OlcheMaith

2017-03-30 09:48

This took a while, but here's my third attempt to tackle the fur:

https://imgur.com/gallery/stg8K

The previous ones (that you've already seen) are here:

https://imgur.com/gallery/1mL5A

https://imgur.com/gallery/Wd2n3

Uncomfortable

2017-03-22 21:55

There's certainly some improvement. I especially like this page of dogs. That said, you still have a long way to go, especially in terms of focusing on that observation. There's still a lot of areas where you're drawing what you think you saw, rather than what is actually there. A lot of forms are oversimplified

Something that I'd be interested in seeing you try is to replicate this demo to the best of your ability. Basically follow through the steps exactly as they're shown.

Take special care at each step - for example, one thing I notice you doing is building the torso (connecting the ribcage and pelvis masses) as a fairly rigid, straight form. If you look at step 2 of this demo, you'll see that I build this form with specific weights in particular areas, with a more exaggerated curve on the bottom side and a shallower one on top, and the pelvis sitting a little higher on the underside than the ribcage.

Additionally, give these notes a read. The nature of your contour curves/ellipses seem a bit arbitrary, so it may help give a little context as to what the orientation and degree of an ellipse describes about the circle it represents in 3D space.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-03 02:16

There's certainly a lot of good stuff here, but there's one major thing that I see holding you back. I can see a developing sense of form and volume, but you're caught up in the results of each drawing, rather than focusing primarily on the process of constructing each animal. This causes you to skip steps and to put more weight on the detailing phase than establishing the underlying structure. Lastly, I can see you tending already towards stylization in key areas. Admittedly, your sense of style is coming through strongly and shows me that you've got a knack for art in that particular vein, but now is not the time to be mixing that in.

Long story short, you're distracting yourself from the core of the lesson. Don't allow yourself to draw what you think you see in your mind's eye - draw what's there. Find the simplest forms that exist in the object you're drawing and build up from there. Don't leave things out. While in the future you'll be able to merely visualize much of the construction, right now you must draw all of your masses and forms, draw how they connect ton one another, and so on.

The second bear (page 4) is pretty good (albeit a little stylized), as you've allowed yourself to put more linework in than in later drawings. There is still room for improvement of course - for example, the additional masses along the top feel a little flimsy due to the complexity of their underside edges (the more wobbling, the more general complexity of a form's silhouette, the less solid it will feel). Also, you should be more mindful of the joints in the back legs.

Back to the point of simplicity - when drawing the ribcage, pelvis and cranial masses, draw them as ellipses. Meaning, draw through them instructed from lesson 1. I'm going to sound like a broken record at this point, but keeping them simple allows you to immediately treat them like 3D masses, rather than just flat shapes. If they're irregular, bumpy, or complex, this illusion of form becomes much more difficult to create. Notice how I block in the masses in this demo.

I'd like you to try another four pages of animal drawings, keeping this in mind. Give the lesson another read and be sure to go through the material in the 'other demos' section. I can see that you do have a grasp of this stuff, but you're simply not pushing yourself to apply it as strictly as you should be at this point. Be more patient and conscientious with how you approach this stuff, and it should go well.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-06 01:58

Definitely not bad! I think you're demonstrating a well developing sense of form. One thing that I am noticing however is that I think you may be letting the details get ahead of you, and are not entirely spending as much time as you should on the construction phase. I can see you blocking in the initial masses pretty well, and you're respecting the three-dimensional nature of most of the components you're building up, but where you seem to be skipping steps is determining just how the various forms fit together. For example, how the legs attach to the torso. This isn't always the case - the red wolf is done pretty well. I'm just not seeing that same attention to construction in many of your other drawings.

Additionally, try to ease up on that hatching. While it can definitely be used well, people at this stage will almost always use it as a sort of filler texture when they should instead be putting more time and effort into carefully observing what's present in their reference image and attempting to replicate specific surface textures. Hatching isn't really a texture (except in very specific cases), and it robs you of the opportunity to really dig into a piece. Additionally, it has the tendency to create very high-density concentrations of contrasting black and white spots which becomes very noisy and distracting.

Now while I would necessarily be against marking this lesson as complete, I'm not going to. I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings, but with no texture or detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on the construction. There's a few more demos in the 'other demos' section of the lesson that you should definitely take a look at if you haven't already. The oryx especially is a pretty in-depth example of how to be extra mindful of your forms and how they fit together.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-11 19:18

Looks like the patreon pledge went through just fine - although considering how much you help around the subreddit, I wouldn't have minded either way.

Looking at your work, I think you're getting a pretty good grasp of understanding form and how things all fit together. Most, if not all of your drawings do have a strong sense of volume.

One area where you definitely need a lot of work is in your observation. There's room for improvement largely in your ability to match the proportions from your reference images, but also you have a bit of a tendency to go a little cartoony at times. So you've got a good grasp of your forms, but perhaps aren't dedicating as much of that effort towards seeing how those forms need to be arranged, and how they need to relate to one another.

In this case, I encourage you to push yourself to draw less, and observe more. Basically a lot of what's happening here is that you end up working from memory. You're likely observing your reference a bit, then taking a good chunk of time staring at your paper and drawing. Within a few moments of looking away from the reference however, your brain goes through the motions of sorting through all that information and throwing out what it deems unimportant in order to simplify things. Then when your brain grasps for that information, it finds a gap and tries to infer what it would have been based on your understanding of the subject matter. Unfortunately when these are things we haven't studied much, our ability to fill those gaps are quite unreliable, leading to things that look off. The solution here is not to allow yourself to rely on memory at all - take only a second or two to put down a couple of marks before looking back at your reference and forcing yourself to refresh your mental model of what it is you're looking at.

Across your drawings, I think you've got a lot of interesting examples of highly dynamic motion that you've captured quite well. For example, the baby elephant on the left. I also quite like the sense of form from the crocodile, I think you've done a great job of capturing the top/side planes of its body, and accentuated them nicely with those ridges.

One other recommendation I have is to leave out all the extra environmental stuff. Here you seem to be trying to create scenes for some of these rather than core animal studies - the problem with this is that there's a lot of distraction. Remember that these are exercises first and foremost - the goal isn't to create a pretty drawing, but to improve your understanding of what it is you're drawing. To better grasp how that particular animal is configured from the standard parts that make up all things. If you get caught up in other things - even getting into texture too early - you won't learn as much from the exercise. The thing about texture and detail is that students often have a habit of, when deciding they're going to take a drawing all the way - it changes their mindset. They end up spending less effort on the construction, they end up purposely drawing more timidly, all so they can jump into the detail and push the drawing to something 'complete'. Always remember, these exercises are all about the process, not the result.

