importance of... you know, not ignoring my instructions :P Since you understand that you should not be approaching fur in the way you did, and that you should be drawing deliberate, planned strokes rather than being rough and sketchy, I won't touch on those any further.
There's some good here, but overall I think you're moving too quickly. You're very interested in getting into details, and as a result you're not spending a whole lot of time on the construction of your animals, and your proportions are all over the place. A lot of what I'm seeing is the result of you drawing from memory, rather than observation. Remember that within a couple seconds of looking away from your reference image, your brain starts throwing away large chunks of what you saw, simplifying it into symbols. It's imperative that you look back at the reference image after every couple lines to refresh your memory.
One thing I did like was the heavy emphasis on form in your moose drawing. Still way too sketchy, and the leg construction is quite weak, but the head and neck feels solid. This drawing also demonstrates one major issue that is present in many of your drawings - absolutely do not cut off the feet, and when you do cut something off, never leave the form open-ended. Cap things off, otherwise they will flatten out.
So, what do I want you to do now? First, I want you to go back and reread the lesson, the demos, and rewatch the demo recordings as well. Then I want you to do four more pages of animal drawings, with absolutely no texture or detail. Focus entirely on construction, break everything down into forms and spend a lot more time actually observing and studying your reference. Don't let yourself fall into the trap of working from memory. Also try to be a touch more deliberate with your linework, and plan things out more. Some instructors will encourage you to be more exploratory and sketchy, but for these lessons it's imperative that you follow my instructions to the letter and not blend them with things you've learned elsewhere.
BintsInBins
2016-10-31 19:30
Hey mate, I appreciate the critique. Here's my extra work. http://imgur.com/a/ySHrw
I'm having trouble applying line weight, and a lot of sketchiness occurs as a result. Working on the superimposing lines exercise again in the meantime. The 1st image is pretty close up, using a dying pen, however the rest of the drawings take up the entire page.
I tried to focus on thinking in 3D, and careful observation - I think I improved there, but I frequently found myself "switching off".
Uncomfortable
2016-10-31 20:15
I'll mark this lesson as complete, but there's a few things I want to bring your attention to:
At every step of the constructional process, you need to make sure you feel confident that what you've drawn feels three dimensional before moving forwards. That means that if you've connected your ribcage and pelvis into a sausage form, but it doesn't feel entirely 3D, do something to reinforce that illusion of form. Usually this means adding a contour curve or two.
Don't draw lines and then ignore them - whatever you've created at the end of a given step is like solid stone. It cannot be ignored, it has to be carved or have more forms added to it.
You tend to draw your ribcages too small. For most animals, it's going to take up something like half of the torso, if not more. Think of it this way - the ribcage houses the lungs, the heart, and so on. These are massive organs, they're not all going to fit in the space between the front legs.
You still need to pay a lot more attention to your reference images. This will improve over time, but you've got to force yourself to constantly look back, not to work from memory, and to pay attention to the proportions of things, how individual forms and objects relate to one another. You definitely are improving, but you've a long way to go.
When it comes to limbs, you've got to think in terms of segments. For example, the legs on your horse don't have any break points establishing joints. They have bends, but these bends are not as concrete as the closing of a segment would be. Dealing with the legs in terms of shape rather than form is fine, but you still need to close off those shapes in order to ensure that you are building up from simple to complex. A whole leg of three segments is a lot more complex than each individual segment being represented by its own self-enclosed shape.
Anyway, keep at it. You're free to move onto the next lesson, and I do think that the next lesson will be quite challenging for you. If done properly, it will force you to think more in terms of solid, simple geometry being combined together to create complex objects. The subject matter we've been dealing with so far has been largely organic, which gives a lot of leeway in terms of making those kinds of decisions, letting students get by without thinking as much in terms of individual rudimentary forms. If that same approach is applied in lesson 6, things will not feel solid. Make sure you watch the intro video and follow the demos closely and carefully.
BintsInBins
2016-10-31 20:50
Thank you! I'll try my best to improve on all of the above, and to catch my mistakes/bad habits as they happen.
Vauxhaven
2016-10-21 07:53
Greetings! I come bearing animals of wildly varying quality. I apologise for there being a ton of dead space around the actual drawings. Imgur doesn't want to let me edit them for some reason :/
My lesson five: http://imgur.com/a/chzGC
Uncomfortable
2016-10-22 17:54
You're definitely hitting a lot of major important points with this work. Your form and construction is coming along well. There are a few things I want to mention though.
Firstly, you have a tendency to get really cartoony with your animals' legs. Keep in mind that there is a difference between this and basic simplification. When things get cartoony, it usually means that you're not observing and studying your reference enough - it tends to happen when you work more from memory. Your brain tosses out important bits of information very quickly, within a few seconds of looking away from your reference, resulting in only oversimplified, symbolic representations of what you saw remaining in your mind. It's imperative that you look back at your reference regularly - like after every mark or two that you put down.
Of course, learning how to properly observe and study is the development of a skill like any other - it comes with time and practice, so gradually you'll find yourself noticing much more of what's in front of you. Just make sure you give yourself the chance to see what's there.
Overall your use of form is quite good - I really liked the bird on the first page, as well as your second springbok (the first one made me burst out laughing, it looks like it was on stilts). You're definitely moving in the right direction here.
The only thing in regards to form that I wanted to stress was something I saw in your first giraffe drawing. For the additional hump on its back, near the neck, you added an additional form. You did the same thing for the second giraffe drawing, but the second one's result was considerably more solid - reason being, the first one has little bits of line jumping from one solid form to another, but where they themselves are not inherently supported. It's like stretching a bedsheet across two chairs that are a couple feet apart. You can tell that there's nothing underneath, and that trying to stand on top will end badly. These transitions aren't always avoidable - they're still there in your second giraffe drawing, but because you minimized them there, it feels considerably better built.
Anyway, there's definitely a lot of room to grow here, but you're making good progress and you're heading in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
[deleted]
2016-10-26 14:21
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2016-10-26 20:02
Overall your sense of construction is coming along great. Drawing through your forms, looking at how the different forms connect to one another, and so on. There is of course plenty of room for growth, but this comes from continued practice, and develops over time. The biggest thing as far as what develops over time is your observational skills - you definitely do need to keep pushing yourself to study and look at your reference more frequently. Try not to draw more than a mark or two without looking back at your reference. Try to think about how your reference breaks up into those different forms, and how those forms relate to one another.
One thing I see you struggling with is definitely fur - I've got a handful of demos on it, but I really recommend that you look at this one and this one. The most important thing to remember is that your tufts of fur have to be designed - you can't rely on randomness, each bit needs to be drawn with consideration. Don't draw continuous lines for multiple tufts - draw each spike separately, and consider the variation in their thickness, curvature, angle, etc. And don't go overboard with them - a few here, a few there is enough. Focus more on building up those tuft shapes along the silhouette of the form as well, as this is where they'll have the greatest impact.
Another point that I think will help a lot is to draw bigger. A lot of your drawings are actually coming out quite small relative to the overall page. When you draw smaller, you end up with less room to think through spatial problems - construction is all about spatial problems, and understanding how forms relate to one another. Limiting how much room you have can result in a lot of stiffness and clunkiness to one's drawing.
Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
[deleted]
2016-10-26 20:17
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2016-10-26 21:25
Half a page at minimum - don't be afraid to go bigger than that. Remember that you want to get a sense of how each form sits in 3D space, and you want to make sure that it feels solid. If you need to draw bigger to feel that, then draw bigger.
As for your other question, it's not really a matter of how much practice or confidence you need - give it a shot regardless. You will make mistakes, you will encounter failures, but that is how you will grow and learn. In fact, it is a very good way to force yourself to think in terms of those objects as forms - just make sure that you are considering the individual forms, and not getting caught up in the detail of the object you're trying to draw.
