At the start struggled a lot with getting proportion and measurement right (as any mistake is so much more obvious than with plants) and also with more complex 3d forms (how to add forms onto each other or carve one form from another) so I took a lot of time to practice.
The last two pages of layins I did while looking only at the references I had already used so I had to rotate the insects in my mind. I thought this might prepare me a little for the hybrids exercise but it was really hard. I need more boxes and cylinders! :D
I am still very much overwhelmed by detail and texture, I might have a look at the texture challenge while practicing animals if I pass this lesson.
Your constructions are excellent. You may have struggled with your proportions, but I think you certainly showed them who's boss, as you did a pretty good job with them too. I'm particularly impressed with the fact that you managed to capture a very strong sense of form without neglecting any construction lines or ending up with anything that felt too stiff. You balanced the solidity of those forms with the flow of the various limbs, and applied line weight to great effect.
You certainly made some strong efforts with the texture and detail, and as far as I'm concerned, you are heading in the right direction. There definitely is a lot of personal experimentation that is necessary to really figure out how you want to tackle that. The one piece of advice I want to offer is always to remember that the detail and texture rests on the surface of your other forms, and end up playing the role of contour lines of a sort, whether you want them to or not.
As a result, they can really help reinforce existing forms, or they can undermine what you'd already established by contradicting them. One example of this is the black widow (on the left side of the page), where its abdomen ended up looking a little deformed once texture was applied. This factor will definitely come into play when deciding what details should be included and which should be left out. After all, as this is a drawing you are creating, you can choose what will help you communicate what you're after, and what won't. You're not married to reality, but reality happens to give you a lot of great information that you can choose to use or ignore.
Anyway, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Tackling the texture challenge next certainly wouldn't be a bad idea, though try not to grind on it too much. Perhaps hammering out 5 to 10 of them would be a good way to get a handle on what is conveyed on the notes there, but after that you should definitely work on them in parallel with lesson 5, as it's the sort of topic that should be tackled over time (letting your brain rest in between). The time you spend away from the challenge ends up being as valuable as the time you spend on it, especially if you're paying greater attention to the objects around you in your daily life.
The start of school is keeping me busy but I still try to do something daily. (Except for this thursday, Divinity Original Sin 2 finally gets released).
Did an extra page because I didn't stick to the original construction of the honeybee (spiky one) and messed it up.
There's a lot of good stuff here. There's also room for improvement, but you're definitely going in the right direction. One of your drawings that I particularly love is this fly (on the left side). It's very clear that you fully understand how each form there exists in relation to its neighbours, and you're entirely convinced that what you've drawn is three dimensional. Your legs also flow very nicely in a way that maintains their gestural flow without appearing stiff.
I do believe that where your drawings are weakest is primarily where you get a little too caught up in the detail, or perhaps too overwhelmed by all of the information present in your reference image. This is a fairly normal issue, where we find it difficult to push through and see the simplest elements. This can cause us to rely more on what we remember seeing, rather than drawing what is actually present, and as a result our drawings become less believable. The scorpion is an example of this, where the forms feel much less solid and sturdy, and the contour details don't quite reinforce the illusion you're trying to achieve. This bee is also another case of the same. It's primarily a matter of pushing yourself to observe your reference more carefully, and forcing yourself not to rely on your memory. Human memory is after all quite faulty, and we need to always push ourselves to look back and forth between our drawing and our reference in order to assure ourselves that the marks we put down reflect something that is actually present. It is also necessary when it comes to capturing the specific nuances of our forms and shapes, and the relationships between them.
With that bee, I definitely see you trying to tackle the furry/hairy texture in a few different ways, and I'm very pleased to see the experimentation. Neither approach really worked out quite well, though your attempt on the right side to focus more on the silhouette was definitely closer to the mark.
In that particular case, it's very important to 'design' each tuft of fur specifically, rather than allowing yourself to draw a continuous back-and-forth zigzag. Since each tuft carries so much more weight (being on the silhouette of the form), you need to think much more about how each one is presented. Again, it also becomes a situation of less-is-more, where drawing fewer tufts but taking more care with them will be more effective than creating a continuous but repetitive pattern all around. There will of course be more opportunities to tackle that when drawing animals.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There certainly is room for growth, as there always is, but I think you should be ready to move onto the next lesson.
To be honest, it's all just doing observational studies. The more you practice drawing an object as it appears (and not as you think you see it), the better you'll get at it.
I honestly thought i did well this time...Until i uploaded them and looked at them again. I just can't seem to get a grasp of the details. I see your way of drawing details and i look at some of your other students drawings and i just can't seem to 'get it' and i really don't know why. I'm not rushing or anything it just feels like i don't 'see'.
To be honest, these are actually quite well done. The first page's not great, but the rest are fairly solid. My one major concern however is that many of these seem to have some kind of lighter underdrawing that appears to be quite a bit more scribbly and erratic.
Underdrawings, in the context of these lessons, are dangerous because of a few reasons:
They reduce the focus on properly planning and preparing before each stroke, and really thinking about whether or not the mark you're going to put down serves a purpose.
If you then go back over those lighter marks to 'clean' them up, you're inevitably going to do so with a much slower, potentially wobblier and less confident mark - the kind we really want to avoid.
They encourage some bad habits, such as correcting mistakes (rather than accepting them and moving forwards as best you can). I noticed several places where you drew, then redrew certain forms. Try and think of it all as though every form you put down is like a chunk of marble being placed into a 3D scene. You can't simply ignore it once it's there - you can cut into it or build on top of it, but you can't outright act like it has ceased to exist, then replace it with another. It's there, so you have to deal with it. Often times that means moving forward with that form being a part of your construction, and learning from the mistake rather than striving to "save" that drawing. Remember that the end result of these drawings is irrelevant - they are all just exercises to help us learn about how these forms relate to one another in space, and how they can be combined to create something more complex whilst continuing to feel solid and tangible.
On that note, what you mentioned about not being able to "see" or "get" the details is relevant here. What I just mentioned about understanding how forms relate to one another is the core of the lesson. Detail and texture is not, it never has been, and it never will be - because detail is unimportant.
My biggest focus here is to teach you how to draw forms and objects that feel solid and three dimensional. Once you've got that, detail's no big deal. But until you get that down, detail and texture tends to serve as a huge distraction, especially when students don't quite grasp how much more important construction and form really is. This distraction causes them to try and reproduce the photo they're working from, focusing on it as a 2D image rather than thinking about the forms and construction.
Anyway, your work here is definitely moving in the right direction. The most important thing you can strive for in all of my lessons is convincing yourself that the things you're drawing exist not as 2D drawings on a flat page, but as solid, unyielding forms in a 3D world.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. Some time in the future, you may want to take a look at the texture challenge, but I wouldn't do anything more than read the notes there until you've really solidified your grasp of form and construction.
You don't know how amazing that is to hear! I think that this is the first time in a year i've actually drawn good enough to continue straight too the next lesson!! :D
I can definately see what you mean with the underdrawings. i think the reason i'm doing them is that i want to draw exactly what i see instead of 'just trying too draw what i see' and working with the lines i actually draw. Like you say i am trying to correct mistakes instead of accepting them and moving forward.
I guess my question is, how much should i strive too draw exactly what i see and how much should i just draw my understanding of what i see if that makes sense? That is probably the most confusing part of all of this for me. I don't know how much "artistic license/ going with my mistakes" i have?
I am very grateful that you are doing all this work! :D
I can see why it might be a bit confusing, as there are a few rules that come into play that apply in different areas. For example, "don't draw what you THINK you see, draw what you see" is a major part of observational drawing, which is a skill we use in all things.
Conversely, constructional drawing focuses primarily on "don't just draw what you see - actually construct it from rudimentary forms, and build up towards more complex ones".
If you think about it though, these aren't really contradictory statements, but rather a sort of chain that combines observation and construction in one process.
We use the observational skills to determine what it is that needs to be constructed. We cannot rely on our shoddy memory, so we need to continually refresh and reinforce our understanding of what's there by looking at our reference again and again as we draw.
Once we determine something that has to be drawn, we again use our observational skills to break it down into its simplest components. Remember that the tools we have at our disposal are the five primitive geometric forms (boxes, spheres, cylinders being the main ones, along with pyramids and cones), organic sausage forms and ribbons (which are effectively flat 2D shapes that exist in 3D space). By observing the specific complex form we want to draw, we identify its core elements that serve as the sort of foundation of the more complex form. This is because the simpler the form we draw, the easier it is to make it feel solid and three dimensional. Jump into a complex form too early, and it'll end up feeling flat without the scaffolding made up with the more basic ones.
Now, we've identified a simple form that needs to be established in our scene. Let's say it's a ball. We add it to the scene, and then come to realize that it's a little too big relative to other forms already present in the scene. But being a solid, unyielding form, it is there, and it must either be accepted or modified somehow. Often times fixing an unintentional mistake like this will result in far too much linework and messiness (which will probably undermine the solidity of our construction), so the best option is to simply accept it and move forwards with the construction as it is currently. Yes, this part will be a little too big, and as a result the proportions will be off somewhat. This is a mistake we accept in order to avoid upsetting the illusion of solidity of our drawing.
I make mistakes like this all the time. I accept them because in my mind, I am not reproducing the photograph exactly. Instead I am using the photograph as reference to create a general copy of that object. A plausible sibling, for instance, or a member of its species (if it's an animal), but not an exact clone. I use the photograph to tell me of all the things I don't know about it - what its proportions are like, how its parts connect to its other parts, what the texture of its various surfaces are like, etc. but at the end of the day, my goal is not to create a photocopy. My goal is to understand it better, and one can certainly do that while making mistakes. You can even see the mistakes as an opportunity for the sort of reflection and analysis that allows us to learn more about the subject.
At the end of the day, keep in mind what your goals are. There are plenty of artists out there who are exceptional at reproducing a photograph perfectly in full detail, but if you have them draw something new, using several photos as reference, they'll fall apart. What we're doing here is learning how everything fits together, so you're able to extract important information from these sources in order to do with them what you like.