And something for the road - draw bigger. Maybe even reserve each page for a single animal, so you have enough room to think through all of the construction and proportion and whatnot.

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see three more pages. Don't get into any detail at all - if there's some element you want to add that you don't feel it necessary to think of as a 3D form, leave it out. Focus entirely on getting your proportions and the general configuration of each animal spot on. Take your time, make sure you're looking 99% of the time and drawing 1% of the time.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-12 19:12

Your use of construction definitely improves over this set. This wolf's torso is especially well done, though you should never cut the feet off of a study. Even if the feet aren't visible in your reference image, it's best to find other reference to try and fill in the blanks.

There are a few issues I am noticing though:

• With the owl at the beginning, you appear to have partially skipped the step of fleshing out the entire wing as a single simple form before diving into the feathers. I say partially because I see signs of you doing it somewhat in certain areas, but not near the top/ends of the wing. This tells me that you may be somewhat distracted and overly eager to jump into the more complex aspects of the drawing, instead of focusing on what you're doing in a given step. Don't allow detail to distract you from building your underlying construction, as it will always be the most important part of your drawing.

• Your application of texture tends to be a little sloppy. I can see that you're trying to draw fur as individual tufts, which is good, but you're still approaching each tuft with a degree of mindless randomness (in how you create those little spikes) rather than designing them purposefully, especially in the cat. The two wolves are a little better, but you do have a tendency to think more about the quantity of fur along the silhouette more than how you're approaching the design of each individual tuft.

• Don't use cross-hatching. More often than not, it is an oversimplification or filler people use when they don't want to think about what kind of texture is present in what they're looking at, but at the same time don't want to leave the space empty. Cross-hatching certainly has its place in certain kinds of drawing, but that is not what we're after here. If you're going to dive into texture, take the time to carefully observe what makes a particular surface rough, smooth, bumpy, etc. Alternatively, focusing on construction is also perfectly acceptable.

• Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel that your hybrid animal was not done using any reference at all, but rather from memory. As it stands, your visual library is not nearly developed enough (and there's no expectation for it to be) to pull out detailed information on how given parts of an animal are to be constructed. So, when doing something like this, make sure you still rely on reference for every individual part of your drawing, and using your understanding of their forms to fit them together.

I do think you've got plenty of room to grow here, but I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. Make sure you continue to practice your observational skills, while pushing yourself to approach the constructional method step by step, focusing on exactly what you're doing at a given moment and not looking beyond. It can also help to do drawings where you are purposely JUST doing construction, as the knowledge that we are going to move onto adding detail can often be distracting in and of itself.

One last point - what kind of pen are you using for this? It looks like ballpoint to me, rather than a fineliner/felt tip pen.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-04 20:47

Pretty solid work! In general you're showing a lot of great examples of construction, and are applying a lot of the principles I've covered quite well. There's only one thing that I want to emphasize to you:

At the end of each successive phase of construction, I want you to be fully convinced that the forms you've laid down are three dimensional. I noticed a bit of a tendency in a lot of areas to start off with initial masses that read more as being loosely two dimensional (so starting off with ellipses/circles rather than balls). This has the potential of trickling down and resulting in somewhat flatter overall constructions down the line.

Now it's very clear to me that you do have a solid grasp of construction and three dimensional form - you've got a lot of great, highly dynamic examples here, especially with your dogs and horses. In places such as the bison and rhino at the top here however, letting yourself start out flat can often make it much more difficult to punch through into the third dimension later on. The rule I generally follow is that the illusion of form is something you either start off with and maintain through each successive pass, or something you lose. Not something you can add later on.

Now that I've gone over that, I'm going to tell you something seemingly contradictory: 2D shapes are great at conveying the gesture and dynamism found in legs/arms. Where 3D form can communicate solidity and weight, they also come with a sort of stiffness that can get in the way of showing how a leg may be twisting while in motion, or even the liveliness when posed statically. Shape on the other hand is great at giving the impression of action and flow.

It is entirely possible to combine these two. I approach legs often by capturing the general flow of an entire limb (if the limb is relatively straight, I'll draw each side of the shape with a single line so as to maintain that continuous flow). Then before this constructional pass is over, I'll strategically place my contour curves in very select locations - usually where that limb connects to the torso, possibly at the knee, and so on, careful not to overdo it. This way we're able to maintain that original flow but reinforce solidity just enough.

So, one last thing - if part of a body is cut off in your reference image, don't just leave the drawing open-ended. Either find other reference to fill in the gaps, or at the very least, cap off that open bit so as to maintain the illusion of 3D form. So if you're drawing a tree trunk, and the base of the tree isn't visible, make sure you cap off the part that's cut off with an ellipse. Leaving it as two parallel lines that suddenly stop really flattens things out.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-05-09 21:21

I'm not really sure what happened, but between this submission and your last one, your work exploded in quality. Either you've been cheating on me with another, better teacher (i'mkidding), or you just really like animals! Either way, you're doing great.

Your constructions are confident, your textures are well balanced and organized, and you're demonstrating a solid grasp of how all of your forms fit together.

The only thing I want to mention - and honestly I'm not entirely sure if I want to say this, because whatever you're doing seems to be taking you in a good direction, but I'm going to say it anyway because otherwise I'd be offering you nothing but praise - is that when you draw your initial masses, I see a lot of signs that you are at least to start with treating them as being two dimensional ellipses rather than solid 3D forms. Basically, when you lay those forms down, before you move onto furthering your construction, try and flesh them out as being actual balls with volume that exist in 3D space rather than just simply shapes sitting on a flat page. Once you regard them as being more solid and tangible, you'll find yourself less likely to have them floating somewhat arbitrarily within your construction, and you'll find yourself abiding by them a little more strictly. This in turn should help add more solidity and structure to your construction, making everything ultimately feel more real and believable.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-05-09 21:41

I think you've got a lot of good stuff going on here, but there are definitely some key issues that I'm seeing.

• You're not drawing through your ellipses. You should be doing this for every ellipse you draw for my lessons. I noticed you were doing this in later drawings, so that's good. Just make sure you do it for all of them.

• As you move through this set, I can see you getting somewhat more relaxed with your construction, skipping steps, and generally 'winging-it' more than you should be. As a result, your end result suffers considerably. Here's an example. The dog in the upper left is fine, and pretty solid, though we can see how its legs aren't clearly defined as 3D forms. Now I'm all for using the gestural nature of 2D shape to capture the flow of the legs, so long as we are mindful enough to reinforce their three-dimensionality at the joints and where they connect to other forms (like the torso) using contour curves and contour ellipses. I can see an ellipse at the hip joint, but it's not actually connected to the thigh itself, which weakens that illusion of solidity. Moreover, leaving those shapes open ended as you did really flattens them out (you do this with a lot of your other animals, like your deer). Then there's the drawing below it, where that sloppiness has gone much further, leading to the legs altogether falling apart.