Uncompleted
2016-10-29 09:24
Goodness... my desk looks like someone spilled a mug of ink all over the place! And I know I'm supposed to draw on the paper.
Well, here is my attempt.
This one was really fun! Espacially the hybrid one. I still need a calling name tho.. :P
Important Note:
I've been running out of sheets in my sketchbook, so I decided I'll use the toned one instead and as I'd just gotten my first Copic Ciaos, I tried them out. Of course I still need to learn how to use them but I had some fun experimenting with values. Also added some crayon, because why not? (You tell me if there is any problem with it!). But I always made sure that was the last thing I did:
Construction
Line weight
Values
a little Color.
edit: I just saw that my flair doesn't show the 250 Boxes Challenge I reached in with my first lesson.
Uncomfortable
2016-10-30 17:10
As you progress through the set, your sense of construction and your use of line and form definitely improves considerably. By the end of it, I'd say you've gained a pretty decent grasp of how to make the different forms fit together believably. The only problem I'm seeing remain however is that you're still a little bit too focused on the details. Focusing on details during the detail phase is totally fine of course, but the problem occurs when we start thinking ahead - when we're dealing with the construction phase, and our mind wanders to the various more complex bits we'll be adding soon.
I'd say that when doing these exercises, you should avoid adding colour and values entirely. The more you pile onto your expectations of your drawing, the more your mind's going to be split as you tackle it. Keep in mind that these exercises are all about construction and form. That isn't to say you can't do other drawings where you play with colour and whatnot, but don't mix them up. Another thing to keep in mind is that we don't actually care about what the resulting drawing looks like - we don't care if we're creating a pretty final drawing. We care about the process itself, and what it teaches us. We care about actually drawing with the confidence and boldness to make the mistakes that allow us to learn and grow. Keep that in mind as you move forwards.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - make sure that for future homework that you submit to me, you focus only on what the lesson asks for.
Uncompleted
2016-10-31 17:27
Thank you for review and sorry for all that extra clutter.
Uncomfortable
2016-10-31 18:12
By the way, sorry about forgetting to add the 250 box challenge badge. It should be there now.
bwbgtr
2016-11-11 03:51
Hi, Uncomfortable -
Here's my homework for lesson 5.
Thanks!
Uncomfortable
2016-11-12 00:00
The first part of your work - specifically the birds - is quite well done. Your bears are so-so, with their legs and heads starting to get rather weak, and that trend continues through the rest.
Overall your torsos aren't bad, but when it comes to the heads and legs, I don't feel that you're really paying enough attention to your reference image. There's a lot more drawing-from-memory (therefore drawing what you think you remember seeing, not what you're actually seeing), and as a result things tend to get way too simplified.
I'm usually quite okay with legs being more gestural and starting off as 2D shapes . That said, as you can see in this demo, I believe it's very important to clearly cut those 2D shapes at each joint, rather than leaving the shapes to be complicated. Always remember - simple to complex. By complexity, I'm referring to the kinds of details that involve a lot of change of direction in your line.
As far as construction goes, most of your heads are pretty well done - it's more about making sure you study your reference more carefully, and look back at it constantly. Don't draw for more than a second or two before turning back to your source, as your brain will immediately start simplifying everything it collected, reducing it to a sort of cartoony state (rather than the sort of simplification we were talking about before).
I'd like you to look through the lesson once more - watch the intro video, read through the notes and demos (and the less formal demos under the 'other demos' tab), then try two more pages of animal drawings. I think that if you can push yourself to observe your reference more carefully, you'll be able to do considerably better. Also, make sure that you're still keeping up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly as part of a warmup regimen - picking two or three exercises each day (or as often as you can) to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto that day's work.
bwbgtr
2016-11-15 02:06
Thanks for the feedback. Here are two more drawings where I've attempted to incorporate your suggestions.
Uncomfortable
2016-11-15 02:07
Sooooo much better. So much. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one.
bwbgtr
2016-11-15 02:37
Thanks!
dencontrol
2016-11-15 16:43
Hey Uncomfortable! Noticed when I clicked on the Figure 3.7 with the camel on it, it links into the bear demo picture, probably not intended?:)
Uncomfortable
2016-11-15 18:09
Thanks for catching that! I've gone ahead and fixed it, and now no one will know my shame.
dencontrol
2016-11-15 19:12
Being dragged away muffled as the only eyewitness until he finishes this lesson
dencontrol
2016-12-02 17:05
Here's the submission for this lesson!
On the earlier lessons, I generally always end up spending weeks on drawing a single plant until I end up with the version I'm satisfied with. But after reading here and there, how the point isn't to show you pretty drawings, I've generally submitted pretty early works without too much finetuning to indicate my "real" ability better, I suppose.
Last pages has lots of cat species there, as through out the lesson I never really understood how to draw their face, so I felt like throwing in some practice while I got the chance to. (Any tutorials HIGHLY appreciated.
That aside, thanks a lot in advance! My older submissions can be easily found on the reddit post history as I don't really use this account for much, so if you want to peek at them to see if there's any improvements that would be really nice! :D
Uncomfortable
2016-12-03 19:22
You're doing a pretty good job of developing your sense of construction, and you definitely improve considerably over the set. There is one big issue that I'm noticing however that is holding you back quite a bit - you have a tendency to draw small. You don't do this all the time, but generally when you try to squeeze two animals into one page, both of them end up feeling very cramped and the construction as well as the line economy tends to suffer.
Ultimately I think this is why you're struggling with those feline heads. They're definitely moving in the right direction, but when working in such small spaces, you're limiting the amount of room you have to think through the spatial problems. Your line weight also ends up feeling much heavier, resulting in very clunky drawings with little to no nuance.
Beyond that, it's really a matter of spending more time observing your reference. You're doing a great job of identifying and breaking down the forms in the overall body, and the head is no different. It just happens to exist at a smaller scale, so you're going to have to give yourself more room for it.
Anyway, I'm confident that you'll be able to practice this on your own without going astray, as you're doing well already. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Mr_Guest_
2016-12-23 18:22
https://goo.gl/photos/XtPKbBCuNq5eVTYx7 Thank you. I tried but idk ¯_()_/¯.
Uncomfortable
2016-12-24 20:45
There's a lot of interesting work here, but one thing that becomes very clear to me is that you're distracted yourself by thinking of the end result far more than the actual underlying construction. You're too focused on detail.
Firstly, I see some drawings where you seem to do a constructional study, then do the same drawing without construction, focusing on detail. Don't do this - if you're going to add detail, add it on top of the construction, as that construction is necessary to uphold the solidity of the overall object. You're a long way off from being able to draw these things without the constructional phase, and I worry that you'll toss construction aside far too early if you continue down that path.
Now, while there are some drawings with fairly weak construction, there's a few that I really liked. For instance, the tiger on the bottom right of this page is excellent.
As far as texture goes, this bird has a lot going for it, but it's also very noisy. You should be more willing to let the areas that get dense become a single solid black area, as I explain in the 25 texture challenge. As it stands, the viewer's eye doesn't know where to focus because there's so many high-contrast areas. The blank areas on the bird's chest are nice, but you need the same sort of thing for your darks.
While in that drawing you've got a lot of careful, specific and deliberate marks used to denote feathers, in later drawings you tend to be much more sloppy, relying far more on randomness and almost scribbling to create texture. While it surely is less time consuming, you need to be deliberate with your details. Now you don't necessarily have to bury your drawing with detail, and you can get away with hinting just a little here and there, but those marks need to be carefully crafted and designed all the same.
That said, I don't want you to focus on texture right now. I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings with no detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction, observing your reference more carefully and trying to maintain proper proportion.
Zofferro
2016-12-25 22:32
For me too, the proportions of a big problem.
How better to train them?
(Google translate)
Uncomfortable
2016-12-25 22:33
Unfortunately it's largely a matter of practicing more. Our observational skills are poor when we start out, and they improve as we do more and more studies. There's no real way around that.