That's why the next lesson ends with the 'hybrid' exercise, where students try and merge different animals together into one creature that feels plausible.
This took a while, but I think they came out well enough. I've noticed I tend to really overdo the line weight at times because I subconsciously try to hide all of the "ugly" construction lines underneath, so I'm working on not doing that as much. I also know my lines get a way scratchy at times, especially when it comes to the legs and parts I might perceive as "less important". So that's one more thing I'm trying to put an end to.
Also, I don't think I had ever actually looked at these things before. They're all way uglier than I thought.
They're pretty hideous. The little creepy crawlies, that is, not your drawings - your drawings are very well done. You're continuing to demonstrate a good grasp of form and construction and as a result your insects feel solid and believable. While I can certainly see what you mean by overdoing the line weight, it's not to the point that it's doing harm to the end result. I've seen plenty of cases where the artist is far too heavy handed, and it has the tendency to flatten things out. In your case, you've still got a fair bit of control over where that weight goes, and achieve a good range of them in a way that helps push the dynamism of the drawing.
At the end of the day, I'll always vouch for the beauty of construction lines, but at the end of the day that's something for you to come to terms with. As it stands, you've still enough awareness of how your choices impact the end result to keep from doing any significant harm there.
Anyway, I have nothing critical to offer here. Your work's coming along great, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one!
I think proportion wise there is a lot that's going wrong. Probably was a problem already present in lesson 3. But with plants things being slightly out of proportion might be less obvious.
I like the yellowjacket I did though. The ladybug. I'm very aware the back legs are missing.. But I couldn't find the back legs on the reference for the life of me :/
I can certainly say with confidence that you've made a massive leap forward compared to the last time you attempted this exercise. Your understanding of construction is vastly better, and while in a few places there are some proportional mishaps (although they're not that major - and being an observational issue, it'll get better with practice as long as you focus on it), the majority of your drawings here feel plausible due to the focus on form and building up the illusion of solidity. Your linework in general also appears to be considerably better controlled, with a lot more subtlety to it.
As you move into the next lesson, you'll find yourself drawing more fur. In the notes there I touch on ways to tackle it that certainly could have applied here - specifically, drawing individual tufts rather than straight lines coming off your surfaces perpendicularly. When you get into that, remember that each line should be drawn individually, the subject of its own planning and intent. The odd perpendicular line like that can be useful to draw one's attention (because it tends to call for it quite strongly), but if overused it'll become distracting.
Anyway, keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Nice work! Your use of construction is, for the most part, coming along great. There's certainly room for growth, but you're heading in the right direction. I especially like how you handled things like the ladybug's open shell on the right side of this page - they feel distinctly three dimensional, and the contour curves were used to great effect in establishing their distortion through space.
This praying mantis is also quite well done, specifically its arms and legs. The thorax flattens out somewhat, but the rest feels quite solid. Despite having no contour curves, the arms still capture a good sense of form. This is ultimately what we're working towards - the point where the student is themselves convinced that what they are drawing is three dimensional, resulting in little imperceptible shifts in how they draw specific things that better capture the turning of form. It's hard to describe, but the fact that it's occurring here and there is a good sign. It'll still be necessary to keep working through your constructions step by step, but basically - just keep doing what you're doing, and your skills will continue to improve.
The one area you're not doing that great is texture/detail. An example of this is this page. There are a couple issues there. Firstly, you're scribbling those marks (very close to using hatching, which I advised you against in my last critique). You need to take the time to carefully observe your reference images to identify the kinds of specific marks and patterns that exist there, rather than being general and vague. Take a look at this image from the 'other demos' section for an example of different kinds of textures one might find on a beetle's shell.
The other issue is that right now you seem to be using texture (or in this case, scribbling/hatching) as a means to convey light and shadow. It's not uncommon for people to feel that 'shading' is important, because in a lot of methods of drawing they rely on it to convey the illusion of form. In our methodology, this is not the case - by the time we go beyond the constructional linework, we've already captured that illusion of form. Therefore light and shadow is no longer something we must achieve, but instead becomes a tool we can use to other ends.
What we actually want to do here is communicate the surface quality of our objects. Remember that our goal is ultimately 'visual communication' - we're not replicating our reference images, we're communicating with our drawings what is communicated in the image. One of those aspects is, as I mentioned, the texture of those surfaces.
The texture itself is made up of yet more forms, but they're very small, and follow the surface they sit upon. The marks we actually put down to suggest their presence are the shadows they cast - this means that these marks are not necessarily lines, but rather shadow shapes that can merge together when necessary to create large swathes of black. You haven't been afraid to do that at all, which is great - but when we have large shadow shapes, what we end up relying on to communicate is the edges of those large shapes. These have to be designed, and must be the result of specific choices and decisions. This is why scribbling won't be enough.
On another note, while much of your construction is coming along great, there are some areas where you get a little sloppy. For instance, in your scorpion, the thorax/abdomen and especially the layering of those plates along its back is excellent, but you definitely skip some steps with its pincers.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Very nice work! You're presenting a great body of work, and demonstrating a pretty well developing grasp of the constructional method. I don't see any major areas where you've jumped into forms that are too complex too early, so in general things tend to feel quite solid. For the most part, you also balanced your textures well so as to keep from undermining your underlying constructions.
On the topic of texture, I do think I preferred the ones where you were a little lighter with it - for example, this coconut crab had a fairly sparse application of texture, but it fit well and helped convey the surface quality of its carapace as well as any other.
I really did like this wasp drawing, but for its abdomen, I definitely would recommend having put down a couple contour curves or ellipses along its length, to help give you reference for the actual layered features that are there. Basically, since none of those segments wrap all the way around the form, but rather are a little offset from each other, I think the layers extending towards the back ended up feeling a little off. Having drawn a couple of underlying contour lines would have helped you maintain their curvature.
I'd also recommend a few contour lines to help reinforce the praying mantis' core, as they tend to be the sort of forms don't hold their volume as easily as others.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work - there's definitely room for improvement, and that will happen with continued practice, but you're absolutely heading in the right direction. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
You've got some great stuff here. Overall your constructions are really solid. I especially liked the whip scorpion, the tick, the scorpion fly, the pillbug and the male stag beetles. Usually I keep that list to two or three things, but I kept flipping through your drawings and found more and more that I liked. Your use of texture was also well done - fairly sparse and light, enough to communicate the surface quality in most cases, but not nearly enough to distract the viewer and compete with or undermine the form and construction.
While there certainly were some that were weaker, you're demonstrating that you've clearly learned from the blunders and circumvented them in your follow up attempts. Over all you've shown a considerable improvement in your confidence and general execution of form over this set.
Sadly, I don't have a whole lot of negative to offer. Every point I think to raise, I see you having conquered it in a later drawing. What I can offer though is that for this photo, I'd recommend treating the forms of the abdomen and thorax as two separate forms each - one for the inner section, and another for the shell that wraps around it.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, and keep up the great work!
Thanks for the critique, but are you sure you don't see any problems?
Finishing up this lesson gave me some serious anxiety, and your critique was honestly not what I expected. My expectations may be off and I know you're focused on looking for improvement, but...
Some things I feel like I seriously struggled with, things that I don't think I've made good enough progress on by the end of the lesson:
Proportions: e.g. the curled pillbug's head compared to the body is off by almost double in size.
Angles and relative placement: e.g the first male stag beetle's head-box isn't centered on the body, so looks displaced and unnatural; the thoraces of most of the bugs appear to be sideways rather than front-back, which makes the bugs generally look like they're twisting.
Subtleties in the organic forms: abdominal and thoracic masses tend to be too rounded and miss things like the slight flatness of the bodies. (Pulled it off with the vinegaroon/whip scorpion, but think I messed it up later with the male stag beetles.)
The first two points aren't important. It's extremely easy to get caught up in the specifics of a given drawing, and a lot of students tend to get overly concerned with how faithfully they're reproduced their subject. Ultimately, that's not what this course is about, so when I critique work, I'm looking for other queues that suggest that you're grasping the material.
Most importantly, it's the plausibility of your constructions. Yes, you may accidentally make a form look flatter (that is, as if it'd been squished down) than it does in your source, but take away the reference image and there's not much sign that it's incorrect. The bigger problem would be if the form itself was flat (as in no longer looking three dimensional, but rather just another shape on the page).
So, while observation is important (as it influences your use of proportion, and the precision with which you match your reference), these lessons are about constructing things that feel real. The skill being trained ties in more with being able to then go on to create something new that feels like it could be real - be it from multiple reference images, or off the top of your head. You are currently showing that you're barreling down that path at great speed.
Other artists however who focus purely on observation may be able to perfectly match the proportions and features of a given photograph in high detail will fall apart when asked to draw the same creature from a different angle, or in a different pose. While at this point you may struggle with that still, you will manage far better.
That's why the next lesson ends off with hybrids of animals, where students are unable to rely entirely on reproducing a single image. So, yes - you're doing perfectly fine.
Overall, great work. You clearly have a strong understanding of 3D space, the relationships between your forms are solid, and you know exactly what you're doing.
My only concern is that your linework, at least in parks (especially the legs) tends to be more timid than it should be. We can see places where your forms are not drawn to completion, but rather made up of a few strokes, with the rest left implied. That's not a bad thing when it comes to actually producing finished drawing, but keep in mind that these drawings are just exercises to improve your understanding of form and space.
I'm not eager to have someone change their approach when they're already demonstrating a good understanding of what some of our goals are - so I'm going to leave the decision of how to go about it all up to you. I'll likely mention the matter in the same way in the future (regardless of what you choose), but I'll let you know if it becomes an issue that needs to be dealt with, or another one of those if-you-want-to deals.
Anyway, your drawings look great. Keep up the fantastic work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Your first few pages definitely are a bit of a struggle as you start to get your head around how to piece your forms together. From there however, you show considerable improvement, and come out the other side with a handful of very successful drawings and what appears to be a much stronger understanding of form and construction. Some of my favourites include the fly on the top right of this page, and most definitely your dragonflies.