• Your birds are quite lovely. This is not an issue, I just felt like pointing that out.

• That elephant at the end was a great experimentation in the use of solid black shadow shapes to make your construction pop. I do feel pushing the line weights elsewhere in the drawing would have helped though.

• When it comes to fur textures, while you're moving in the right direction by focusing your efforts along the silhouette of the forms, you're definitely going quantity-over-quality, with a lot of your tufts being quite poorly crafted. Try to design each tuft carefully, as a few well placed details of this sort can really pull the weight of the entire drawing, while a lot of really rough ones will just make it feel cluttered and noisy. Additionally, there's lots more information on texture in the 25 texture challenge.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I do want to recommend that when you practice for yourself, try to do drawings with no texture or detail whatsoever. This will force you to pay all of your attention to the construction phase, and will help you keep from getting distracted. When we know we have the texturing to look forward to, we tend to think only about that, resulting in sloppier work in earlier stages.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-13 19:10

It's true that you're visibly struggling with texture, but what I do see is a growing grasp of construction that is being impeded somewhat by a split focus. That is, split between construction and detail. This is actually very common, and the solution for now is to leave texture and detail out.

Basically, due to the fact that you've been fighting pretty hard with texture, when you approach a drawing, that is what is on your mind through the whole drawing process. So when you should be focusing on observing the general proportions and basic structure of a particular piece of reference, your mind is at least partially distracted.

I do have a few tips that I want to share with you:

• Construction is made up of several successive passes, starting off simple and gradually piling on the complexity. As a rule, before moving onto the next pass and adding more forms, or breaking your forms down further, make sure that what you've constructed thus far maintains the illusion of being three dimensional. Looking at your drawings, you start off with three ellipses - one each for the head, ribcage and pelvis. Ellipses are two dimensional, and so it's easy to regard them as not being particularly solid. They're mutable, and can be ignored easily in favour of some other lines (something I'll get into in a bit). Before you move onto the next phase, make sure you take your ellipses/circles and turn them into proper balls. Rather, make sure that you do whatever is necessary for you to be able to perceive them as three dimensional forms. Here are some options. A rule I like to impress upon people in regards to the illusion of form is that it is something that a drawing starts with, and that while moving from constructional phase to constructional phase, it can only be maintained or lost. Not added or gained. Now this isn't entirely true, but thinking in this way will help you avoid pitfalls that ultimately make your construction feel weak or flat.

• Once you're working with proper 3D forms, you must respect their solidity. Take a look at this bison, specifically its head. We can clearly see the ellipse you started out with. In your next constructional phase, you more or less ignored its solidity and used it as a loose approximation of the space the head occupied, rather than the core element of the construction around which the rest of the forms were arranged and built up. As a rule, never ignore a form. We aren't drawing something arbitrary or abstract - we are effectively placing forms in a three dimensional space, and once they're there, they cannot be forgotten. They can only be built on top of, or carved into. The thing about carving is that it is a three dimensional act - we do not cut away two dimensional slices - instead, we need to think about the actual three dimensional form that is being carved away, in order to maintain the solidity and three dimensionality of what remains.

• The addition of any piece of information, form or otherwise, must be supported by what is present from the previous constructional phase. You cannot jump from ellipse to full head, as you appear to have in the bison drawing. The ellipse does not provide enough of a structural scaffolding to support the information required by the overall head, and therefore you need to consider more rudimentary forms - by adding a rudimentary, boxy muzzle attached to the original sphere, and carving out eyesockets before placing the eyeball (which in your drawing was treated more like a sticker being pasted on the surface of the underlying form). Here's a demo from the lesson that touches on some of this.

• Again, the same bison drawing. It's proven to be a good example of important issues to be aware of. There's two separate issues I want to mention in regards to its torso. Firstly, the ribcage mass is meant to actually represent the ribcage itself. As such, consider its size, length, and even angle so that you're effectively placing a large ball where the ribcage would be. If you can't identify these things about the ribcage from your reference image, find some others to fill in the gaps of your understanding. Same goes for the pelvis, which tends to be at a bit of an angle.Secondly, notice how between the pelvis and the ribcage, the pelvis gets pinched in on both sides? This severely breaks the illusion of form, and is a kind of pattern you want to avoid. When building a rudimentary sausage-like form, try to keep the lines through its length as parallel as possible. The curvature should be in the same direction on both sides, rather than mirrored. You can then add extra bulk and volume using more organic forms piled on top.

• When it comes to legs, it can be useful to actually leverage the gestural quality of (2D) shape over (3D) form. This may seem a bit contradictory, but bare with me. Shape is very good at conveying flow, while form excels at conveying solidity. We can achieve a balance of both by establishing the legs as simple shapes with some gesture and flow to them, then leveraging contour curves at the joints and at key connection points (avoid placing contour curves through the length of a shape, like in the middle of the calf, focus on where the flow changes) to reinforce it with solidity. For example, take a look at this.

Lastly, slow down. Pay more attention to your reference, and make sure you do not work from memory. What you want to do is study your reference, identify a form or detail consisting of just a few lines, look at your page to draw it in, then return your gaze to your reference. This is the case for both your construction and your texture - much of it is built from what you remember seeing, rather than what you actually see.

On the topic of texture, you should give the 25 texture challenge a look - but only once we've gotten construction down more solidly.

I'd like to see 8 more pages of animal drawings, with no detail or texture whatsoever. Construction only.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-22 23:58

You are definitely demonstrating a decent grasp of texture, although one significant issue I'm noticing is that your focus on texture is vastly overshadowing your efforts towards laying down the underlying construction. To put it simply, too much attention to detail, not enough attention to what comes before.

This is a pretty common issue, especially with those who aren't confident with texture. They end up rushing through the earlier phase so they can jump into the area they feel is their weakest.

In your situation, your use of construction isn't bad (although your heads do seem to be your weakest area), but what definitely suffers is the actual observation and study required of your reference image to decide which forms go where, and what the proportional relationships between them should be.

So, I want you to try another 6 pages of animal drawings, but this time I want you to include no texture or detail whatsoever. Focus on studying your reference images carefully, and pay more attention to how they're put together. Remember that the ribcage and pelvis masses are meant to actually reflect the actual rib cage and pelvis - so try and identify their orientation and size in your reference image first, then lay it down to match in your drawing. In your drawings, they seem to be quite arbitrary, with your pelvises being both far too large, and also at odd angles.