Zofferro
2016-12-25 22:42
Thank you
Mr_Guest_
2016-12-28 19:13
https://goo.gl/photos/XtPKbBCuNq5eVTYx7 I did a few more pages, Thank you.
Uncomfortable
2016-12-28 20:42
Much, much better. There's still room to grow (especially with those elephants' legs and feet), but that'll come with continued practice. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Zofferro
2017-01-04 14:43
Here's my submission for Lesson 5: http://imgur.com/a/3WAoT Thank you!
Uncomfortable
2017-01-06 00:35
Excellent work. In general, your drawings demonstrate a very strong underlying understanding of form and construction. In certain cases your actual linework speaks to a slightly more rushed, almost sloppier approach, but the decisions you make when drawing make it clear that in your mind's eye, you understand what you're doing.
That said, I do want to try and warn you against being quite so quick and reflexive with how you make your marks - at least while you're doing these lessons with us. Reason being, if you allow yourself to work sloppy, you may slip further down that slope, and your grasp of space may slowly erode.
Since the constructional method follows a series of successive 'passes' where you start simple and then build up and break down form, always keep this in mind: at the end of each constructional pass, what you have in your drawing should always feel solid and three dimensional.
A good example where this is not really the case is here, especially the pig on the left. The three major masses (cranium, rib cage, pelvis) feel more like flat circles/ellipses than solid three dimensional balls. The ribcage especially is quite weak. Furthermore, we don't grasp how the legs connect to the torso, and because of this they have a tendency to flatten out somewhat.
Additionally, when drawing any mark, make sure it's deliberate and planned. Looking at the lower right rabbit, we can see two sets of contour curves along its torso (specifically around where its ribcage would be), that seem to perhaps fall a little short of properly wrapping around the 3D form. This calls the solidity of the whole form into question. Another point relating to this is the fact that you're doubling up a lot of those contour curves. Stylistically it actually looks quite nice, but as far as this exercise goes, it speaks to you drawing by reflex again.
Now it's very clear that you're quite good at drawing animals, and that you have a very solid grasp of whatever methodology you may have learned beforehand. You even have a reasonably solid grasp of how to draw solid looking 3D objects - but I want to see a few very solid examples that you understand how to construct with clear, deliberate forms and linework before I mark this lesson as complete.
Give me just two more pages, and focus on following through the constructional steps that I demonstrate in demos like this oryx. See how clear I am about how things connect to one another?
You have a tendency to draw more from observation (than form-construction). Your observational skills and even your understanding of 3D space are already well developed, so just show me that you can apply the methodology covered in the lesson and I'll mark this lesson as complete.
Zofferro
2017-01-12 20:11
Three pages http://imgur.com/a/deQPI
Uncomfortable
2017-01-13 00:42
You definitely improve considerably over this set. Your dogs are especially well done - those two on the last page demonstrate a strong understanding of construction and form, and how all of them relate to one another. All the while you've managed to capture their energy and gesture quite well.
Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.
dataguard
2017-01-21 05:08
This lesson was rather tough, but very rewarding to do regardless. The results are so-so, eagerly waiting for your critique. Thank you.
http://imgur.com/a/xo0Dd
Uncomfortable
2017-01-22 01:27
While I agree with you that the results are so-so, I think I see a lot of signs that you're really grasping the concepts of the lessons (as far as construction goes), and the rest is really a matter of training your observational skills.
I see a lot of solid combinations of forms, and I'm quite pleased with your propensity towards piling on more organic forms to flesh out the bulky muscles of your subjects. On the flipside, you do have a tendency to get quite cartoony - this often happens when we get too caught up in our drawing, and stop looking at our reference as much as we really should. Always remember - you should be looking and studying way more than you're drawing. Only draw for a second or two before forcing yourself to look back at your reference. Don't work from your memory, as this is where the cartooniness emerges.
You have a particular tendency to oversimplify when dealing with heads, though you do show some improvement on this front throughout the lesson.
Another thing I'm noticing is that your linework is a little on the stiff side, so you'll want to loosen up a little and perhaps draw somewhat larger. It's difficult to gauge what size these drawings are at, but I generally find that when you draw larger, things tend to feel a little more organic and less cramped.
Anyway- I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, because you have definitely grasped what I'm trying to teach here. You have a lot of room for growth, of course, so you'll want to keep practicing, especially when it comes to the observational side of things. Keep up the good work!
dataguard
2017-01-22 02:26
Thanks! I've been fighting the stiffness, but progress is very slow on that front. Is this something that I can expect to naturally improve over time? I've been keeping up with practice every day for at least an hour, but given that I started from scratch, it's probably going to be a long road.
And yeah, my observation skills are definitely very, very insufficient. I've been trying to focus more, but it's surprisingly hard. I figured that once I've finished your lessons, I'll look for some other material focusing on the observational side of things, though that'll be far in the future.
Uncomfortable
2017-01-22 02:28
You're on the right track, over all. That stiffness will improve, so long as you're always reminding yourself to draw big, draw from the shoulder, and apply the ghosting method, executing each mark with a confident stroke.
sperezmiller
2017-01-22 16:51
Well, I didn't expect it to take me a year to finish this assignment, but it did...
Glad to see you are still doing this, thank you!
Uncomfortable
2017-01-23 23:21
Oh wow, it sure has been a while! I definitely appreciate that you've continued to support drawabox through patreon over all this time.
So the first thing I want to point out is that you're demonstrating some very strong observational skills here. Your details and textures are generally quite well done, and in general your drawings are looking quite good. That said, I think it's rather clear that you're applying the constructional side of things a little more loosely than the lesson demands. This isn't particularly abnormal - I see it quite a bit from students who have plenty of previous experience. I could easily let you skip on forwards from here since you know how to draw animals, but you've come to me to learn how to construct them, so we'll take some time to focus on that.
So what I'm seeing is that you lay in your initial head/ribcage/pelvis sections of the body fairly well, but instead of focusing on establishing those masses as solid three dimensional forms, you jump ahead too early and start putting in more complex details with no underlying structure to support it all. You make up for this with your strong observational skills, but ultimately this doesn't teach you a lot about how these animals would look if, say, the viewing angle was changed slightly, or if the pose of the animal were adjusted.
The first step is to focus on 2D vs 3D, in terms of those initial lay-ins. You drew many of your initial forms more as 2D shapes. The two geese at the bottom of this page are an exception - you can see that the torsos are more reinforced and read distinctly as three dimensional forms. This is a good start. The one in the bottom right corner definitely has its issues though - the head is more guesswork than construction, and we have no real sense of how the legs connect with the torso.
Defining connections between forms in a more explicit manner is a great way to better grasp how all of the basic forms fit together. Granted, doing so means drawing more lines that don't contribute to the final pretty drawing, but always remind yourself that we are not pursuing pretty drawings as an end result. These are all exercises, and their purpose is to train you to think about these things as objects that exist in 3D space. Drawing in the manner in which the various basic forms intersect with one another will help you begin to shift your thinking in that direction.
On the lesson page, you'll see an additional section labelled "Other Demos", under which you'll find a bunch of more informal demonstrations. Make sure you go through them, like the oryx demo. This one in particular shows how I gradually build up the construction, only adding forms when what's already in the drawing is able to support it, and avoiding adding information that has nothing to hold it up.
I'd like you to do three more pages of animal drawings, with a bit of a twist - I don't want to see any detail or texture. That's your biggest strength, and I think you rely on it a bit much to cover up the lack of construction. By removing that, I believe you'll be forced to contend with the areas where you are weakest.
sperezmiller
2017-02-15 16:22
Wow, thank you for the detailed critique! I really appreciate what you are doing here and I'm glad to see your Patreon support picking up.
I knew that my 3D constructions were weak, but I didn't know how to fix that. You are right that I want things to look good, so I tried not to worry about that so much in these new! drawings. Happy to do more if required.