A lot of people tend to get very distracted and overwhelmed by both the detail on dragon flies, as well as the complexity of their constructions, but I think you did an excellent job balancing both, and keeping your mind on what you were doing at a given moment (rather than trying to think ahead and lose focus).
There were still some areas where perhaps you did think too much about detail, too early - like this page where your construction was not quite solid before you moved onto the more 'fun stuff'. That said, you are still showing considerable improvement and are heading in the right direction.
Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, and keep in mind what I've said here about always looking past detail towards the underlying forms, and ensuring that they feel solid and believable before moving onto detail.
So one thing that stands out to me in a big way is something I actually mentioned in regards to the last lesson a couple times. Draw through your forms. If your drawing is made up of two spheres that intersect with each other, I want you to draw two full spheres that overlap - not draw one full sphere, and another that stops where it hits the first.
This is VERY important. While practicing and learning this stuff, we draw through our forms because it gives us an understanding of how EACH form sits in 3D space, and how they all relate to one another. If you only draw the portions of each component that is visible, you only end up looking at those forms like they're 2D shapes on a flat page, with no understanding of their three dimensional qualities.
Construction is all about looking at a 2D image, breaking it down into its 3D forms and reconstructing those 3D forms into a 2D drawing. Currently you are jumping from 2D to 2D, instead of 2D --> 3D --> 3D --> 2D.
There are other issues (proportions could use some work, and your textures are very, very scribbly) but this matter of construction and drawing through your forms is the most important one. I want you to try the homework again, and this time I want you to focus entirely on construction. No texture, no detail, draw through all of your forms and strive to understand how they all exist in 3D.
On, one other thing - your contour curves aren't that great. Work on getting them to wrap around forms more convincingly and use the overshooting technique mentioned there.
That actually is considerably improved on the points that I mentioned (drawing through forms, and your contour curves). I honestly didn't expect to see that, since you finished it in basically a day or less. I expected more of garbage fire, so I've been pleasantly surprised.
The next thing I'd like you to do is try and reproduce all three of the demos from the lesson. I want to see exactly how you approach these - pay special attention to your proportions, and really take your time observing your reference images. Remember that you don't want to rely at all on memory. Look at your reference, study it closely, and look away only to draw one or two very specific marks before looking back.
For this next submission, I'd like you to take several photos throughout the process, so I can see each phase of construction.
So I've identified a few things where your attempts differ from my demos. Take a look and try all three again. I'd also like to see what your lesson 1/2 warmups look like.
A lot of the things in my last critique still stand. I've also added this additional page of notes for you: https://i.imgur.com/S5TAgla.jpg. It's not that you're not improving, but that you're continually missing important instructions. You absorb some, but not most of what is expressed in my critiques and in the lesson.
I have a question - why is it that you think you're struggling to absorb what is being shared? What is it about your approach to following these demos that makes things slip by? I think reflecting on this may help you make more efficient use of these resources.
As for the warmup stuff you included, I'm definitely glad that you're doing exercises like that. In general your linework is definitely still stiff. I have brought this up before, but I'll just repeat what I probably said in the past: draw your lines with confidence, don't allow yourself to hesitate. Apply the ghosting method so you can build up muscle memory before executing the mark. The flow and smoothness of your lines is infinitely more important than your accuracy.
For your organic forms with contour ellipses/curves, make sure you vary the degree of your ellipses, as the degree will shift through the length of a form as described here, because those circular cross-sections are going to be oriented slightly differently in relation to the viewer. I also mention this in the fly notes I linked above, where I've drawn a form with contour curves towards the upper left.
That same demo shows a contour circle that sits on the "pole" of the ball form - this is important and can help show which side of the form is facing the viewer. Right now none of your organic form practices really have any such poles, so it feels like both sides are pointing away from us, which feels somewhat harder to believe.
Lastly, I did want to mention that the flow of your fly's legs are actually quite nice, and I think you're improving on that front. You do need to put the breaks on trying to add any detail though, as your constructions still aren't up to snuff.
I'm not entirely sure where to move from here, not at least until you're able to reflect on the question I posed earlier. You are absorbing some of this stuff, but it's quite slow, and the stiffness of your lines is as I mentioned before, certainly a problem. I had given you the option before to either move onto this lesson, or to start over from the beginning and deal with the more foundational issues involved in drawing stiff linework.
I think that may be the better option for you now - to go back to the beginning - but before we do that, I want to hear your thoughts on my question.
TBH. I always had problems with absorbing information. I'm schizophrenic. ( I can scan my diagnostic papers to prove it)
I'm also attending a life drawing class. And my teacher said I might not be ever good at drawing straight lines as my hands shake quite a lot. (Neurological issues. Specifically, I had such massive anxiety attacks as a child that my nerve endings kind off got a little destroyed there the psychotic episodes also contributed to that)
Admittedly enough. Right now I'm also going through Scott Robertsons "how to draw" book (which you recommended). So maybe I could just do all the exercises in that book both digitally and traditionally and then give it to you as homework? I mean they'll teach me a lot about perspective and construction which I think I need to learn/practice more before I tackle drawing animals or vehicles. I personally think that's a better idea than going through lesson 1 and 2 from the beginning. As I plan to go through Scott Robertson's book anyway. And I think it's normal for special needs students to need to do some additional reading/exercises.
As it also tackles the same issues as lesson 1 and 2 but also will help me better understand perspective. So I'll be learning two things at once.
Admittedly my ultimate goal with drawing is not to 'be a concept artist' or anything like that. I want to be able to storyboard my animations (I'm learning 3d modeling/animation through self-teaching too) and I think we're going a bit too 'perfectionistic' here.
If I could also approach the 'drawing vehicles' lesson digitally that would be great. Admittedly the huuuuge number of support lines etc really overwhelms me sometimes and I'm really scared of that lesson.
I was concerned that there may have been underlying issues that were giving you additional obstacles to deal with.
I'm not sure digging into Scott Robertson right now is the best idea - it's extremely dense (much moreso than my material), and may well just overload you. Often times trying to tackle many things at once can result in learning neither thing all that well, so it's often better to give yourself smaller things to focus on.
The fact that you're taking a life drawing class is good - when doing that, I want you to particularly try to focus on observing whatever it is you're drawing from life. Try and think about the proportions of things, and really focus in on specific elements at a time. That doesn't mean focusing on tiny details - a large element of something (like one of its major core forms) can be an element that you can try to focus in on and isolate in your mind while observing it. Observation is a skill that we don't start out with, but rather one we need to actively rewire.
I'm also not 100% convinced that you won't be able to draw a straight line. It's possible that your teacher is correct, but based on what I'm seeing in your ellipses right now, at least part of it is the fact that you are still trying to nail something accurately.
So instead of going directly back to lesson 1 (we may do that anyway in a bit), I want you to do the following for me:
Take a piece of paper, and fill it with ellipses. For each ellipse, just draw it as quickly and as confidently as you can. Don't even think if you don't have to. Just draw ellipse after ellipse, and focus only on being confident. Don't slow down. Don't try and fit it into any specific place. Avoid overlaps for clarity's sake, but if you end up overlapping here or there it's not a big deal.
Do one page filled with super imposed lines, and try to approach them similarly. Lay down your initial line for each set with a ruler (pick a variety of lines, some longer, some shorter, but all straight). Maybe even lay down all of your initial lines first so your page is really packed, and then set to work going over each one 4x. When you go over a line, I want you to take the time to place your pen at the correct starting point, think about where you want your pen to go (which would be to the other end point), then draw confidently and as quickly as you can. Don't worry if it flies off the rails, just focus on being confident and fast.
For both of these, do your best not to use your wrist at all. When you start on each task, I want you to come back here and reread the instructions for that page, and do your best to follow them.
Critiques on your work are always easy, since I've mostly said what comes into my head during your streams. I did catch one thing that I missed though - check out the spideys.
Overall you're doing great though! Since most of your drawings were from the demos, I was very interested in how that mosquito came out, and I think you did a great job applying the understanding of form and construction, and also achieved a very nice flow on those limbs. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
I feel pretty good about these, but the praying mantis was really challenging and I'm still not completely happy with that one. I'm still trying to improve on breaking down forms and confidently make marks flow through 3D space. I'm a bit confused on how to construct shadows too. Also, I think my contour curves could've flown around my forms a bit better. Thanks in advance for your critique, looking forward to it.
So there's a few things that really jump out at me in terms of both your approach, your general focus and your goals with these drawings. You're going into these drawings intending to create a well detailed piece of work at the end. As a result, you're quite focused on the texture, details and rendering of your drawing, but less so on the actual underlying construction.
You've probably noticed that drawabox is basically devoid of any information relating to lighting your major forms. There's no section on light and shadow, and so it's understandable that you were a little lost on how to approach that (as we can see from some of your experiments on the first page).
I neglect to cover that material because I find it to be a distraction. In fact, don't want students to worry about it. When it comes to a lot of fine art classes, it's one of the first things they teach - class, take out your 2B-8B pencils, here's the core shadow, the bounce light, the specular highlight, etc. I have found, however, that lighting is used as a crutch to convey the illusion of 3D form.
So, by having that element pulled away, students are forced to use the tools given in lesson 2 to capture the illusion that the flat, 2D marks they're making on their page are actually projections of an actual 3D form that exists in a 3D world, to which your piece of paper is only a window. Once one is able to really get a handle on using things like contour lines and generally drawing their forms so they give the impression of solidity, rendering light and shadow can sit on top of what is already there - like a dress on top of a mannequin, being held up by that which is already there, solid with or without its clothing.
So, when approaching this work, it is not that your abilities are lacking, but rather that what you came out to accomplish was a different task than what was requested.
Another thing I noticed was that your observation habits could use some adjustment. From what I can see, you're likely looking at your reference in small bursts, but largely focusing on your drawing. Instead, do the opposite. Get in the habit of spending 99% of your time looking at and studying your reference. Our memory tends to be unreliable, so the moment you look away from the image, your brain will go to work simplifying elements. In order to deal with that, we look long and hard at specific parts of the reference (like the nature of some major form), and then go and draw that singular element immediately - before looking back and refreshing ourselves as to where everything else is.