Of course this isn't to say you haven't had successes in this set - this goose (on the top) and this bear (on the bottom) are quite well done.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-23 00:51

I noticed a few issues in your warmups that are definitely worming their way into your main drawings.

• Largely when drawing your ellipses or curving lines, your lines are very tentative and timid, even chicken-scratchy. You're not applying the ghosting method to these lines - that is, you're not executing your marks confidently by any stretch. Look at this page. Your ellipses have many noticeable gaps where your pen has come off the page (either intentionally, or because you've drawn so lightly that it's bounced along). Your contour curves aren't made up of a single, planned line - instead you're sketching along them, either with short segments or going over them multiple times.

• Your contour curves are also generally not really giving the impression that they're wrapping around a rounded form - I can definitely see signs of you hooking them slightly as they reach the edges, so I think you understand what you should be aiming for, but they aren't always quite making it. This may be because they are not aligned too well, which is understandable as you completely neglected to include the central minor axis.

Moving onto your attempt at lesson 5, since you're drawing all of your forms so timidly, your constructions end up feeling quite weak and flimsy, and you're not really able to build any sort of foundation on which to build your animals. Instead you end up floundering, drawing a lot of unnecessary lines in the hopes that adding more will cause something to come together.

You need to step back and focus on each mark you put down - think about every individual form. When you draw, your brain is several steps ahead of your fingers - you're drawing the head, but your brain's already on the torso. You're also still showing signs that you're working quite a bit from memory, instead of observing your reference closely and looking away only for a second or two to put down a couple marks at a time.

First, take a look at this overdrawing of your squirrel. Look at how I approach each individual form - my ellipses are continuous lines, and they're drawn with confidence. I'm not concerned with trying to hide my lines, all I care about is building solid forms. Once I've decided a particular form needs to be drawn in a specific spot, the rest of the drawing disappears - all I focus on is drawing that single form. In your drawings, at this point you're still thinking about the whole thing.

Next, I want you to reread the lesson material, watch the video again, and reread the last critique I gave you. You're still doing a lot of what I mentioned there, and I think part of that is because you left such massive gaps between your attempts. We are only human - we are practically designed to forget things.

Lastly, I want you to do a single drawing, of a specific reference. Draw this raccoon. Take photographs at each stage of construction so I can see how you approach it. I also want this to be construction-only. No detail whatsoever - I noticed that you included bits of fur and such in your other drawings. By construction-only, I mean the second-last step (so step 3 of 4) of the squirrel demo I drew over your work.

Jmscrvnts

2017-05-26 13:44

Whoops, this is the patreons link comment place. wheres the link for me to throw in some money?

Uncomfortable

2017-06-03 17:19

While your initial rabbit holes (especially that cat drawing) are far too focused on detail and texture with little to no construction (you don't really adhere to those starting ellipses, nor do you really establish them as being three dimensional balls), the main lesson homework seems to be markedly better.

I especially like the reindeer in the upper left. There is of course plenty of room to grow, but you're definitely heading in the right direction. I have only a couple of suggestions:

• Decrease your focus on texture/detail when doing these exercises. Construction should be what you spend the vast majority of your time on. Sometimes just knowing that you'll be moving onto detail later can influence your ability to focus on construction, and can cause one to draw less confidently, attempt to hide their lines, or simply rush.

• Don't go over your construction with a heavier pen as you did here, or do your construction with a lighter coloured pen. I remember finding those grey triplus fineliners when I was taking classes, and they're great for laying things in for drawings whose end result actually mattered, but all of these are just exercises. Approaching them in the way you did for this particular drawing leads to the sort of things I mentioned in the previous point. I'm glad to see though that this seemed to primarily be an experiment, rather than a trend in your work. Still figured it was worth mentioning. Use one pen for the entire drawing.

• I noticed in a couple of places (like the horse drawing here) that you weren't quite treating your individual phases of construction as being quite as solid as you should. For example, if you look at the ellipse you laid in for the pelvis, you treated it more as an exploratory mark. Instead, I want you to treat these things as though they are solid forms, like masses of marble being placed within the three dimensional space. Plan them out more carefully, and abide by them once they're there. If you need to adjust them, you must cut and carve into them, rather than simply ignoring parts of them and moving on. The difference is that when you cut, you are aware of both the piece being cut away, and the piece that remains, as it exists in three dimensions. This forces you to continually acknowledge your forms as they sit in 3D space, and avoid falling into the trap of seeing your drawing as something flat and two dimensional.

• Ease up on the scribbly hatching. Any kind of unplanned marks tends to look sloppy. There are some places where hatching was fine (where purposely flattening out far legs to push them back), but I'd advise against using any kind of hatching when applying texture, if only to force you to look more deeply into your reference images. It's very easy to just apply some hatching and move on, but this results in the same kind of texture being used for all cases. Of course, you didn't do too much of this, just in a few places like this bird's chest. Either way, when you do use hatching, don't be sloppy about it.

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

Oh, a side note about your doodly warmups. Try to be more structured when doing them - don't just jump from one to the next, do several of a single exercise and try and don't rush through it or approach it sloppily. When constructing cylinders, always draw a minor axis. When drawing contour curves, always take care in wrapping them around your form's surface. And always apply the ghosting method to each and every line. Don't be sketchy or loose.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-09 20:45

This set definitely has some interesting examples of construction, and some that are definitely less strong. The biggest issue that I'm noticing across the board though is that you have a tendency to get too caught up in details, with less of your attention being spent on the construction itself. That said, before I get int the construction stuff, I want to mention that when getting into detail, you seem to be scribbling quite a bit. Don't. Scribbling and randomness is never the right choice, as it completely neglects any attempt at trying to identify the actual rhythms and patterns that exist in your reference image. Additionally, it suggests that the student is trying to apply rendering (light/shadow) to the reference, using texture (or in this case, scribbly hatching) as a tool to show that lighting information. This in turn implies that the student is attempting to use lighting to convey the 3D nature of a form.

Those priorities are generally completely mixed up. When it comes to capturing solid, believable form, we do this through the use of confident linework. Shading/lighting is not necessary to this end. Instead, we use light and shadow in key areas as a way to capture the surface quality of those objects (effectively their texture), as texture is made up of small forms, and the lines we see that make up that texture is made up of little shadows cast by those minute bumps and masses.

But again, we're not going to get into that right now. You can read more about it on the texture challenge.