Uncomfortable
2017-02-15 21:25
These are certainly moving in the right direction. Now once you're able to combine your strong observational skills with these kinds of constructions, you should find the solidity and believability of your drawings increase.
One minor thing to point out - in your first page, I noticed that when you drew the muzzles of the animals, you weren't really defining how the box-like muzzle form connects to the cranial sphere. Make sure you're always aware of how things connect as you did with the bears (though the bears were done a little more from memory, and could have used more strict observation).
Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Occultist-Narath
2017-01-28 10:40
Here is my homework submission: http://imgur.com/a/2CaLk
Uncomfortable
2017-01-29 00:11
You're definitely moving in the right direction, but what I'm seeing right now shows very loose and therefore unconvincing construction, then wrapped up with more focus on detail and pure observational drawing to compensate for the lack of solid structure underneath. More than anything, it's a matter of convincing you of the solidity of the simple forms you're drawing - to gradually change your outlook on all this from drawing loose shapes on a flat page to manifesting, and then moulding and carving solid masses within three dimensional space.
So you've read through the notes about construction, and you understand already how we draw in successive passes - starting from simple to complex. I can see that you have a grasp of this already, so that makes this explanation a little simpler. Here's an additional rule I want you to follow:
At the end of each and every constructional pass, you must be convinced of the solidity of the forms you are working in. This means that you cannot be perceiving and treating them as loose ellipses and lines that can be undermined and adjusted at a whim - you need to hold in your mind the illusion that these things are firm and unyielding.
Our animal drawings begin with laying out the three major masses - cranium, ribcage, pelvis. Therefore, at the end of the first pass, you must have three solid three dimensional masses. If you don't feel convinced of this, then try reinforcing them with one or two contour lines as needed. Don't go overboard, and focus on the illusion of it. Think of it a little bit like a magic image (not even sure if people remember what these things are anymore), where you need to squint and adjust your own perspective before the image reveals itself from the otherwise abstract pattern.
Once you yourself are convinced of this, then all of a sudden it becomes that much harder to just whimsically ignore certain facts about the forms you're dealing with. If you believe in the lie you've constructed, you can no longer just will something to be changed - you need to carve into it, or build on top of it, which are inherently constructional acts.
Even if you're cutting a chunk away from something, you need to imagine that what you're cutting away is itself a form - like if you have a ball, you might imagine another box to subtract from it.
Another thing I mentioned above is that you tend to rely heavily on more purely observational detailing to make up for what your construction is missing. This, along with the visible difference in the kinds of lines you use to draw detail vs. construction, makes one thing clear - you're still focusing too much on the final result of the drawing.
Don't think about creating a pretty drawing in the end. This, like everything else you've done up to this point, is an exercise, nothing more. Just like the rotated boxes exercise, just like the tables of ellipses, they're just exercises. It just so happens that these have a face. Don't let it distract you.
Draw each and every line with full confidence - don't try to keep your construction lines faint and timid. Afterwards you can come back to add line weight to organize those lines, but your main drawing should not be concerned with keeping things pretty. Be mindful of your line economy, of course, but if you've decided that you're going to put a line down, draw it confidently.
Now, I'd like you to do another four pages of animal drawings, with one caveat - don't draw any detail whatsoever. Focus only on construction. No texture, no fur, no little feathery frills, just construction. Oh, and spend more time looking at your reference images - I see a lot of really strong demonstrations of a keen eye, but I also see a lot of areas that have gone sharply towards the cartoony where you're clearly working more from memory than from observation.
And to clarify something I realize might be confusing - I've mentioned observation in two ways here, one positive, one negative. Observation itself is important, but never go directly from "i see this" to "i draw this". You must first see, then you must understand (from a constructional standpoint) and then you may draw what you understand.
Back to observing more - as a rule, make sure you're not drawing for more than a second or two before you go back to observing.
One last thing - this demo specifically does a good job of stressing the importance of construction, and confidence of line. I don't try to hide anything. Whatever masses and forms I see in my reference, I try to grasp what they are, and then I build them up in my drawing. No concern for the prettiness of the final result.
Occultist-Narath
2017-01-30 05:20
I hope this is better: http://imgur.com/a/5zqKj
Uncomfortable
2017-01-31 01:02
Definitely better. Your proportions certainly do need work (as is more or less expected), but by the end of these new drawings you're demonstrating a stronger grasp of how construction should be applied, and a better sense of how these different forms connect to one another to build up more complex objects. There's plenty of room for improvement, but you're back on the right track.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6.
inq314
2017-01-29 20:53
Here is my lesson 5. Do your worst. ;)
http://imgur.com/a/bWMYe
inq314
2017-01-29 21:29
This time I shared a lot more of my failures. Every other lesson I had just as many, but I didn't share them... Maybe thats good?
Uncomfortable
2017-01-30 01:30
I see strengths, and I see weaknesses. The weaknesses are actually not uncommon - much of this critique will be a repetition of something I mentioned to another student yesterday, largely relating to treating the things we draw as being solid, unyielding forms, rather than abstract, or intangible loose sketches that can be altered with a thought and a mark.
Before we get into that though, I want to point out how loose and sketchy you tend to get. In some places, you even fall into the hole of chicken-scratching, which is something you need to force yourself to stop. It's a terrible habit, and it extends from the problem of thinking less and drawing more, which is more prevalent in this set.
Every mark you put down should be the result of conscious planning and forethought. Never reinforce a line reflexively after having drawn it. Never put down two marks where one would have sufficed. And lastly, don't let yourself get caught in the trap of overly energetic sketching. It's not that it's an unacceptable way to draw - it's got many strengths, the results tend to be packed full of gesture. The problem is, however, that it's not what I'm teaching you. I'm teaching you to plan and to construct.
Now through many of your bird drawings, I do get the sense that you do have a certain degree of awareness of the 3D forms you're working with. Your warblers especially demonstrate a nice sense of volume to them. The one in the bottom right of page 3 has a torso that feels strongly three dimensional, very much due to that contour ellipse that we can see quite prominently. It gives a nice cross-section that really sells the illusion.
A major problem however is that I also see signs across the set that when you lay in your initial masses (head, ribcage, pelvis) you see these as being loose approximations that will inevitably be ignored as you continue to work through the drawing.
Instead, I want you to hold true to this rule: at the end of every 'phase' of construction (in the sense that we gradually build up our objects in phases or passes, building up the complexity from simple to complex), I want you to fully believe and grasp the fact that what you've drawn thus far is solid and three dimensional. That means that the initial shape you put down for the cranium is not a shape at all - it's not a simple circle, it's a solid ball. If you don't feel convinced of this (and you may well not), you can reinforce these forms with contour lines, as you did with that warbler I mentioned before. Don't be frivolous with these contour lines, of course - add them only where necessary, and plan them before executing.
Next, when you add a form, to this construction, I want you to know explicitly how those two forms connect to each other. With many animals, you'll find that the ribcage and pelvis can be wrapped together to form a big continuous sausage form - but the neck that comes down from the cranium similarly connects to the torso sausage, but it does so in a distinct ellipse of intersection. They don't flow directly from one to the other, but rather there is a point of intersection where their flow becomes slightly disjointed. It is a matter of understanding where the flow breaks and where it continues that allows you to piece these constructions together in a way that is believable.
I see in your drawings a real urge to jump right into carrying over all the details you see in your reference image. For example, with your first rhinoceros drawing, its head seems to go from a big ellipse to its cranium, almost straight into all of the detail of the rest of its head. The biggest of your beagle head studies is certainly better, in how you've wrapped the muzzle against its cranium, and you've put thought towards the curvature of all those surfaces, but you would have benefitted more from considering the muzzle as a simpler, box-like form, hinged against that cranium, then expanded on its more nuanced curves later. Just figuring out and separating the different planes of that muzzle is an important step that you skipped over.