Currently your proportions are off due to this (for example, compare your black widow to mine and you'll notice the legs I've drawn are considerably longer), and your details/textures tend to be highly oversimplified rather than replicating existing elements that are present there. I talk much more about this in the notes on the texture challenge page, so give that a read.
Anyway, I'd like you to take another stab at this lesson, starting from rewatching the intro video and rereading the notes. Then, when you do the homework drawings, focus entirely on construction. I don't want to see any detail, rendering, texture, etc. I've found this kind of limitation to go a long way in helping students keep their focus where it needs to be.
I tried to keep all of my forms and shapes really simple but I think the only insect that really turned out accurately is the bee. I really struggled with the grasshopper and I feel like my legs need work with proportion and size, in addition to everything lacking dimension and flowing into 3D space. Oh well, I hope the construction aspect is a little better at least.
You misunderstand somewhat. We need to make sure that we start simple, in order to give our drawings a solid foundation on which we want to build. This is combined with careful observation to identify the nature and proportions of this underlying foundation. Starting simple does not mean ignoring the information that is presented to us, but rather learning to sort through it.
I regularly divide the process of drawing into construction and detail. Detail constitutes the additional touches we may add where we're not overly preoccupied with what those marks tell us about the solid forms that make up the object. Everything else, however, is construction - and it can still convey a great deal of information.
Construction consists of successive passes, building on top of the previous stage to go from a very solid foundation to something that strongly represents whatever it is that we're drawing, while maintaining that solidity throughout. Jumping into the more complex phase of an object immediately will result in that solidity being lost. Now, that doesn't mean that we should just start at the first, simplest phase and just stop.
You drew a ball, and more or less stopped. If you look at mine there, I also started with a ball, which I then carved with contour lines to clarify the various planes of the form and built on top of it to capture the segmentation and layering of exoskeleton.
In addition to this, observation is extremely important, and on many occasions you still identify the elements of things but neglect to think about their proportions, how they sit in relation to one another, and so on. We can see from this spider that you didn't actually look all that closely, and were even missing the forms of its pedipalps, among other things. You cannot expect to absorb all of this visual information at once - you MUST continuously observe and study your reference (and rely on other reference to give you information about the parts you may not be able to see), and you must continuously ask yourself questions about how these forms relate to each other.
You also are definitely struggling with the positioning of your center lines. I'm very glad that you've made big strides towards using center lines, but this shows that you do have a ways to go in terms of developing your understanding of 3D space. I hope you are still practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warmup routine - the organic form exercises in lesson 2 are very helpful with developing an understanding of how organic forms sit in space.
Lastly, you did have some constructions that were decent like the cockroach, though I would leverage some additional contour curves to help define the actual volume of its abdomen. There are some forms that simply do not communicate certain information as well as others might (like a sphere can tell us fairly easily how it sits in space without additional contour lines) but some are very easily perceived as flat without the additional support.
Anyway, I'd like you to try another four pages of insect drawings, taking into consideration what I've said here.
I feel like adding a bit more segmentation and contour lines helped with the beetles. Obviously my caterpillars proportions are off and it's really fat, but I feel like it's alright. I did have some problems with it looking 3D and flowing in space. I guess I'm not entirely sure how to make the head look like its curving and coming out in front of the body. My proportions and observational skills need work but I hope it's a step in the right direction. I'm not really happy with any of them, and these few were pretty frustrating in general, but oh well. Hope you have a good holiday and new year. Thanks for the work you put in
Overall though your grasp of form and construction is coming along well. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Excellent work! You're demonstrating a great grasp of form and construction, and are doing a pretty good job of observing your proportions and details quite carefully. There are some areas where your proportions are somewhat off (like the housefly's thorax being too big) but that's pretty normal, and you handled it well by just rolling with it.
I have just one bit of critique to offer. In a lot of the lay-ins at the end of your submssion, you have a bit of a tendency in certain places to draw the segments of your legs as stretched, but straight ellipses. This tends to mess with their general sense of flow, due to the sort of regular ballooning-and-pinching through their length. Instead, try to draw them more like sausages. I pointed this out in another student's work, so you can see what I mean in the square on this page.
Aside from that, excellent work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
The legs were the part i struggled the most. It was hard for me to ghost the outlines of another form which was not an ellipse.
I want to mention that i found a nice 3D viewer for different animals on the internet which helped me a lot at the spider for example. Maybe you want to take a look at it
That's pretty neat! I do still think there's a lot more to be gained from drawing from high-resolution photos (more accurate information, less stylization) but it's definitely an interesting tool on its own.
You're definitely moving in the right direction here. There are some less successful pages, while others demonstrate a lot of strengths. Specifically the pages where you applied additional line weight and strategically placed cast shadows, as they really go a long way to help separate out your forms and clarify the drawings.
For this page, I can't be sure but I feel like it definitely could have used more careful observation for proportions and such. That said, I do still feel like your forms and construction are still very convincing and believable, which really is the goal of the lesson.
One thing I noticed was that you have two different approaches to drawing legs throughout your drawings. For some of them, you use a sort of stretched ellipse, and for others you'll use more of a sausage. The difference is that the width throughout the length of the sausage remains fairly consistent, whereas a stretched oval will have considerably more tapering throughout.
Stick to the sausages - stretched ellipses result in the legs following a pattern of pinch, swell, pinch, swell, which ends up feeling kind of static and stiff. The sausages tend to flow much better, and maintain gesture.
So, keep that in mind as you continue to move forwards. Also, push yourself to take more care in observing your reference carefully and studying proportions, as that will continue to help push your work to the next level.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
For this page, I can't be sure but I feel like it definitely could have used more careful observation for proportions and such.
It's probably too late but I found the reference image again. After comparing the image with my drawing I noticed that the left wing needs to be sharper and higher up. Maybe you can find something I can't.
Overall there's a lot of good things here. I do have one big concern though, and it comes up as a general aspect of how you're approaching these drawings. It seems to me that you're somewhat timid, and perhaps too focused on the cleanliness and clarity of your end result. That is, you're making a lot of decisions that err towards a pretty drawing at the end over really exploring and learning about forms, imbuing them with a sense of solidity and weight, and ultimately using them to construct objects with those same qualities.
So, for example - when you draw your ball forms, which are generally fairly ellipsoidal, you're not drawing through them as covered in lesson 1 and 2. As a result, you're drawing them more slowly and less confidently, which adds little wibbles and some stiffness to them, ultimately undermining the illusion of form.
You are however drawing through your forms, which is definitely good. Though when you draw two intersecting forms, it helps considerably to actually draw the intersection that occurs between those two forms. So if two balls intersect, you're going to have a cross-sectional ellipse where they meet - if you actually draw it in, it'll reinforce the intersection itself, and in turn help solidify the two forms involved.
Another thing I want you to keep in mind is the idea that when constructing something, you're not placing flat shapes on a page and connecting them together. Think of it as though the page is a window into a boundless 3D space, into which you are inserting solid chunks of matter - like balls of marble. This means that once you place a solid form into that space, you cannot simply override it with a new line or two. You have to actually cut and carve it, which means being aware of how the resulting pieces actually sit in space, and in relation to each other. You need to grasp how everything exists in 3D, and not allow yourself to take certain shortcuts that the fact that you're drawing tends to afford you.
I'd like you to do three more pages of insect drawings, but this time I don't want to see any detail or texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on just capturing the forms themselves, and leverage everything you've learned thus far to focus on making them feel solid, and as though they carry weight. Draw entirely in felt tip pen - leave the grey markers aside for now, and focus primarily on capturing form with line. Ultimately there's a lot of additional decoration you can add (rendering, detail, etc.) on top of your forms when they're already solid, but right now I think the prospect of doing that is distracting you from what you really need to set your mind to.
[deleted]
2017-11-07 08:49
Hey,
I totally get that - I think I've been avoiding drawing over the ellipses a couple of times to make it neater rather than going for form. I'll have to keep that in mind!
I've had a free evening so I've had another go at these already. Looking forward to your feedback!
Very, very nice. You caught onto exactly what I was saying. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Just a couple things to keep in mind:
Definitely way too many contour lines on your fly's head. There definitely is a point where you get diminishing returns on them, and building a wireframe doesn't really end up doing you a lot of good. I think you managed the density quite nicely elsewhere, esepcially on the last page, but here it's definitely too much.
Watch those contour curves' curvature on the wasp's abdomen. They're almost there, but they're not quite hooking back around enough to give the impression that they continue along the rounded surface on the other side.
Overall, the biggest discovery for me has been that I need to loosen up when drawing. Often I focus so much on flaws that drawing becomes a big chore.
In the middle of drawing the bugs, I decided to accept that everything I draw will be a bit crap and to fill the page with "lovable monsters". Weirdly enough, accepting that every drawing will be seriously flawed somehow helps me draw better. Even the lines flow smoother.
Very nice work! You definitely improved in confidence over the set, and as a result your constructions end up coming out more solidly. One thing I noticed early on was that you were trying to draw very faintly, and then clean up your linework with a successive pass. The thing about cleaning up linework is that your next pass ends up inherently being much slower and more deliberate, and as a result the lines tend to stiffen up. It's not something I recommend at this stage, because we still want to focus on being able to draw everything smoothly and boldly - so we want to avoid multi-stage cleanup processes like that and focus instead on drawing our initial forms as confidently as possible.
You may be considering the clean up process as being the same thing as adding line weight, but it's not. Line weight is more about clarifying very specific overlaps by applying additional thickness to portions of existing lines, rather than the entirety of a long stroke. Because of the limited length, it's actually fairly straight forward to apply line weight this way.
I think your wasps were probably the most successful of the lot, due to the shift towards being much bolder with your initial linework. The forms feel considerably more tangible and weighted, and there's no sense that you're trying to hide anything.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - as you move onto the next lesson, definitely push yourself to continue this trend towards greater confidence in your approach, and try to avoid any situation where you're actively trying to make certain lines get "hidden" later on. Techniques like manipulating line weight will result in that, but you don't want to concern yourself with what is being hidden while drawing a given mark. You want to leave that for later.