As far as construction goes, you do have some examples that are coming along reasonably well (like this horse), but in general there are some key mistakes that I'm noticing in particular areas. First and foremost, at every stage of construction, make sure that you believe in, and are convinced of, the illusion that what you've drawn on your page is actually three dimensional and solid. So when we lay in our initial three masses (cranium, ribcage, pelvis), they should be balls rather than ellipses. Imagine that you are placing balls of solid marble into a three dimensional world, and now that they are there, you must either carve into them, or build up around them.

Next, make sure that when you attach another form to build up complexity, you explicitly define how those forms connect to one another using contour ellipses, contour curves, or something of that sort. With these cats, we have no idea of where the neck sits, or more importantly, where the neck intersects with the ball of the head, or where it intersects with the ball of the ribcage.

When you look at your reference image, you're bound to see a lot of visual information. You'll see eyes, tufts of fur, all kinds of little details. Look beyond them. It's very easy to get caught up in seeing an eye, and merely drawing an eye on the head with now real sense of how it exists in 3D space, and how it fits into the rest of the 3D structure of the head. Instead, in this particular example, you build in the eye sockets, and build up the structure around those eye sockets to get them to integrate comfortably with the muzzle, and whatever other elements are required for the particular head you're drawing. Then you can place your eyeballs inside, and then wrap eye lids around them, and so on.

So, what I want you to do is five more pages of animal drawings - but this time, no detail or texture whatsoever. Any information added to your drawings should be done so in the form of constructed form. This means you should have a solid understanding of how those forms fit into one another, and how they all relate to each other. Also, remember to draw through all of your ellipses confidently, and to apply the ghosting method to all of your lines - I noticed that you were getting a little sketchy/chicken-scratchy in certain places. 90% of the process of drawing is not about putting marks down on the page, but rather thinking and observing.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-14 02:26

This covers a lot of major issues that I saw. To summarize though, you're getting distracted by detail, aren't focusing enough on constructing solid three dimensional forms (you're not drawing arbitrary ellipses, you are building up solid spheres and balls, and need to be aware of how these forms connect to one another), and lastly are showing signs of symbol drawing/working from memory in certain areas. Observe your reference more, looking away only for a moment or two to draw a couple lines before looking back and refreshing your understanding of what you're looking at. This is especially important when working on construction, as the relationships between the forms can easily be missed.

I'd like you to try another 8 pages of animal drawings, but this time with no detail at all. Removing this additional distraction should help you put more of your attention and energy where it counts.

Lastly, remember that construction is all about going from simple to complex - building things up gradually, rather than jumping into complicated forms that can't quite stand up on their own. While there are lots of examples of this in your work, I specifically want to draw your attention to the antlers of your deer - notice how you've created a complex structure of branching forms without any underlying scaffolding to support them? The result is that they come out feeling flat, because you're juggling both establishing convincing 3D form and creating a believable branching structure. Our brains aren't great at multitasking, so breaking things down into bite-sized tasks as the constructional method does helps considerably.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-21 15:36

I definitely think you started out rather weak, but as you mentioned yourself, things really started to come together and improved overall over the course of the work here. I'm especially pleased with your deer/horses, where you're demonstrating a much more solid grasp of 3D form and construction, and are also demonstrating a much more careful observation of your reference images.

It is clear that there is plenty of room to grow, but you're definitely on the right track. There's only one particular thing that I want to draw your attention to - it's how your animals' legs connect to their torsos, especially the horses and deer. It seems that the way you draw them, they're more connecting around the bottom of the torso. Your lines do imply a shoulder form, but the actual form you draw for it is incomplete (often only the underside is drawn). Make sure you draw those forms completely, rather than only drawing them partially. This will help you better grasp the particular volumes at play.

Additionally, one thing you may want to practice is to draw two balls in space near one another (basically your ribcage and your pelvis), and to connect them into a sausage form. A lot of the solidity of the animal you're drawing hinges on how solid its torso feels, so getting used to nailing this more thoroughly will definitely help.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one. You may also feel free to submit 8-page sets of animal drawings in the future for further critique.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-02 23:50

In general you're doing reasonably well. It's clear to me that you grasp how your forms sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another, so your constructions feel reasonably sturdy. I'm especially fond of how you put your camels together, and the extent to which you studied your coyotes.

There are two major things that I'd like to point out however:

• Firstly, I did notice that you have a tendency to draw smaller and cram more into each page. The number of drawings is definitely great, but beware of the fact that when you draw smaller, you limit the amount of room your brain is given to think through spatial problems. In general, when it comes to spatial challenges, our brains do benefit considerably from having lots of room to figure things out.

• I also noticed that you go over your drawings to clean up your drawings. While I certainly encourage the use of extra line weight to help clarify overlaps and emphasize certain parts of certain lines, I want you to avoid thinking of it as a way to clean things up. We're not going in there to replace underlying "rough work" - the lines we've drawn initially are as much a part of our drawings, so we should not be striving to hide them from view. This also means that you shouldn't be purposely drawing those lines lighter earlier on, as this will have an impact on how confidently you draw (and therefore how solid the forms themselves feel). Keep in mind that these are all just exercises to help develop your understanding of how 3D space works, and how forms can be manipulated within it. Take a look at the coyote in the top right of this page. The underlying construction is totally solid, albeit faint and somewhat hidden. You've even fleshed out how the leg connects to the torso, which is important. The darker lines however start to flatten things out by overruling some of those form relationships made underneath. That very same connection of the foreleg to the torso has been modified somewhat, in a way that no longer feels quite as believable, because it was an addition not made through construction.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep those two points in mind as you move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-06 14:02

Overall you're doing quite well. You're developing a good sense of construction, and are applying strong observational skills throughout the lesson's work, but with a fair bit of improvement over the set. There are a few points that I'd like to raise though:

• While you do this less later on in the lesson, it's still worth stressing. Remember that the forms we start off with - those three balls - are to be treated as solid forms you've placed in 3D space. Think of it as though you're literally constructing something - you won't be able to have your next form float arbitrarily around those initial balls. Whatever you add to it needs to rest snugly against them, or envelop them tightly. For example, take a look at this page. Notice how the ribcage and pelvis are floating loosely within the torso, kind of like pickled eggs in a jar? You're going to want that torso to be tightly bound to them instead.

• While you're definitely demonstrating a grasp of the three dimensional nature of what you're drawing, and how the forms sit in space, you are visibly skipping through a few steps. For example, you're not at all fleshing out how the legs connect to the torso, or how the neck connects to the torso, etc. Take a look at the demos in the 'other demos' section of the lesson, especially this oryx demo. Try and apply those steps, and draw every one. Eventually these will be so second nature that you'll able to visualize them instead of drawing them, but that is going to be a long way off.