I'm also catching that your drawings are generally quite small, resulting in cramped, stiff drawings (like your deer) in a sea of blank space. You've got plenty of room to work, so you need to be taking advantage of it. Spatial problems require that sort of space, especially when your sense of 3D space is only just developing.
Lastly, your approach to texture is very scribbly and haphazard. This does relate back to your loose, sketchy approach thus far, but there's more to it than that. I see a lot of rather sloppy hatching, which is almost always a sign of "i don't want to take the time to really study what kind of textures are present here, but i don't want to leave it blank." It's something we all do at a point, but a good rule of thumb is that if you feel the urge to put hatching down on a drawing of an actual, real object (not just an anonymous box), it's probably a mistake. There's very few surfaces for which hatching actually matches the texture that is present.
I'd like you to do five more pages of animal drawings, but this time I want you to leave any and all detail or texture out of it. Focus entirely on gradually building up your construction, and being mindful of the solidity of the forms you're working with at every step.
Always remind yourself that you're not just drawing shapes on a page - every form you create is something you've summoned, it is solid, tangible and unassailable. If you want to adjust that form, you cannot simply change place a mark and move on - you need to actually cut it, or build on top of it with more forms. The very act of cutting or carving a form means being aware of the opposite form that you are subtracting from it. For example, if you have a ball, and you want to cut out a quarter of it, you'd actually have to hold in your mind a box that intersects with that ball, to represent the cut itself.
Here's a demo worth studying closely. In drawing this oryx, I take care to build up form gradually, always mindful of my intersections (a big one is how the legs connect to the torso at the shoulder), and I am never timid or shy with my line work, even if things start to get a little ugly. I can always come back afterwards to reinforce my line weights and help organize my mess - although of course, this is after all just an exercise, and the prettiness of the end result is irrelevant.
inq314
2017-02-01 03:43
Okay, working on more line economy. Here are some more animals!
http://imgur.com/a/J3kD9
Uncomfortable
2017-02-01 21:29
Well done! Some of your proportions are all over the place, but your constructions feel considerably more solid. Even the llama at the end (which is admittedly still a little too loose) is feeling more tangible.
My only suggestion at this point is just slow down a little bit and spend a little more time planning out your individual strokes. This should bump up the solidity of your constructions overall. This is gonna be pretty important for the next lesson, because hard surface objects are way less forgiving than organic matter.
Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
inq314
2017-02-01 22:11
Great thanks.
I have two questions.
Do you think there's value in practicing a contour focused approach with pencil, to work on observation skill? I'm sure you spent many years drawing with a variety of tools before you were taught this method of approach to drawing. I haven't spent any time really drawing, so maybe I could learn more from this course, if I had stronger observational skills.
2.I'm confused about the concept of "planning a stroke". I want to put dots all over the page, to help me plan out strokes, but I don't think thats really what you mean. For me, I have to see the two wrong strokes side by side, to see the right stroke between the two. Which is why I used so many extra lines previously. Do you know what I mean? Any tips in that regard?
Uncomfortable
2017-02-02 02:47
On the first point, no. Pencil will make you more erratic and less focused, due to its forgiving nature. Working in ink forces you to think and consider your actions, which is exactly what you need to be doing to develop your observational skills. Pencil makes you draw more, ink makes you draw less. What you need to do is draw less and observe more, so obviously the latter suits the task better.
As for planning a stroke, I do mean applying the ghosting method. Dots are perfectly fine for lines that need to be straight, but in general it's a matter of ghosting through the drawing motion and developing that muscle memory before executing. If you look at your contour curves, they're sloppy and inaccurate.
Previously I really stressed the importance of drawing with confidence to achieve smooth strokes - and I still do, of course. But ghosting and planning is the other side of that same coin, because confidence alone leads to smooth strokes with no accuracy. Ghosting beforehand allows you to achieve accuracy while continuing to execute your marks with confidence.
Don't stress about what you cannot do right now - just because you cannot visualize the stroke you want to achieve now does not mean that it will forever be so. You haven't gone through a fraction of the mileage required to establish your own limitations, so for the time being, assume that you will eventually achieve it all.
A lot of people like to strategize around their shortcomings - they will consider what they know about their problems and try and come up with potential solutions for them. At face value, that's a laudable thing - until you consider the fact that students at this stage are doing so with only a little bit of understanding available to them. These strategies can only be developed when one is able to see all of the variables at play - to develop a strategy based on what you spy through a keyhole is to run blind into the night.
Now that I've crammed togehter just as many mixed metaphors as I possibly could, I'll leave you to it. For now, just focus on visualizing and planning before each mark to improve your accuracy and the effectiveness of your lines and move onto the next lesson.
Oh, and make sure you continue to do the lesson 1/2 material as warmups.
inq314
2017-02-02 03:23
Do you do a lot of measuring of reference images, or real life subjects? Not necessarily with a ruler, but for example with your fingers, or your pen? I would think to answer that you would have to think way back to your first years drawing.
Part of me feels like I should be able to draw accurately without planning(measuring), that no one actually checks every line relative to every other line consciously, but more unconsciously. But at this point I feel like if I'm going to draw accurately I really need to be consciously measuring and checking everything with relative measurements.
Since doing that is quite challenging and takes concentrated effort, well, forget about the pencil, but maybe there would be value in focusing on just that: accurately drawing contours with pen. What do you think about that?
Uncomfortable
2017-02-02 03:32
I never measured references much. My sense of proportion developed very slowly though. There's no reason to think that you'd somehow be able to achieve proper proportions without measuring and without the opportunity to make loads of mistakes and learn from them. You only feel that way because you watch other people do it - other people who've spent all that time practicing.
Ultimately measuring and checking is what will make your proportions improve faster. It's not that it will immediately make your drawings perfect, but it will speed things up, at least as far as proportion goes. There's other roles that observation plays (like in terms of texture and detail) which will develop separately.
At the end of the day, my lessons teach you how to construct, so while I'll point out when proportions are off, I don't focus on it that much (since in my experience, it's the sort of thing that takes time to develop an eye for). My goal is that you should be able to construct something that feels tangible and solid - even if its proportions are a bit wacky.
As for your last question - no. By doing studies of plants/insects/animals/etc. as you have done here, you're practicing a wide variety of skills together, in a way that each one plays off the next. Practicing these things in isolation should be limited to your warmups (which is exactly what lessons 1-2 do).
If all of your practice is focused on one area, then things will fall out of balance.
Your questions lead me to one of my own: are you in some kind of a rush?
inq314
2017-02-02 03:53
Haha. No I'm not in a rush. Okay I think I will spend more time measuring. Somehow I felt like that was cheating, or, not in the right spirit of drawing, that it should be more flow-y. I hope I can improve quickly though! ...and that's your cue to say, "don't worry, you won't" eh?
pruffins
2017-02-19 19:34
My Submission here.
The first 2 drawings i did were after the dogs/cats. Had a difficult time "constructing" some of the faces especially the cat and horse ones.
Anyways please fell free point out anything (and everything) I did wrong lol.
Uncomfortable
2017-02-19 20:23
In general, these are really, really well done. They're a touch loose, and a touch sketchy, but you demonstrate a very strong grasp of form and how everything exists in 3D space. Often times people with a looser, sketchier style focus entirely on replicating the 2D images they're working from, resulting in something that feels flat and poorly put together. Yours do not fall into that category, and so I regard this as more of a stylistic choice.
As far as that goes, I do still want to recommend that you slow down a little and put a little more thought before your strokes (try to avoid haphazard scribbly hatching like in the cast shadow of this drawing - it just looks bad). There's always a difference between energetic sketching and plain sloppiness. Same goes for this horse, where its coat is really messy. Fur and hair follows a particular rhythm, and generally when people approach it in this manner they tend to be avoiding trying to consider the flow of detail. Rushing is never the answer!