I'm a bit surprised by the wasp comment. I considered them to be the most troublesome of the lot.
If I understand correctly, you think that I'm worrying too much about making a "finished" drawing and not focusing enough on solid construction.
The wasp in the lower-left is the only one where it's just pure construction - no fancy stuff on top. Is that why it's more successful?
It sounds like I need to hide all pens but one. No more switching from Micron 01 to 05 whenever I feel like it. Playing around with "Let's go over everything with a brush pen" is making it harder to focus on the fundamentals. Is that right?
That's exactly right. Everything else becomes a distraction, and it's easy to get caught up in what you're going to do, rather than what you're doing at that moment. And yes - stick to the 05.
Some of these I really enjoyed and some felt like such a grind - the spider was so hard to study because they are so creepy. I had trouble with the ladybug just trying to get a decent ellipse to start with that even looked like a ladybug body. Also found the 'bugs have triangles' notes really useful for these exercises.
Anyways, thanks in advance for checking these out!
A lot of these are quite well done. The fly on the first page is an especially good example of balancing form/construction against detail and texture. Other constructions were somewhat less good (like the scorpion), and the texture on your... spider dog? was definitely very scribbly. Don't scribble!
The wasp's abdomen on this page really demonstrates a great, more subtle grasp of form in how those segments curve as they hook back along the underside. That's a very good sign as far as your understanding of 3D space goes, and your personal belief in the illusions you're producing.
I have just a few recommendations to make:
Don't let yourself get too caught up in texture. I definitely see this with some of your drawings, like your ladybugs, where your focus from the beginning is producing a clean, pretty drawing. If you neglect your construction in favour of that, your end result will be mediocre at best, and worse still, you won't get the same value out of the exercise. That's what this is after all - an exercise. We're not in it for the drawing at the end.
Try and keep in mind that the act of adding a form to a drawing is not that you're just putting a mark down on a page - you're placing a solid mass into a 3D world, and once that mass is there, you have to deal with it somehow. This beetle isn't bad, but I did notice that you used the initial abdomen's ellipse as a more of a guideline/experiment, and then you draw more confidently around it. That is certainly one way of going about things, but it treats your underlying construction as more of a sketch, marks on a flat page, than actual solid forms you're building up. You want to make sure that you respect their solidity, and take that into consideration when adding new forms alongside them.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, just keep what I've mentioned here in mind.
Thank you for your critique! I appreciate the time you take doing this. I will keep this in mind as I move on and as I practice exercises from earlier lessons. Sometimes I ghost my starting ellipse or shape way too many times. I need to learn to commit and work with what I've put on the paper.
So your drawings do get better through the set, but there is definitely still a strong tendency to flatten your constructions out. Also, one extremely important part of construction is to draw complete forms. When drawing the segments of your legs, you draw them more like layered scale (the next segment has a start and end point, rather than being a full, solid loop. When you don't draw things to completion, they will come out flat.
Also, try and draw your leg segments more like flowing segments (as mentioned in this demo, closer to the bottom).
Aaaaand it helps a lot to draw a center line along the surface of your forms, helps both to keep things aligned and also to ensure that you're giving the appropriate amount of volume to your forms.
I think it'd be a good idea to do another three pages of insect drawings. Focus on construction, don't add any detail/texture. When you do deal in texture (later), stop scribbling. Scribbling is not a texture - texture needs to be carefully observed and intentionally executed. But again, leave that alone for now, focus only on drawing forms in whose solidity you fully believe. 90% of this is creating an illusion (of form, that you're drawing 3D forms in a 3D world and not marks on a flat page) and then buying into that lie yourself.
No need to apologize for taking your time. Rushing is not a good thing, and each submission is going to take time for me to critique. Better that you give yourself the opportunity to read through my critique carefully, so you can successfully apply everything I've mentioned there.
That said, there's one thing that jumps out at me that I did point out previously that you seem to have missed. It was in the hand-written notes I provided.
Your cast-shadows should not be drawn as one continuous blob, or anything of the sort. If a line's trajectory changes dramatically, then you should be breaking it up into individual drawing movements, not striving to keep them going.
I do think that you may generally be rushing things a little. Take more time in observing your reference and identifying different forms that sit there. You can even try drawing on top of your references to help figure out what forms exist (doing it digitally, using tracing paper, or printing stuff out and drawing on it) before drawing the object.
Also from the looks of it, your organic forms with contour curves aren't coming out as well as they could. Watch the degrees of your ellipses read these notes if you haven't already, or if you've forgotten. They're used to communicate the orientation of those cross-sections of the form, and this will shift as we move down along a given organic form.
Lastly, use line weight to clarify which forms overlap others. Looking at the page I redlined (or purple lined as the case may be), the insect on the bottom's torso is quite light relative to the legs, so their interaction/overlap is not at all clear. This serves to confuse the viewer.
Ultimately when I say to focus on construction, simplicity is a strong starting point as it allows you to lay down a strong foundation. That does not however mean that this is all construction is. It is a series of phases, on which you build up your forms and break things down to convey all of the major forms and elements that exist in an object.
I'd like to see another four pages of insects. Take your time, and spend most of that time observing your reference rather than drawing. For every second of drawing, there should be nine seconds of observation and study, trying to understand what it is you're looking at before you attempt to reproduce a given form on the page.
So I definitely think that the way you've kind of spread out the work over time is hindering you. I totally get that you've got school, finals, etc. and you can only devote so much time to this kind of work, but as a result, you are definitely forgetting a lot of important concepts covered in earlier lessons.
That isn't to say you aren't having some successes - you certainly are. Also, a lot of the mistakes I see you making are more a matter of forgetting not to approach things in a particular way.
I've outlined all the major issues I've seen from this set on this page of notes. Many of these points are things I've mentioned in previous redline notes I've given you - it's very important to keep revisiting the material especially when you've got long gaps between drawing sessions.
The especially important points listed there are:
1) Drawing complete forms, not just letting them stop when something else overlaps them
4) Respecting your construction and not using line weight as an excuse to replace those construction lines. Every form you add is like adding a solid mass of marble to a 3D world - once it's there, you can't just ignore it. You need to deal with it. So then drawing a line that deviates from the existing construction without adding the appropriate structure/scaffolding to support it will result in your drawing looking flat.
5) Solidity comes from simplicity. You cannot start a form out like some complicated blob, it needs to be simple. You can then build up and combine multiple simple forms to create more complex ones that still hold onto the same sense of solidity, but you cannot just jump into a more complicated stage and expect it not to come out flat.
Also, another area you definitely need to think about more is observation. Look more, draw less. You're dealing with a lot of guesswork in some of these. Others are better demonstrations of observation, but you've got a significant number that show the kind of sloppiness that comes with simply not taking your time and paying attention. It's normal to become overwhelmed by these things, because there's a lot to discern and take apart. We usually respond to being overwhelmed by just guessing and drawing and hoping for the best. Instead, respond by stopping, taking a step back and looking closer.
Lastly, how big are you drawing? It's hard to tell the scale of your pages, though some of them look kind of stiff and cramped. The wolf spider looks like a good size, but in many of the others your linework tends to look heavier in comparison - it may just be because you're pressing harder, or because they really are just proportionally quite small.
So instead of asking you to do a bunch of pages again, I'm going to ask for just one. One drawing of an insect - preferably something you find to be easy, but not done from one of my demos. If you can apply the principles I've mentioned in my redline notes, I will mark the lesson as complete. Like before, no detail, no texture. Construction only.
While you're drawing it, I want you to take pictures at every stage of construction.
I'm a man of much patience! I'm not going to get angry at you, but I will cut on occasion with a scalpel. That shit hurts.
So there are two primary issues here. First off, you picked a downright shitty reference image. It's very low res, and it's hard to tell what's going on. If you're using google image search, hit 'tools' and set the size to large.
The other issue is related to the first one, but is definitely a problem of its own - you've got very clear signs here that you're not really looking at your reference image all that much. There are basic proportional issues, which aren't entirely abnormal, but if you look at the back leg (the one that bends into a triangle and tucks back under the abdomen), your version of this is totally different.
I stressed the importance of observation in my last critique. I'm not really sure what the deal is - it was far less of an issue here - my only guess is that you've gotten rusty and are rushing ahead with your drawing despite that.
Here are my notes for this one: https://i.imgur.com/ZArIDCH.png. Try again. Pick a higher resolution reference image and take your time actually looking at what you're doing.
Okay you did pretty well here. The construction of the body is solid, the only thing I didn't like at all is how you handled those eyes. They're not just little dots, they're actually solid forms.
I do get why you drew them in solid black though, because you were trying to replicate the colour you saw. You gotta keep pushing yourself to think in terms of form, ignore the local colours, all the lighting and the rendering. Just focus on what you actually know to be there.
Anyway, like I said - you did a pretty good job, so I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. The next lesson will continue to push your ability to observe your reference, and to think about things in terms of form. I strongly recommend that when you do the next lesson's homework, that you focus again purely on construction and ignore texture for now.
There's a lot of great stuff here, and what's more important is that you demonstrate a lot of development in your skills and understanding of form/construction over the set. Earlier on in the set, your constructions were somewhat weaker, but you steadily improved upon it. As far as your later work goes, I'm especially impressed by this last page - the way you've layered the forms, establishing a strong sense of solidity and volume while also maintaining the general flow and fluidity is very impressive.
The only recommendation I want to make is that on pages like this one, you've treated the underlying construction as more of a rough sketch. I want you to consider every single form you put down as being a solid form. They should be drawn confidently, without trying to go out of your way to make them faint or hidden. Think of it as though you're placing a solid mass of marble into a 3D world - once it's there, you cannot "override" it with a different line, because it's effectively not just a bunch of marks on a flat piece of paper. You have to respect and abide by what already has been added to the world. Adding line weight isn't a means to 'clean things up' in this way, either - line weight is to be applied locally to sections of lines in order to clarify very specific overlaps, and make it clearer as to which form comes in front of which.