• I want to encourage you not to go over your drawing with a thicker pen as a 'clean up pass'. This is somewhat different from just adding line weight, which is a matter of adding extra weight to certain sections of certain lines to clarify overlaps and such. A clean-up pass focuses instead on replacing lines entirely. This will both distract you from the underlying construction (since you're clearly going to be way more focused on creating a pretty drawing, which is not our goal here), and it will also result in more wobbly, stiff lines as you strive to get your replacement lines to match those you're replacing.

I'd like you to do just two more pages of animal drawings, following what I've mentioned above, before I mark this lesson as complete. As for your other question, unfortunately I've made the decision that I will be removing the figure drawing section altogether, rather than expanding upon it. It was in many ways a mistake to venture into that area, as I know I am not skilled enough with figure drawing to teach it effectively. Moving forward, the core of drawabox will be focused around the first seven lessons, where I'm much more confident in my ability to teach, to establish a strong foundation for students. I may also expand into design-oriented lessons, although if I do end up going in that direction, the critiques for those lessons will be set at a much higher tier than the standard $3/month, since they're considerably more of a case-by-case situation than these, which follow more of a set formula.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-18 19:34

So what stands out to me the most is that in a lot of these drawings, you're thinking in terms of 2D shapes. As far as you perceive them, the marks you're putting down are largely two dimensional. Additionally, your understanding of what you see in your references and what you carry over into your drawing is also limited to that space. This results in you adding a lot of details that float arbitrarily on your drawing, rather than being grounded in actual, solid construction. The eyes for instance are a good example of this.

Now this is the case to varying degrees. I think the cardinal drawing is an improvement, where the torso feels considerably more solid and three dimensional, though its head is still quite flat.

The first thing you need to accept is that when you draw, you are not simply placing marks on a piece of paper. You're adding forms within a three dimensional space that you are able to observe through that page. For example, every single construction starts by blocking out those three major masses - cranium, rib cage, pelvis. We block them out with ellipses, but these ellipses actually represent solid three dimensional ball forms. You need to be convinced of their solidity, of their tangibility.

If you had a solid sphere of marble floating there in space, that's something you have to deal with. Largely what you've been doing is simply drawing your next phase right on top, without much regard for how those new forms/shapes relate to the ball that's sitting there. This tells me that you yourself do not believe that the ball is something solid at all. To you, it's just an arbitrary mark on a page, one that can be ignored when it suits you.

Instead, you need to deal with it. We can do so by building on top of it - that is, attaching new forms to what already exists, with an understanding of how those new forms relate to the sphere. Or we can cut into the sphere, carving away the pieces we don't want. Here's an explanation of what it means to carve a form when drawing.

This is what the constructional method revolves around. If you start simple and build up complexity with successive steps, you will be able to maintain the illusion of solidity that is more easily achieved with simpler forms. If however you jump forwards in complexity, or attempt to apply complexity in a way that ignores what you've built up underneath, your drawing will appear flat and flimsy.

Take a look at how I tackle constructing a head in this demo I did for another student. Notice how I start off with a solid sphere, then build up additional solid forms around that. Each form is simple and primitive, but they come together to build up something more complex.

The other point I wanted to make is that you are not really observing your reference images as you should be. You're working a lot from memory, which tells me that you're looking at your reference, then spending longer periods drawing. What you should be doing is looking at your reference more regularly, taking only a moment or two to put down a couple lines before returning your gaze to your reference. Our brains are not designed to retain the kind of information in our memories that is needed to draw something faithfully, so as soon as you start relying on memory, things tend to get overly simplified and cartoony.

I'd like you to take another stab at this lesson. Be sure to rewatch the lesson 5 intro video, reread the lesson material, and take a look at the demonstrations in the "other demos" section of the lesson page. Remember that you need to understand how every element you add to your drawing exists in 3D space. Don't just carry details over arbitrarily from your reference. You have to apply construction to build them back up into your drawing.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-29 03:05

There's a lot of good going on here. I really like the fact that you're building up your masses piece by piece, and your strong observational skills are definitely coming into play in a big way. On top of that, you tend to capture a real sense of liveliness in a lot of these, so definitely keep that up.

There's two things that I would like to point out that should help you continue to develop your approach to this kind of construction.

Firstly, one thing that stands out a lot in a few places is how you regard the actual underlying shapes/forms you place on the page. From what I can see, there's a good chance that you regard the marks you put down as being just that - exploratory shapes placed on a flat page to help you move beyond the lack of grounding inherent to a blank canvas. You place the initial masses, and then build those up, and ultimately it helps you flesh out your drawing - but the end result does not necessarily follow the marks you placed earlier. We can see this a little on the bottom of this page. Notice how the warthog's head's got an ellipse there that is effectively overridden by the darker lines that end up actually making up its head?

This is actually a fairly common way of approaching things, but when it comes to the sort of constructional drawing we tackle here, it's important that you treat every mark you put down as being a solid three dimensional form. Think of it like you've introduced a mass of marble into a 3D space, to which your piece of paper is merely a window. That marble is hard and unyielding. You certainly can't ignore it and have other chunks of marble take its place. Once it's there, it has to be dealt with in some way or another.

Generally we deal with these by building on top of them, or cutting into them. Cutting a 3D form involves having an awareness of how both resulting pieces - the part being cut away, and the part that remains - sit in 3D space. This takes your initial ellipse and imbues it with the illusion of form.

The other issue surfaces with the warthog on the bottom of this page, specifically its head. Overall you've tackled breaking things down into smaller forms quite well, but this is an area where it didn't quite work out that well. It's important to work big to small - so establish your major forms, such as the whole snout of the animal as a single boxy form built off the cranial sphere, then break it down as needed into smaller forms. Something a little like this (i wasn't actually sure what species of pig that is, obviously not a warthog, so i wasn't able to find reference imagery for my demo. instead you get a fictional cute thing!)

Aside from those two points, I think you're doing great. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-01 21:33

Looks like your post got stuck in the spam filter, so I almost missed it! I guess reddit isn't too fond of url shorteners.

So while your drawings are generally quite nice, you appear to be skipping past a vast amount of what's covered in the lesson. Rather than completing the drawabox lesson, "drawing animals", you primarily just drew some animals. Now, that's not entirely true - in some areas you applied the principles from the lesson a little more, and in others you used them a little less, but overall I think your application is quite loose and approximate.