As far as construction goes, I have only one critique and it relates to the issue you raised. Heads/faces. What I noticed distinctly is that your constructional forms - like the cranial ball mass, the boxier muzzle, etc. tend to float together a little loosely, rather than fitting together like pieces of a puzzle.
Take a look at this squirrel. If you look at the cranial ball, and the top half of the muzzle, they're clearly made to fit together, but there's a distinct sense of space there between them. Try to keep these constructions more snug and deliberate, it will help push the solidity of your drawings much further.
I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. You know what you're doing, and you're doing it quite well, but I feel like you need to find your balance between energy and sloppiness, as there is a clear distinction between the two though it may often feel like they are one and the same.
You will definitely find that the next two lessons will be more challenging, considering your current approach. In this sense, they will either force you to change your mindset towards thinking more, and being more deliberate with your mark making, or you will find them extremely frustrating. Ultimately organic subject matter (animals, insects, plants) tend to be pretty forgiving. Geometric, hard-surface objects are really, really not.
So as you get into the next lesson, be more patient, and allow yourself the room and time to think through each and every stroke.
pruffins
2017-02-20 01:10
Well I'll try to change the way I add detail (especially the fur/hair). Regarding loose or sketchy do you mean I need to practice more on making my lines more confident?
For sure I have found the lessons have gotten more and more complex. But that is just a part of learning that I accept so I won't be deterred.
Uncomfortable
2017-02-20 01:48
Your lines are plenty confident - what they need is more thought and planning prior to execution. You've got a lot of lines that feel wasteful, reflexive, and unplanned.
pruffins
2017-02-20 01:56
Oh that make more sense now. Thanks!
Nyctef
2017-02-20 11:14
Here's my lesson 5 submission: http://imgur.com/a/uFjtY I tried to avoid drawing over my construction lines so much like you suggested (although I did end up adding fur silhouettes to a lot of them). I also tried switching to sheets of A3 printer paper instead of my sketchbook - I think that helped with confidence a bit.
Bit of a mixed result in the end - for a lot of these I felt like I got a few proportions wrong or put a couple of lines in the wrong place which spoiled the whole thing. This might be one of the best things I've ever drawn, though :D
Uncomfortable
2017-02-20 23:51
Your first couple pages of birds are pretty well done, and this page of cats is quite impressive, especially the big one. The way you've constructed that body is bang on - you're very aware of how the different forms fit together, how the legs connect to the torso, and how the additional volume you've piled onto its back lays across the forms beneath it. You've approached the head with more guesswork than you should have, but the rest is well done.
Assuming your work is in chronological order, things tend to get somewhat worse as you push along. I'm not sure if you're losing focus, or if it's a matter of needing to reflect upon the lesson material more frequently. I can definitely imagine that when things get spread out over several days, it becomes very necessary to reread the lesson at the beginning of each session.
As you noted, proportions become a pretty significant problem through the set (it's more than just a few - you need to spend a lot more time observing your reference image, assessing how the different forms relate to one another in scale, always looking much much more than you draw), but in general your form construction gets weaker as well.
I want you to do another four pages - start by rereading the material and rewatching the intro video. Then, when you do the four pages, I want you to stick to construction only. No detail, no fur, no texture, just focus on establishing your forms and figuring out how they connect to one another.
You've made it clear that you're fully capable of doing this stuff, but somewhere along the lines you allowed yourself to lose focus and get sloppy. I'm sure you'll do better on this next attempt.
Nyctef
2017-02-23 14:22
Thanks for the feedback - I went back and rewatched the lesson video, and decided to spend some more time on badgers/elephants since I'd had some particular trouble with those. Still not particularly happy with the results - it felt like there was a lot of fur on the badgers which made it hard to figure out where to put forms. With the elephants I felt like I was losing confidence in the lines, although I think I did a bit better with proportions this time. Anyway, here's some more pages: http://imgur.com/a/ueW8r and the photos I was trying to draw from for reference: http://imgur.com/a/nRrf6
Uncomfortable
2017-02-23 23:47
You're definitely nailing it in this page. Your elephant's still got some definite weak points. You're definitely minding your forms, though the legs are very wobbly and as a result don't feel particularly solid.
Honestly though... elephants are challenging to say the least. I tried to do a demo for you, and struggled immensely. Here you go.
Anyway, I think you're doing well enough to merit lesson completion. Be sure to keep practicing this stuff, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Nyctef
2017-02-24 00:26
That's an awesome demo :D Thanks again for the help
[deleted]
2017-02-23 23:35
Here we go again http://imgur.com/a/VvJcH
Uncomfortable
2017-02-24 20:40
You're certainly moving in the right direction, and are gradually developing a greater sense of form and volume, but I do see some areas where you can improve.
Overall, think of this process as though you have a bunch of forms that you're actively sticking together. This means requiring an awareness of how those forms fit together, and being sure not to skip the steps of determining these areas of connection. For instance, how do the goats' legs connect to their torsos?. The one on the right side does a good job of capturing how the neck connects to the torso, but this is also missing form the one on the left.
For the initial masses, your 'ribcage' mass does not generally come particularly close to actually lining up with the animal's actual ribcage. You'll find that it generally makes up about half of the torso in most animals, but you're only cramming it all the way to the front, which throws off your overall construction.
Don't ever let yourself work from memory - we do this naturally, even when working from reference, where we'll spend longer periods of time drawing without returning to our reference. For yourself to look back and refresh your memory every second or two. If you don't, your brain will quickly oversimplify what you previously saw, rendering it somewhat useless. This is important both in the areas of establishing believable proportions (observing how the different major forms relate to one another in terms of scale), and also when it comes to capturing more detail.
I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings. In these drawings, don't get into any texture or detail. Focus entirely on construction, on building up those forms and the relationships between them. I believe you're making good headway, but I think that if pushed in the right direction, you'll be able to do much better.
[deleted]
2017-03-06 22:47
Pudus are actually the world smallest deer, not goats. I hope you don't get in trouble for that if you travel to Chile q:
Here are the extra pages http://imgur.com/a/2cuFN
Uncomfortable
2017-03-07 23:26
This is definitely more in line with what I'm after. There's certainly more room for growth and development, but that will obviously happen over time and with practice. For now however, I can clearly see a stronger grasp of construction and how all the forms fit together. In general, your forms are feeling reasonably solid too.
The biggest thing to work on at this point is observation - that is, working less from memory, studying your proportions more closely, and so on. This is pretty normal for this stage, though.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. One important thing to mention on the subject of the next lesson - it's highly recommended that you go through the 250 box and 250 cylinder challenges before tackling it.
Aramande
2017-02-25 13:07
Sorry it took so long, time has been scarce, and my inability to just do as much as I can and continue later has been ever present. And it didn't help that I decided to get into Overwatch either..
Anyway!
Animal Drawings
15 minute warmups
A drawing was always preceded by a warmup. A couple of the warmups ended up not having an animal drawn after it, due to taking too long searching for good references and ending up not drawing anything.
Uncomfortable
2017-02-26 01:37
Before we get into the animal drawings, here's a couple points you should keep in mind for those warmups:
Draw through your boxes, as mentioned in the 250 box challenge. This will help push your grasp of how each box sits in 3D space.
Don't reinforce lines by reflex immediately after drawing them. Plan, prepare, execute, then stop. Every mark you put down should be preceded by forethought and use of the ghosting method. If you make a mistake, that's fine, leave it be. Getting into the habit of correcting them by reflex is not a good idea.
It's great that you're doing warmups, but don't limit them just to boxes and cylinders - you should be doing exercises from both lessons 1 and 2, having them on rotation instead of focusing on just one or two things. Otherwise you end up missing out on important things like the use of contour lines, and so on.
For your animals, overall it's clear that you're developing a sense of construction and form. There are a lot of important issues that I can see however that do undermine your attempts and have a negative impact on your results.