Anyway, generally you're doing pretty well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Better. Watch your leg segments though - for some of them you're not drawing them to completion, you're stopping them where they get hidden by other forms, so they don't end up retaining enough solidity.
Hi uncomfortable. Here's my Lesson 4. I ran out of fineliners for the last drawing, so it is drawn with charcoal. I hope you will overlook this little break of the rules.
You've got a lot of nice constructions going on. I like the house fly a lot, the ants and cricket are decently done, and so on - but I'm going to use that one extra page to hammer home a few important points that you seem to have forgotten about in that particular page.
Take a look at these notes. Basically, always make sure you're working from simple to complex, and always draw through all of your forms. We're drawing complete forms, not letting them come to a stop where they get blocked by something else. I do think that the texture/detail in that praying mantis was probably a big distraction for you, and you were probably preoccupied with that when you should have been thinking more about construction. For that reason, it can help quite a bit to just do drawings where you don't even intend to put any texture in later on, as then you're left with nothing but construction to think about.
Anyway, overall you're still doing well, so keep those points in mind and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
The first 8 pages were done a little while ago, with the remaining 6 (from the Rhino Beetle onwards) were done much more recently. (In-between I went through the ctrl-paint unplugged tutorials)
I also tried to push myself to experiment with texture & detail a bit more with the recent pages.
You're doing quite well. In general, the drawings where you focused primarily on construction were more successful than those where you pushed more into the realm of detail and texture. You're doing alright on that front, but I do want you to always remember that construction is paramount. People often have a tendency to get caught up in knowing that they're going to move onto detail, so they'll put less attention towards their construction. Always treat your drawings the same, and consider detail/texture to be more of an after thought.
Another issue I noticed was in the very last page. Notice how you started out by laying in those two ellipses, but then ignored them for the rest of the drawing. In general, you don't want to be treating your phases of construction as being something you can easily ignore. Treat it as though you're adding solid masses of marble to a 3D world - if you want to change them after the fact, you need to cut and carve into them, which is a process where you're aware of how the resulting pieces (the piece you're cutting away, and the piece you're leaving behind) sit in 3D space. If you allow yourself to treat the forms you draw with less regard, then you will fail to fully convince yourself of their solidity, and in turn will fail to convince the viewer of that same thing.
Aside from that, really great work. A lot of your constructions are very solid and well put together - I especially like the fly and the scorpion. The weevil was also one of your more successful detailed ones.
I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
I can definitely see a hell of a lot of improvement in your understanding of form and construction, even across this set. So great work with that! Overall you're demonstrating a sort of internalized grasp of 3D space, which is definitely what we're looking for.
Your textures do still leave something to be desired, but that will improve with time and practice. This page in particular felt quite disorganized. Try and consider where your focal point is, and how you want to guide the eye around your piece. Also, lesson 5's got some tips on how to approach drawing fur/hair.
The only other thing I wanted to mention is that you can probably ease up on those contour curves. A couple here and there is fine, but try not to suggest that there's a sort of wireframe thing going on. Things started to get a little excessive on this one.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
I had some problem with my line weight from the 3rd page because I had to change my pen ink. It's getting better, but I could felt a loss of quality in my line weight for a while.
Fantastic work. You're demonstrating an excellent sense of form and construction here. There are however some pages where I think you get too preoccupied with making a clean, pretty drawing and as a result skip over important steps. For example, on your scorptions, you're not drawing each form in its entirety (like the segments of its claws) - you draw them until they get blocked by a neighbouring form, which results in those shapes/forms being more complex, and therefore less solid. Always follow the process of working from simple to complex, especially when that requires you to draw through your forms. The end result is unimportant, and it can be organized and clarified through lineweight.
While it is important to be mindful of line economy, it's more about making sure the lines you put down are worth something, rather than just trying to cut corners.
I really liked this page of spiders. Overall you were pretty light on texture (which is totally fine), though where you did add textures you had a bit of a tendency to rush through it a little - in the future, try not to use hatching, and try to look more closely at what kind of textures are present on the surfaces you're drawing. When you draw marks for those textures, remember that the marks we see are the result of shadows being cast by small forms - these shadows can blend together into larger areas of pure black. Texture, like everything else, should always look deliberate and planned. You can read more about this on the texture challenge page.
Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. While I did have some things to say here, you're still doing very well. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Overall you're doing pretty well, and your forms are generally coming out feeling quite solid and your constructions believable. There are just a couple things I want to point out.
Firstly, I wanted to remark that on pages like this one, there seems to be a little bit of detachment between the initial forms of your construction (like that fainter ball/ellipse/thing that you started with) and your final forms. Keep in mind that every form you add to a construction is like a chunk of marble being added to a 3D scene. Once it's there, you have to deal with it somehow, and ignoring it so you can replace it with other later forms is going to undermine the solidity of your construction more times than not. Get into the habit of accepting that these forms are present, and build up around them rather than letting them float arbitrarily.
For your cerasini nymphs, I did notice that you were a bit neglectful of the segmentation of their carapaces - the layering there is a great way to describe the curvature of their forms (free contour lines). A lot of objects will have freebies like this, so it's important to take advantage of them - not just to be accurate, but also to help convey the illusion of solidity. This is how I'd have approached it, with considerably more attention paid to that exoskeletal layering.
Anyway, you're generally doing a good job with the rest of these. I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Thanks for your feedback, I see what you mean about the carving and the freebies to take advantage of. Your response nymph is annoyingly good. Ill crack on with the next lesson! Thanks for your rapid reply!
Overall you're doing a really good job. You're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of form and construction in most areas, resulting in objects that look and feel believable. There are two things that I'd like to bring to your attention however.
Firstly, when scanning your work, you've got the contrast ramped way up, and it makes it considerably more difficult for me to see your underlying construction lines, as the fainter ones tend to get blasted away. So while I can see hints that you are drawing through all of your forms properly, it's not always that easy to tell.
The other issue - which actually pertains to your approach to construction - is about this rhinoceros beetle, specifically how you've gone about building up its head. The way you approached it suggests that you're building it up in two dimensions - that is, blocking in the silhouette, rather than actually considering the forms that are present. Because of this, you end up with no options but to jump straight to the more complex stage of construction (the horn, the swooping carapace of the head, etc.) and as a result those elements end up lacking the structure.
Instead of thinking of the head mass as being something that encompasses the entirety of the head, think of it as the core building block, on top of which the rest of the head is constructed. Like a ball that holds everything else together.
Aside from that, the rest of your constructions are quite well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
I did struggle a lot with rhinoceros beetle's head. I was aware of sloppy 2D border that I carved out of the sphere, and could not quite wrap my head around doing it any other way. I will work on improving that.
About the images, I have been using an app called iScanner to take pictures. It has some cool features for border detection and perspective correction. Looks like when I have flash turned on(which i had to do because of low lit room), it does some image enhancement that increases the contrast. I will make sure to upload better pictures next time.
Overall you're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of construction. I went and looked at the steps for the beetle that you'd posted, and I'd say it's the best example there of a good understanding of how your forms sit in 3D space, and how they all connect together.
I have a couple things to point out though:
You're generally not drawing through most of your ellipses. You should be doing that for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons, without exception.
At times your linework can be a bit vague at the earlier stages. You do cover this up as you go along, but the result is that the underlying construction doesn't always end up as solid as it could and should be. This has an impact on the resulting drawing. Take more care with things like contour lines (making sure they go from edge to edge and hook around confidently so they appear to continue on along the other side - it wasn't quite achieved in your dragon fly, for example, overshooting your curves a little as they hook around can help here), and generally take more time planning your marks. Vagueness tends to come from rushing into the execution phase too early.
If you look at the dragonfly's tail, you constructed it with a ball that has been stretched quite dramatically. In most cases, such forms are better off handled with sausages. This applies to legs too. I explain this in one of the insect video demos, here.
Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There certainly are areas for you to grow, but you're heading in the right direction. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Thank you! I definitely noticed the problems you mentioned with the contour lines, but I hadn't picked up on the issues you mentioned with the ball vs. sausage shape, that's a great point. As for drawing through the ellipses, I don't know at what point I dropped that habit but I'll get back on it. Thanks again!
I've been working hard on these critters all week.
I now find myself looking at everyday objects and thinking of how I could deconstruct it or simplify them and then draw using the construction method. I've caught some type of "bug"
Things definitely start off kind of weak, but you certainly get the ball rolling and end up with a pretty good grasp of construction. The biggest challenge you were facing at the beginning was definitely proportion. Over the course of the set, you improve on this front considerably, while building up a better understanding of how your forms convey solidity, how they relate to one another, and even your use of texture.
Your last two pages are quite well done. I do have one thing to point out however - you've got to be more deliberate with the lines you put down, and you must draw through each one entirely. Take a look at this page. The construction is solid, but we can clearly see that the lines of the abdomen distinctly stop where they get overlapped by the form of the thorax. You're purposely expending mental energy to stop yourself from drawing marks beyond these points. Drawing each form in its entirety gives you a much stronger grasp of how they sit in space, which is ultimately what we're forcing you to internalize. You won't have to do this forever, but I want you to do it in all of my lessons. Additionally, by spending that additional focus on stopping your lines early, you're also taking away the resources your brain could be applying to the other problems you're attempting to solve here.
Aside from that, you're doing great. Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Thanks so much for the feedback. I do need to work on being more deliberate and selective with the lines I put down; its something Ive been being mindful of lately. Ill focus on your suggestions, and apply them in lesson 5!
There's definitely some good here, but also some things I want to bring to your attention.
First and foremost, in many of these drawings you're allowing detail and texture to distract you from construction. When you do decide that you're going to move forward with texture, you seem to have that on your mind while working on the earlier steps. As a result, your constructions end up sloppier, less solid, and perhaps end up being given less time before you jump the fence and frolic in the fields of detail.
Detail and texture are irrelevant. They are not what you're here to learn, and they are not the focus of these lessons. First and foremost, before touching any texture or even giving it any thought, you must have a solid construction. Then you can decide whether or not you want to take it further, but not before then.