The first and most important thing that I want to point out is that you approach the initial steps - that is, laying in the cranial, ribcage and pelvic masses - as being more of a loose sketch that can be disregarded at will later on. That's not really what we're after here. Instead, think of it more as though you are introducing three balls of solid marble into a three dimensional world.

The thing about solid masses is that once you've got something that you're convinced is substantial, you cannot simply ignore it when it suits you. If you want to alter that form, you have to deal with it, as it exists, in some way or another. We can choose to build on top of it, by placing more masses on top of it (with an awareness of how the new mass wraps around or sits on top of the first). We can also choose to carve into the mass - which means to have an understanding of how both the piece that remains, and the piece that is being cut away, exist in 3D space and how they relate to one another.

It's considerably easier to make alterations when all we see is a 2D shape, because we're free to draw on top as we please - but this does not maintain the same sense of solidity and dimensionality that we want to achieve.

Take a look at this oryx from the 'other demos' section of the lesson. Notice how explicit I am with every form I add to my drawing? I am by no means ever attempting to draw faintly to hide my underlying construction, because I know my goal here is not to create a pretty drawing at the end. When you get caught up in the end result, you take shortcuts which undermine the core focus of the exercise itself. And it is an exercise after all - meant to build up your understanding of the constructional method, as applied in various contexts.

The way I see it, before adding a line to a drawing, one must consider whether or not it helps them to better grasp how the things they're drawing sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another. If it contributes in that manner, then it should be drawn confidently with no attempt to hide it. We can always come back to add extra line weight in key areas to clarify overlaps and separate things out a little bit as needed, but right now our focus is on constructing an object that feels solid. If however the line does not contribute to that goal, then it should simply not be drawn at all.

Now of course, drawing every single line in this manner is not what we'd do if we were drawing something for-realsies. But again, these are just exercises - and by repeating them over and over this way, we continue to develop our mental model of three dimensional space. Over time we will shift from doing more of this explicitly on the page to doing more of it in our minds. But that is not a target you should be remotely concerned with right now.

So, I'd like you to do another six pages of animal drawings, taking what I've said here into consideration. Don't skip steps, draw all of your lines confidently, and apply the constructional method as stringently as you can. Always start simple, and gradually build up complexity - never introduce visual information whose complexity cannot be supported by the forms and construction already present in your drawing.

I'm 100% certain that you're capable of this already, from what I can see here, but you need to be pushed back onto the right path as far as following instructions and applying the lesson's concepts goes.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-01 21:43

The improvement over the set - and through those three rounds you've been posting to the main subreddit - is considerable. Your drawings convey a very strong sense of volume and form, with your constructions feeling very solid and tangible. You've also applied a great deal of personal flair to your approach with line weight, but not in a manner that has undermined or sidelined the central focus of the exercise, which is definitely nice to see. Often times when people introduce too much style, they get distracted.

I often find that the hybrid exercise at the end is what shows us whether or not a student truly understands how the things they're drawing exist in 3D space. There are a lot of students who get caught up in replicating the 2D images they're working from, and when they're forced to combine things in a novel way, they find that everything falls apart. You certainly proved that you know what you're doing, and that you fully understand how all of these forms relate to one another.

As far as detail goes, I see an interesting mixture of hatching lines and very careful, observant application of a variety of textures. Usually I'd encourage students to stay away from hatching, but as with all things, that is a rule meant to be broken once a student has demonstrated their capacity to observe and replicate a wider variety of textures with a great deal of success. You certainly have moved beyond that point, and as a result your use of hatching helps push your resulting drawings in a fresh direction.

I did definitely notice that you're still quite timid about drawing through your ellipses, and if you look carefully, you'll notice that the ellipses where you've only gone around once tend to be less evenly shaped. You're managing it decently in this lesson, but I do believe that it will become a much larger concern when we get into more geometric forms where smooth ellipses become a major element of the constructions. So, when drawing organic matter, do as you like, but make sure you continue to push yourself to draw through each ellipse two full times when working on the material in the next few lessons.

I am genuinely curious how you'll fare with lessons 6 and 7. I'm certain you'll do well if your past performance is any indicator, but the subject matter changes drastically, and some students find it to be more of an obstacle than they'd initially expected. That said, as you've demonstrated a strong understanding of 3D space here, it shouldn't be too bad.

Keep up the fantastic work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-02 22:56

I wouldn't say it was tough, so much that you didn't really apply that much from the lesson, and eventually just went your own direction with everything by the end of it. If you look at what you drew at the end of the last lesson (for instance, this wasp), while it's far from perfect it demonstrates some understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space and how they relate to one another. Nothing in this set demonstrates anything even close to that. All I can see is that you skimmed the lesson content, started loosely following the first-three-masses without really grasping what they represented (think of your own rib cage - it's not just what sits between your shoulders, it's a solid half of your torso), and eventually just dropped that stuff altogether.

Furthermore, from the look of your work, you're not observing your reference much at all. You're likely looking at it for a bit, then drawing the rest from the memory of what you saw - rather than what I mention frequently, looking back at your reference constantly so as to keep yourself from relying on your faulty memory.

This does not demonstrate patience, nor care in going through the lesson material provided, nor does it demonstrate the skills that you have shown yourself to be developing in the past. If you're having this much trouble, I'd recommend going back to the first two lessons and revisiting them, especially since this work here tells me that you're not likely going through those exercises regularly as warmups as instructed.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-05 20:32

There are a few things that stand out to me right off the bat. The first thing is that I think you're trying to handle too many things at once, and as a result you're getting distracted. The constructional approach to drawing is all about breaking things down into chunks that can be handled in isolation from one another. Instead of tackling many problems at once, we tackle one problem at a time. Once we move on from one problem to the next, we no longer attempt to change what was established in the previous step - even if it's off, we work within those bounds because if we try to correct those mistakes now, while accomplishing another task, we are going to risk compromising what we're doing now.

I think your approach to detail/texture has very much fallen victim to this, and as a result it's coming out either scribbly and chaotic, or isn't reflecting all that much careful observation of your reference image. Rather, you seem to be looking at your reference for a while, attempting to commit it to memory, then drawing for a long while from what you remember. Or rather, what you think you remember. What comes of this is that your details end up looking cartoony and oversimplified.

You need to accept that as human beings, our capacity to remember is intensely flawed. We need to instead look at our reference continually, in order to refresh our memories. We can only look away for a moment or two to draw a few very specific marks or establish a particular form before we have to look back at our reference.