Your linework is very hesitant, resulting in stiffness/wobbling rather than the smoothness and confidence that is required to convey the illusion of solidity. It's clear to me that you're afraid of making mistakes, and as a result you choke upon execution in order to put more focus on accuracy. Always remember that the smooth flow of your linework is the first priority, and accuracy comes in second. You need to be drawing the majority of your lines from your shoulder, not your wrist, and need to be doing so with a confident pace after a period of preparation with the ghosting method. Don't concern yourself with drawing some lines faintly - draw everything with the same confidence, then come back later to add line weights to help sort things out.
You're not giving yourself much room to work. Your drawings tend to be very small and cramped. As construction is largely a spatial problem, not giving your brain enough room to think through how all of the forms relate to one another is a great way to end up with really stiff linework, and forms that don't feel convincing. It's common for students to respond to the overwhelming nature of drawing an actual object or animal by drawing smaller, but this inherently leads them to perform worse. Instead, the better choice is to respond with - as I've mentioned many times already - confidence.
You're working a lot from memory. That is to say, you spend too much time looking away from your reference, focusing on drawing. The moment we look away from our reference, our brains quickly process and oversimplify what we had previously seen, reducing it to cartoons and symbols. This is something that improves with practice, but only if you absolutely force yourself to return your gaze to your reference continually, spending no more than a second or two drawing at a time. This has an impact through every phase of a drawing, from laying in your early masses (to establish accurate proportions) to communicating more complex details.
I'd like you to try another six pages of animal drawings, but this time do not go into any detail. Focus entirely on constructing solid, confident forms. Make sure that at the end of each and every construction 'phase' that the forms you've laid down feel solid to you. You need to be convinced of that illusion that you're trying to sell to others. Students often feel that they'll be able to capture that solidity later on, in the next phase, but this is never true - solidity is something a drawing has from its earliest conception. Through every step, it can only lose that solidity, rather than gain it. If when you consider moving onto the next successive pass, you don't feel like your forms are solid, try using the tricks you've learned in previous lessons - like contour lines - to reinforce them.
I did want to mention that the raccoon/platypus hybrid was interesting. It definitely shows the hallmarks of not much observation (the feet for instance are flat and symbolic), there are many parts of the construction that show a developing sense of how the different forms fit together. This exercise is a great way to test that, since you're forced to put together components from different animals, and therefore must give thought to how they all connect.
Aramande
2017-02-26 11:51
I have a couple of questions that might help me as I continue.
I do try to draw from the shoulder as much as I can, but end up with shaky, uncertain lines due to it. And my first instinct is to go over the line again, until it looks less shaky in my mind. But basically, draw a line and let it be, no matter how shaky or misplaced it ends up?
When you say room to work, do you mean I shouldn't plan for having more than one drawing per page? Would it be better to turn the page sideways (like the brontosaurus) and have the page dedicated to a single drawing?
Should I still draw parts of animals, such as head or feet, in higher detail in order to study them?
Is measuring distances as pen-caps a good idea in your mind? It seems to work well for the bigger picture, such as the body masses, but less effective on feet and eyes.
Is there any trick to draw less symbolic details, because I did try my best to try to replicate what I saw.
Uncomfortable
2017-02-26 15:52
Yes, leave your mistakes alone regardless of how bad it is. There are always more drawings you can do, the one you're on now is just a drill - it doesn't have to be perfect, or even good. The mistake has been made, it cannot at this point be unmade. That said, the use of the shoulder doesn't cause the wobbling - it's rather how you use it. Make sure you reread the notes on the ghosting method, and try to work on reducing any hesitation while drawing - even if that results in your line being off target. Your first priority is that the line be smooth and even - accuracy is below that.
Turning your page sideways would work, but in general your sketchbook is very restrictive in its size. Try getting some loose printer paper (8.5x11) and work on that.
No, as I mentioned previously, focus entirely on construction. The problem is that it's very easy, when aiming for a 'detailed' drawing to get caught up in those details and distracted by them. Students tend to spend less time and focus on their construction phase and end up trying to fix the underlying mistakes by adding more details. Focus entirely on form.
I don't really see why it would be a problem, but that depends on how exactly you're using them. The appropriate way to use a tool to measure proportion is to hold up your drawing utensil and capture some 'measurement' (usually holding your thumb against the pen, so the measurement is between the pen tip and your thumbnail), then seeing how many times that measurement fits into other components. For example, by doing this one might discover that the head fits into the torso X times.
The important thing is to constantly ask yourself questions about how things fit into the rest of the construction. We tend to quickly get symbolic when we stop regarding the forms that are present, and just start pasting details on like stickers (with out any sort of grounding). One common metaphor is that when beginners draw an eye, they just stick it on. They instead need to consider that the eye lids are built on top of an eyeball, which in turn is set into an eyesocket, which is in turn defined by the brow ridge and the cheekbone. Everything is connected, so you need to lay in the foundation of a detail in form rather than simply see the detail and draw it. Other than that, there are no tricks to this - it's a matter of continued practice, forcing yourself to continually look at your reference, and learning not to trust your memory.
Aramande
2017-02-26 17:05
The sketchbook I'm using is A4 size though, it should be about the same as a printer paper, minus the threading.
In any case, I will do 6 more pages of (I assume random selection) animal constructions and get back to you, thank you for your time.
Uncomfortable
2017-02-26 17:07
Huh, that's surprising. Felt smaller to me. In that case, stick to one drawing per page, turn it horizontally and use the space you've got.
OlcheMaith
2017-02-28 08:34
Here's mine, finally done!
I struggle a lot with texture, but I've just started working on the texture challenge - hope it will help...
It was also hard for me to show the head in the right angle without messing it up, I'd love to hear if you have some tips for that :)
Thanks!!
https://imgur.com/gallery/1mL5A
Uncomfortable
2017-02-28 23:40
As far as construction goes, I think you're doing a pretty solid job. You're fleshing out your volumes, working from simple to complex, and are careful enough in your observation to identify the different forms that are present and generally do a decent job of getting your proportions down.
I do have a slight concern that you may be limiting yourself by drawing a little small, but this is debatable. Your forms don't actually suffer quite in the same way they would if your scale was really a big problem but I think where it does start to come in as a factor is where we get into details. Since you're trying to cram a lot of information into a very small space, it tends to come out very clunky. Additionally, the limited space really has an impact on your ability to really wrap your head around the marks you want to put down.
For example, if you look at how you approach fur (and even grass in some areas), it's really not more than little scribbles. This is in part due the scale, but in general you also need to make more of an effort to try and design your strokes more intentionally. Generally we keep our contrast and visual density down by only adding key details here and there, accentuating the silhouette and whatnot, but since we're relying on very few marks to carry the weight of the responsibility of communicating all of this information, those marks need to be planned, designed and very specific. For example, look at this demo. Notice the marks around the ball, and how they're not a simple repetition of the same zigzag? Each tuft is designed at least to some degree (though it gets sloppy towards the bottom).
Now generally I would mark the lesson as complete, but I'm going to go a little off script here and ask you to do two more pages. Take up as much of the page as you can with each drawing, and focus on some furry animals. Lets see how you can do with the additional advice I've given above.
OlcheMaith
2017-03-04 09:11
Thank you so much! I'll do the additional pages soon.
OlcheMaith
2017-03-14 13:41
Here it is - I hope it's better, though I feel I need to start working on larger pages :)
https://imgur.com/gallery/Wd2n3
Uncomfortable
2017-03-14 19:59
To be honest, it's not a big change from your previous set. Your application of fur is still rather scribbly and noisy, more focused on the quantity of little furry marks rather than the quality of each one. That's effectively what I was saying last time - you have to design each curving tuft of fur as though it was a little character in a crowd. As it stands, I cannot pick out any one such character amongst the furry silhouette. Notice how in this demo (also from the other demos section in the lesson) you can pick out individual tufts? I mean, sure some of them are a bit repetitive, but they're not muddled scratches. They're distinct, they stand on their own, and they each contribute something to their localized area of fur.