I like how you handled the segmentation of the body for this grasshopper, (the lines wrap very nicely around that rounded form, giving it a sense of solidity) but it's very clear that you did not observe what you were drawing very carefully when drawing it. After all, you've given it a head and an abdomen, but no thorax. In the lesson, I explain the three components of the body, so you should have already been looking for them.
For this beetle, it's definitely a good start, but there are two major issues with it. First of all, you should be drawing through all of your ellipses. You didn't do this for the three major masses, and as a result the shapes are drawn more slowly, less confidently, and are generally uneven and don't give off a sense of solidity. Secondly, always work from simple to complex. The way you've handled the legs there definitely started off way too complex - focus on establishing the flow of the forms, then add additional forms on later to add bulges and other matters of greater visual complexity.
Overall I think your spiders were quite well done, especially the one on the bottom there. I have one major issue I want to mention however - when drawing the legs, you drew them in segments, where the lines of a given segment would stop as soon as they hit the previous one (you didn't draw the lines where they'd be hidden by other forms). I absolutely want you to draw through all of your forms, regardless of overlaps. If you draw incomplete forms, they will not feel as solid, and this will influence the resulting construction.
One day you'll be able to draw those forms focusing only on that which is visible, but for now each drawing is merely an exercise in learning to wrap your head around constructing complex objects from simple forms, and in developing a stronger sense of 3D space.
Lastly, this drawing has a lot of really cool texture work going on, but the abdomen is totally flat. Those layered segments should have been wrapping around the rounded abdomen (which itself wasn't really being sold as a solid 3D form to begin with), but they didn't seem to demonstrate a good grasp of how that form existed in 3D space. So, that lack of understanding of the form was then communicated to the viewer. So construction is important!
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do four more pages of construction-only drawings. No detail, no texture. I think your detail work is actually quite good, especially near the end of the lesson, but you need to build it up on top of a stronger foundation of form.
I gotta say, you are going CRAZY with those contour ellipses. I had to go back and see if I specifically told you to add more contour lines.
Whenever a student starts overusing contour lines like this, it raises the question whether or not they understand what they are trying to achieve with them. Usually when a student doesn't really grasp the goal of the technique, they tend to just go to town on adding them, hoping that it'll work out in the end.
Contour lines have a very specific purpose. They run along the surface of a form, and in doing so, convey how that surface turns through 3D space. In doing so, it reinforces the volume and illusion of three dimensionality.
Even just ONE contour line has a great deal of impact, but the more you add, the smaller your returns and the stiffer your construction gets. Instead of adding a wealth of them, think through each individual one you draw and add as few as you can to achieve the effect you're after. Plan them out, consider their positioning and always work towards a specific goal. Don't just add them for the sake of having more.
As far as form goes, you are definitely doing much better - they do feel solid, and that is definitely in a big part due to the contour ellipses. Of course, the downside is that your drawings are extremely messy and you're being quite wasteful when it comes to line economy.
The other thing I wanted to point out was in regards to how you drew legs in the first page. I outlined it, along with a few points relating to contour lines, in these notes.
You are improving, but you need to balance how you approach things and perhaps think more and draw less. Right now you're doing a lot on each drawing, but also are doing each individual component with a little more sloppiness than you ought to. Uneven ellipses, lines getting hairy and generally being less planned out. Slow down, think about what you're doing, and invest more time into the planning phase.
Not bad! I do feel like the main bodies feel a little squished - not flat, but like their forms despite being obviously three dimensional have been pancaked. Not this one though. I'm quite fond of how you handled its legs. One suggestion that can help as well is to place a contour curve right where the segments of the legs meet. Keep the lengths of those tubes clear, but reinforce the joints to kind of show how those two forms intersect.
Oh, I can see you're still not drawing through all of your ellipses.. but you are getting most of them.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Hooooot damn, that is some nice work. Unfortunately I have no real criticism to offer. Your use of form is spot on, your constructions are are broken down into the simplest of components and maintain a strong sense of fluidity while remaining solid in every way.
I mean, I could offer that you should always remember to construct cylindrical things around a minor axis. On that last page, you've got some branchy things that could benefit from that - also watch the way your contour curves wrap around said branchy things, as it's not quite as good as elsewhere in your drawings. Or rather, I think the other drawings benefit from that sort of segmented look, whereas a branch is a continuous tube, so the contour curves on it need to appear as though they are running directly on the surface of the form, not marking dips within it like you'd see between segments on an exoskeleton.
I did mention in my last critique that you should draw bigger. I'd say here that your most successful drawings were the bigger ones. Some of your smaller ones were perfectly fine, while, say - the praying mantis on the top of page 3 felt a bit scrunched.
Anyway, really great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Good golly, your forms and constructions have really improved by leaps and bounds with this one. If we compare them to the cactus I called out in your lesson 3 work, the sense of weight and solidity of these insects is miles ahead. Each one feels tangible and three dimensional, without becoming stiff. Your use of line weight has gone a long way to really build a cohesive sense that these are not merely individual lines on a page, but marks that cannot be separated from one another.
I really love the legs on this spider - their flow is spot on, and they have a wonderful sense of direction. You've really done a phenomenal job here. I also like the fact that you pushed some experimentation with texture and detail, but maintained a sort of subtle, light touch to it, rather than going to town. Because of this your constructions stay strong throughout, while still managing to communicate the presence of different surface qualities.
I'd say the furry thorax of the bee was probably your weakest area. In the animals lesson, you'll see some notes on how to approach fur. You actually were heading right in that direction, so you may have already seen them. I believe the trick here would just be to try and draw fewer tufts, and focus more on the individual groupings as they break the silhouette. If you decrease the number but take more time in designing them, your impact should be greater.
Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
To be entirely honest with you, I'm a bit on the fence as to whether or not I should critique this submission. Ultimately I have decided to go ahead and do it, but the reason I'm conflicted over it is that you haven't followed one of the most important rules of these lessons:
Draw the entire thing in ink. I don't want to see the kind of loose, sketchy linework you've done in pencil, and I don't want to see you going back over your drawing with a slow-and-steady hand to line it in pen again. Even when adding line weight normally, you should never be going over the entirety of a shape - line weight should be applied locally to certain areas to clarify specific overlaps, rather than to clean up or replace existing lines.
Your work has its strong points and its weak areas. You've got some drawings, or even some parts of drawings that really push a strong grasp of form, while others come out entirely flat without much application of the principles of construction. I felt it was best to convey my observations by writing directly on your work.
I'd like you to do another four pages of drawings, with only a 0.5mm fineliner this time. Think more about each individual form that goes into your construction, and focus on starting your constructions off as simply as possible. Simple is always best when it comes to conveying the illusion of form. You'll notice that in the little example doodles I added to my notes there, my forms often start off as completely even ellipses with no wavy lines or additional visual detail. Keeping them evenly shaped keeps them solid - I can then build on top of them, add the odd contour line, etc. to achieve the specific arrangement I require.
Also make sure you draw through all of those forms - explore how forms connect to one another, even where you wouldn't be able to see them. You did this in some places (in pencil), but not in others, and the latter group tended to come out quite flat.
Due to my diploma work I didn't have as much free time as I'd like to. It took some days but I managed to finish the assignment. However I think I need to makes my strokes cleaner. Here is the assignment: https://imgur.com/a/ZLQxb
You've got some nice work here, though I do have a few points to bring to your attention that should help you develop your skills.
Overall your grasp of form is coming along well, as is your general use of construction. You're showing a good understanding of the components that go into a more complex object, and are quite mindful of how they connect to one another. This establishes a good sense of 3D space.
There are a couple things that jump out at me as holding you back a little however.
Your linework is quite timid, and relies heavily on you drawing with a light hand at first, drawing many marks for a single line, and 'choosing' one to emphasize. This ultimately undermines the solidity of your forms and makes things look a little chicken scratchy, or at least sketchy. We want to ensure that every mark we put down is the result of conscious planning beforehand, ghosting, and ultimately a confident execution. When we draw timidly, it's because we don't feel confident in our ability to nail something beforehand. We draw lighter, and do more of our thinking directly on the page, and it really gives the impression that we're not buying into the illusions we're creating. This in turn erodes the effectiveness of that illusion for the viewer.
Commit to your decisions. Part of drawing confidently means committing to the marks we've made. Our marks aren't all going to come out as we want them to, but we need to learn to roll with the punches. Demonstrating that you are of two minds in a drawing will again, undermine the illusion of solidity. Take a look at this beetle. Notice how at the far left of its abdomen, you've got two curves - one goes a little further out, and another darker one cuts across the original shape that was placed on the page. This "trimming" doesn't take how the forms exist in 3D space into consideration at all - it acts on the shapes that are on the page, and as such it reinforces the idea that these are just flat marks on a flat piece of paper.
You might be drawing too many contour lines. They're not too bad because you're drawing them faintly, but in essence, since that undermines the methodology we're after here, you're going to have to be more economical with your contour curves. For the most part, a lot of those curves aren't really contributing anything of their own. One or two will usually do the job along a fairly long length of form, and any more you add after that will have drastically diminishing returns.
Always work from simple to complex. Generally you're doing a good job of this, but the abdomen of this wasp stood out to me. It doesn't look like there was any sort of underlying construction onto which the layers of segmentation were constructed. The form itself came out quite flat as well because of the inherent complexity to it - it should have been broken down more from the outset.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You bring a lot of great stuff to the table, and have a good grasp of how 3D space works, but you've got to work on being more decisive. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Uncomfortable
2017-09-06 00:39
Old thread got locked, those eligible for critiques from me can submit their work here.
Ozelotl
2017-09-11 22:46
Hi Uncomfortable,
it's been a while but I managed to finish my insects:
Imgur album
At the start struggled a lot with getting proportion and measurement right (as any mistake is so much more obvious than with plants) and also with more complex 3d forms (how to add forms onto each other or carve one form from another) so I took a lot of time to practice.
The last two pages of layins I did while looking only at the references I had already used so I had to rotate the insects in my mind. I thought this might prepare me a little for the hybrids exercise but it was really hard. I need more boxes and cylinders! :D
I am still very much overwhelmed by detail and texture, I might have a look at the texture challenge while practicing animals if I pass this lesson.