This doesn't just apply to detail, but rather to construction in general. Take a look at the feet of your animals, or their eyes. If you compare them to your reference images, you'll notice that there's a lot more complexity to them there. Complexity that your brain threw out because it was not necessary to understand the concept of what a "foot" is, or what an "eye" is. Remember that we evolved to survive in the wild - only the basic concept of what an eye looks like is necessary to know that those eyes peering at us from the darkness means danger.

Anyway, for now I want you to set aside detail altogether. For the time being, it's only serving as a distraction that is keeping you from really focusing on your construction.

The second point I wanted to raise is one that I've raised a few times in the past already. Take a look at this bird. Notice how at some point you realized that its chest was puffing out further than you wanted? You then went on to entirely ignore the form that was there initially, treat it as though it was a flat shape on a flat piece of paper, and draw an entirely new line.

This makes sense if we're just drawing two dimensional shapes, but we're not - we're placing solid chunks of matter in a three dimensional world, and we need to continue to treat them as such if we want them to maintain their illusion of solidity. Think of it as being solid marble - you can't just ignore it when it suits you. You have to deal with it, or respect the fact that you've placed it there, and that it's not going anywhere.

That ties back to the idea of previous steps of construction dealing with certain challenges - and once those challenges are dealt with, it's inadvisable to go back and try and change them. In this case, that chest puffed out that far, so while that is not identical to the reference image you were using, that's simply how your drawing is now. So you need to push yourself to make that work, because while the result won't be exactly what you were trying to draw, it will still feel solid and most importantly, plausible as a three dimensional object.

On a related note, notice this dog's snout? You started off with the center line of the cranial mass oriented in one direction. Once that decision is made, hold true to it - the snout's orientation should match.

I'm not sure if I've shown you these notes before, but take a look, specifically at the part about lines closer to the bottom. I'm noticing that your linework tends to be very uniform, and this contributes to a general appearance of stiffness.

One last thing - when it comes to the initial masses (cranium, ribcage, pelvis), I want you to think about your own body. We also share in these masses, and their proportions aren't entirely dissimilar to those in these animals. Our ribcages take up somewhere around half of our torso, and our pelvis takes up maybe a quarter. In animals, the pelvis can be even smaller. When placing these masses, actually try and assess where they would sit on the animals you're trying to draw and how they'd be oriented. It's not just a matter of placing arbitrary masses.

Look at this dog. You drew the pelvic mass as this massive thing that doesn't really reflect a dog's actual pelvis. If you're unsure of how it should be oriented, you can certainly look at dog skeletons or other anatomical images to get a better sense of it. Once those masses are established, we can certainly add extra volumes here and there to represent some more noticeable muscle forms that tend to bulge out, but it needs to be built upon a framework that reflects that bone structure.

I'd like you to try your hand at this lesson again, but this time focus entirely on construction, with no detail. I don't want to see any lines that are not part of a form. No hair, no fur, no features, no arbitrary hatching lines. Just forms. Take a look at the 'other demos' section of the lesson as well if you haven't already. And most of all, slow down. Observe your reference more carefully, don't draw what you think you see.

Oh yeah, one other thing - eyeballs are spheres. You're drawing them like stickers on the face, but they're actual balls that sit in sockets, and eyelids wrap around them. It all comes back down to form.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-03 21:08

Looks to me like you've got the right flair badge. DS1 is for plants, DS2 is for insects. This lesson's would be DS3.

So there are some really nice drawings in this set, but there's also a lot of issues that need to be addressed. Before that though, I want to point out that this bird is very well done. It feels tangible and three dimensional, like it actually exists in a 3D world, rather than as a collection of shapes on the page. This frog is also pretty good.

As for my critique, I wrote most of it here, but I'll highlight the main points:

• There are many examples of you skipping constructional steps. That is, building up complex forms without any proper supports for that kind of information. If you skip steps, your constructions will feel flat, so you've got to start out with the simplest forms you can (primitive geometric forms, simple organic sausages, etc.).

• Your first priority is convincing yourself that what you're drawing is not just marks on a flat piece of paper. You've got to believe that the piece of paper you're drawing on is just a window to a vast 3D world where every form you add exists tangibly. If you draw a sphere on a page (basically a circle), and then try to draw a line across it, if you fully believe in the lie that it is a sphere, your line will curve along that "sphere's" surface. If you aren't convinced at all, it'll just cut through as a straight line. Right now you're sitting somewhere in between.

• Your application of fur tends to be quite scribbly and poorly thought out. As with every texture, and frankly everything you draw, you've got to think through every single mark you put down. Don't allow yourself to function on autopilot - consider what the purpose of the mark you want to draw is, whether or not it's necessary, and how it should be placed.

• Don't trust your memory - you've got to keep looking back at your reference image constantly, taking only momentary breaks to draw a few marks before looking back. Otherwise you will start drawing what you think you saw, and memory is always going to be faulty and oversimplified.

I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings, with no texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction, on building up your basic forms and understanding how those sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-07 22:34

I really have to ask. Have you done the following?

• Read the lesson

• Watched the intro video

• Followed along the lesson demos and those in the 'other demos' section?

• Read my previous critique

I'm 100% sure you have, but your work does not show much evidence of this. Perhaps you read these things before, but not as you were doing the work itself, so it wasn't actually fresh in your mind at the time. Regardless of the reason, you're doing a lot of what I pointed out in my last critique. I'm sure you can understand that I am not interested in repeating myself.

An example of a very specific issue I mentioned previously: the ribcage. I my last critique, I pointed that out very specifically, but you're still making the same mistake. The issue I raised about your observation of your references also still stands. In a few places it's improved slightly, but overall you're still primarily drawing what you think you remember seeing, rather than continually looking back to refresh your memory.

I really cannot help you if you're not going to pay attention to the advice I offer, especially when it's as specific as pointing out that your ribcages should be considerably larger. If you're going to try again, then I strongly insist that you revisit the lesson content frequently.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-13 18:31

You're doing pretty well! I think you start out a little uncertain, which is normal, but over the course of the lesson you show considerable absorption of the material, and strong application of the principles of construction. In some places, like the horses, proportion gets to be a bit of concern, but that's not uncommon at all.

I actually really love how you captured the seagull's wings near the end. The construction overall for that one is quite well done. You're showing a strong ability to construct even in smaller spaces (like the heads), which is definitely an important skill. You can see the same in the hyena.

Speaking of the hyena, I'd recommend that when tackling the fur, that you avoid creating a sort of continuous zig-zagging effect. This sort of pattern ends up becoming quite repetitive and distracting. It's often much better to reduce the number of visible tufts, but at the same time take more care and focus when 'designing' each one. Rather than zig-zagging, drawing each line individually with a greater sense of purpose and planning generally has better results.

Keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the nexto ne.