Try again, and this time try and really force yourself to draw less fur. I'm noticing that you've got a bit of a trend where you probably try to incorporate my advice, but whenever you feel dissatisfied with your results, you try to correct it by simply adding more. That is not a viable solution, as it makes a mess. Strategize, hold yourself back, and if things go wrong, don't just pile on more linework. If necessary, leave the drawing alone and try again.
Also, yes: bigger is generally somewhat easier to work with.
OlcheMaith
2017-03-15 11:09
Thanks for the advice and the patience! I'll try again with even bigger drawings and hopefully it will be better next time :)
Slabang
2017-03-01 14:19
Finally finished mine, I said last time that I was gonna do the texture challenge at the same time as doing this lesson but (as you might notice from my textures) I haven't done it yet. Also some drawings are cut off, but that's me messing up and not my scanner. http://imgur.com/a/lag1t
Uncomfortable
2017-03-01 23:16
You've definitely got a good start as far as construction goes, but there's two things I'd like to point out.
It's very clear to me that you do have a pretty decent grasp of form and space, but overall you're being a little too loose and approximate with your how much you respect the solidity of the forms you're drawing. The first point I want to make is that the marks you put down are not just arbitrary 2D shapes - you're constructing individual, solid, tangible three dimensional forms. By the end of each successive pass of the constructional method, you should end up with a construction made up of forms that actually feel as though they occupy three dimensional space, rather than just being marks on a flat page.
While drawing these marks, focus on establishing that illusion of form (make this reflect in how you draw the various ellipses, being sure to draw through them and keep them reasonably tight rather than being overly loose), and if at the end of a pass you do not feel convinced of their solidity, apply some of the tricks you learned in previous lessons, like contour lines.
Now, there are times where you'll want to make adjustments to a form that you've already included from a previous pass. In this case, don't simply act like it's not there and draw something new on top. As these forms are solid and tangible, you must work with them. Instead of outright replacing a shape, you must carve and cut the existing forms. The difference is that when cutting away at something that already exists, you must be particularly aware of the piece that is being cut away and how it sits in 3D space.
The other point I wanted to raise is that you have a strong tendency not to give much regard to how limbs connect to the torso - you've been stamping them on arbitrarily more often than not. The way you should be doing it is how you approached it in your bear drawing. Actually flesh out the connection between the torso and the shoulder mass.
Lastly, as you noted yourself, your approach to texture certainly needs work. This isn't as much of a concern for me since my focus lies on construction, but there is a suggestion I can offer. When drawing fur for example, we obviously try not to cover the entire surface and focus on the silhouette of the form. The thing is however, as we are using far fewer strokes, the importance of each individual mark goes up considerably, as it is being used to communicate far more information.
As such, you need to design those tufts of fur along the silhouette much more deliberately. What I'm seeing here is almost always a sort of repetitious pattern rather than the result of forethought and planning. You're basically saying, "okay I want some fur along this edge", and then you go into autopilot. Don't allow that to happen - repetition will make your textures feel stiff and boring, and generally won't go very far in terms of actually capturing the look you're after.
I'd like to see four more pages of animal drawings - three of the pages should be construction only, and the fourth can have texture included if you like.
Slabang
2017-03-02 00:06
Will do! Thanks for the feedback.
Slabang
2017-03-06 02:23
http://imgur.com/a/QDVq4
All four are construction only. Also FYI, I honestly never really understood how to draw from the shoulder but I decided to look more into it today and I think I've corrected my technique a bit. It does feel a lot more awkward and clumsy as I'm not yet used to it, so if you notice a difference between the dik-dik and the seal then that's probably it.
Uncomfortable
2017-03-06 20:13
Definitely an improvement, but here's a few things to keep in mind:
Draw through your ellipses. Uneven ellipses don't read as solid balls, drawing through them helps keep them a little more even.
In some of these drawings, you've gotten a little lax once you reach the head. For instance, the rhino's whole muzzle should start off as a boxy form coming off the cranial ball, with clearly suggested planes (top, front, side). You more or less just arbitrarily placed its mouth/nostrils/eyes without much grounding in form.
The bunny is actually generally pretty good (mostly due to the simplicity of its forms - remember that simplicity helps convey 3D form much better. The only issue I see is that there's no clear sense of how the head connects to the torso.
While there's definitely room for improvement, I think you're moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. I think you'll find the next lesson to be quite different (in terms of the shift from organic subject matter to more geometric, hard surface objects). My hope is that it will continue to instill a strong regard for the solidity of objects, and the importance of building things up as form, rather than breaking away from it and drawing strictly what you see without any foundation to support it.
Oh, also - thanks for increasing your pledge!
Slabang
2017-03-08 16:02
Sweet! Thanks for the feedback. I've been drawing a lot more recently so I thought the pledge was fair, hope I can increase it in the future.
[deleted]
2017-03-12 15:46
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2017-03-13 16:51
Really solid work. I especially liked your work with the hens - you've definitely got a solid understand of 3D space. I do happen to see areas where I would generally ask students to be more clear and concrete with their constructional elements (defining clearly how the tube of the neck connects to the torso, for instance - something you generally skip). In your case, it's still not something I'd necessarily overlook, but it is obvious that in your mind you are able to visualize this relationship between forms. My only concern is that down the line, you don't want to end up getting sloppy, losing that grasp on your forms and ultimately having nothing more concrete to fall back on. Ultimately the long-long-long-term goal is to transfer a lot of drawn construction to more visualization (so drawings that are more than just exercises don't get cluttered with unnecessary linework), but it really doesn't hurt to continue to express those details more concretely in simple studies and exercises.
As far as texture and detail goes, you're doing great. While I generally warn students away from abuse of hatching lines, it's because it's difficult at early stages to grasp how to properly use it. It's clear that where you've applied it, you've done so with clear understanding of how it impacts the read of the various volumes. You've done so in key points where you've strategically flattened some things out for effect, or where you've been able to accentuate those volumes. The short of it is - keep it up, you're doing good.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, but I definitely recommend putting more of your base construction marks down so that every time you do these studies/exercises you're reinforcing the spatial models you hold in your head.
adamzhang
2017-03-12 20:50
Here's my shot at lesson 5, thanks!
Uncomfortable
2017-03-13 19:17
Constructionally, there's some good stuff here, but there are fundamental problems with your observation. Your natural response to being overwhelmed by detail/complexity is to stop looking at your reference and to work strictly from memory. Here are some examples:
Proportions in general
The t-rex's arms and raised foot
The legs
The feet
There are other examples, but I feel these make my point. You cannot simply draw what you think you know. At this stage you do not have enough experience with these various subject matters to trust anything that you feel you already know about how they're put together.
It's not abnormal to have proportions that are off at this point, but a lot of these examples show that you're not thinking through your approach enough.
That aside, while there are some decent examples of construction like these dogs (ignoring its weird leg business), there are a lot of areas where you're just flat out skipping steps and being sloppy. For example, a lot of your torsos have no contour curves to help reinforce the volume (these aren't always necessary, but yours read kind of flat most of the time). At the same time, you're going crazy with contour ellipses on your flamingo and ostrich necks, to the point that most of the contour ellipses don't serve any purpose. Don't just throw them all over - think about what they're doing. Never just apply a 'trick' without considering how it helps your drawing, or whether or not it's needed. You're also not defining a lot of areas where the neck connects to the torso (which leads to a rather flat neck).
I want you to try this lesson again. Reread the material, rewatch the videos/demos, and follow along with them. I've also got a lot of extra material under the "other demos" section of the lesson that you should look at. It is very clear, looking at your work, that you missed a great deal of the lesson content.
When you redo the work, DO NOT INCLUDE ANY TEXTURE OR DETAIL WHATSOEVER. Focus entirely on construction. You are getting distracted by the details, and it's actually fairly common for beginners to feel that they can rely on that later phase to strengthen construction that is weak.