Cheers and thank you once again for your time,
Ozelotl
Uncomfortable
2017-09-12 20:25
Your constructions are excellent. You may have struggled with your proportions, but I think you certainly showed them who's boss, as you did a pretty good job with them too. I'm particularly impressed with the fact that you managed to capture a very strong sense of form without neglecting any construction lines or ending up with anything that felt too stiff. You balanced the solidity of those forms with the flow of the various limbs, and applied line weight to great effect.
You certainly made some strong efforts with the texture and detail, and as far as I'm concerned, you are heading in the right direction. There definitely is a lot of personal experimentation that is necessary to really figure out how you want to tackle that. The one piece of advice I want to offer is always to remember that the detail and texture rests on the surface of your other forms, and end up playing the role of contour lines of a sort, whether you want them to or not.
As a result, they can really help reinforce existing forms, or they can undermine what you'd already established by contradicting them. One example of this is the black widow (on the left side of the page), where its abdomen ended up looking a little deformed once texture was applied. This factor will definitely come into play when deciding what details should be included and which should be left out. After all, as this is a drawing you are creating, you can choose what will help you communicate what you're after, and what won't. You're not married to reality, but reality happens to give you a lot of great information that you can choose to use or ignore.
Anyway, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Tackling the texture challenge next certainly wouldn't be a bad idea, though try not to grind on it too much. Perhaps hammering out 5 to 10 of them would be a good way to get a handle on what is conveyed on the notes there, but after that you should definitely work on them in parallel with lesson 5, as it's the sort of topic that should be tackled over time (letting your brain rest in between). The time you spend away from the challenge ends up being as valuable as the time you spend on it, especially if you're paying greater attention to the objects around you in your daily life.
Ozelotl
2017-09-13 18:01
Perhaps I unconsciously tried to squash the scary spider? :D
Thank you for your critique, that sounds like a good plan!
You will hopefully see more from me soon :)
Turkopauto
2017-09-12 20:18
The start of school is keeping me busy but I still try to do something daily. (Except for this thursday, Divinity Original Sin 2 finally gets released).
Did an extra page because I didn't stick to the original construction of the honeybee (spiky one) and messed it up.
In 2 parts because of Imgur's MB limit.
PART 1 : http://imgur.com/a/tU9eg
PART 2 : http://imgur.com/a/vKn1f
Also damn /u/Ozelotl for setting the bar so high
Ozelotl
2017-09-13 18:02
Ah divinity was a large factor of motivation for finishing this lesson though.
Congrats on pushing through! :)
Turkopauto
2017-09-13 19:12
Divinity (SO CLOSE) and seeing your awesome submission pushed me to finish it on an otherwise tiring day.
Uncomfortable
2017-09-13 18:23
There's a lot of good stuff here. There's also room for improvement, but you're definitely going in the right direction. One of your drawings that I particularly love is this fly (on the left side). It's very clear that you fully understand how each form there exists in relation to its neighbours, and you're entirely convinced that what you've drawn is three dimensional. Your legs also flow very nicely in a way that maintains their gestural flow without appearing stiff.
I do believe that where your drawings are weakest is primarily where you get a little too caught up in the detail, or perhaps too overwhelmed by all of the information present in your reference image. This is a fairly normal issue, where we find it difficult to push through and see the simplest elements. This can cause us to rely more on what we remember seeing, rather than drawing what is actually present, and as a result our drawings become less believable. The scorpion is an example of this, where the forms feel much less solid and sturdy, and the contour details don't quite reinforce the illusion you're trying to achieve. This bee is also another case of the same. It's primarily a matter of pushing yourself to observe your reference more carefully, and forcing yourself not to rely on your memory. Human memory is after all quite faulty, and we need to always push ourselves to look back and forth between our drawing and our reference in order to assure ourselves that the marks we put down reflect something that is actually present. It is also necessary when it comes to capturing the specific nuances of our forms and shapes, and the relationships between them.
With that bee, I definitely see you trying to tackle the furry/hairy texture in a few different ways, and I'm very pleased to see the experimentation. Neither approach really worked out quite well, though your attempt on the right side to focus more on the silhouette was definitely closer to the mark.
In that particular case, it's very important to 'design' each tuft of fur specifically, rather than allowing yourself to draw a continuous back-and-forth zigzag. Since each tuft carries so much more weight (being on the silhouette of the form), you need to think much more about how each one is presented. Again, it also becomes a situation of less-is-more, where drawing fewer tufts but taking more care with them will be more effective than creating a continuous but repetitive pattern all around. There will of course be more opportunities to tackle that when drawing animals.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There certainly is room for growth, as there always is, but I think you should be ready to move onto the next lesson.
Turkopauto
2017-09-13 18:58
Thanks for the swift response, don't suppose there are any exercises outside of drawing a lot that would help with improving observational skills?
Also feels nice to get something (somewhat) right after the dumpster fire of my plants haha.
Uncomfortable
2017-09-13 19:11
To be honest, it's all just doing observational studies. The more you practice drawing an object as it appears (and not as you think you see it), the better you'll get at it.
Tarrazan
2017-09-15 23:10
Here it is : https://imgur.com/a/PzpoQ
I honestly thought i did well this time...Until i uploaded them and looked at them again. I just can't seem to get a grasp of the details. I see your way of drawing details and i look at some of your other students drawings and i just can't seem to 'get it' and i really don't know why. I'm not rushing or anything it just feels like i don't 'see'.
Uncomfortable
2017-09-17 03:49
To be honest, these are actually quite well done. The first page's not great, but the rest are fairly solid. My one major concern however is that many of these seem to have some kind of lighter underdrawing that appears to be quite a bit more scribbly and erratic.
Underdrawings, in the context of these lessons, are dangerous because of a few reasons:
They reduce the focus on properly planning and preparing before each stroke, and really thinking about whether or not the mark you're going to put down serves a purpose.
If you then go back over those lighter marks to 'clean' them up, you're inevitably going to do so with a much slower, potentially wobblier and less confident mark - the kind we really want to avoid.
They encourage some bad habits, such as correcting mistakes (rather than accepting them and moving forwards as best you can). I noticed several places where you drew, then redrew certain forms. Try and think of it all as though every form you put down is like a chunk of marble being placed into a 3D scene. You can't simply ignore it once it's there - you can cut into it or build on top of it, but you can't outright act like it has ceased to exist, then replace it with another. It's there, so you have to deal with it. Often times that means moving forward with that form being a part of your construction, and learning from the mistake rather than striving to "save" that drawing. Remember that the end result of these drawings is irrelevant - they are all just exercises to help us learn about how these forms relate to one another in space, and how they can be combined to create something more complex whilst continuing to feel solid and tangible.
On that note, what you mentioned about not being able to "see" or "get" the details is relevant here. What I just mentioned about understanding how forms relate to one another is the core of the lesson. Detail and texture is not, it never has been, and it never will be - because detail is unimportant.
My biggest focus here is to teach you how to draw forms and objects that feel solid and three dimensional. Once you've got that, detail's no big deal. But until you get that down, detail and texture tends to serve as a huge distraction, especially when students don't quite grasp how much more important construction and form really is. This distraction causes them to try and reproduce the photo they're working from, focusing on it as a 2D image rather than thinking about the forms and construction.
Anyway, your work here is definitely moving in the right direction. The most important thing you can strive for in all of my lessons is convincing yourself that the things you're drawing exist not as 2D drawings on a flat page, but as solid, unyielding forms in a 3D world.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. Some time in the future, you may want to take a look at the texture challenge, but I wouldn't do anything more than read the notes there until you've really solidified your grasp of form and construction.
Tarrazan
2017-09-17 23:33
You don't know how amazing that is to hear! I think that this is the first time in a year i've actually drawn good enough to continue straight too the next lesson!! :D
I can definately see what you mean with the underdrawings. i think the reason i'm doing them is that i want to draw exactly what i see instead of 'just trying too draw what i see' and working with the lines i actually draw. Like you say i am trying to correct mistakes instead of accepting them and moving forward.
I guess my question is, how much should i strive too draw exactly what i see and how much should i just draw my understanding of what i see if that makes sense? That is probably the most confusing part of all of this for me. I don't know how much "artistic license/ going with my mistakes" i have?
Uncomfortable
2017-09-17 23:55
I can see why it might be a bit confusing, as there are a few rules that come into play that apply in different areas. For example, "don't draw what you THINK you see, draw what you see" is a major part of observational drawing, which is a skill we use in all things.
Conversely, constructional drawing focuses primarily on "don't just draw what you see - actually construct it from rudimentary forms, and build up towards more complex ones".
If you think about it though, these aren't really contradictory statements, but rather a sort of chain that combines observation and construction in one process.
We use the observational skills to determine what it is that needs to be constructed. We cannot rely on our shoddy memory, so we need to continually refresh and reinforce our understanding of what's there by looking at our reference again and again as we draw.
Once we determine something that has to be drawn, we again use our observational skills to break it down into its simplest components. Remember that the tools we have at our disposal are the five primitive geometric forms (boxes, spheres, cylinders being the main ones, along with pyramids and cones), organic sausage forms and ribbons (which are effectively flat 2D shapes that exist in 3D space). By observing the specific complex form we want to draw, we identify its core elements that serve as the sort of foundation of the more complex form. This is because the simpler the form we draw, the easier it is to make it feel solid and three dimensional. Jump into a complex form too early, and it'll end up feeling flat without the scaffolding made up with the more basic ones.
Now, we've identified a simple form that needs to be established in our scene. Let's say it's a ball. We add it to the scene, and then come to realize that it's a little too big relative to other forms already present in the scene. But being a solid, unyielding form, it is there, and it must either be accepted or modified somehow. Often times fixing an unintentional mistake like this will result in far too much linework and messiness (which will probably undermine the solidity of our construction), so the best option is to simply accept it and move forwards with the construction as it is currently. Yes, this part will be a little too big, and as a result the proportions will be off somewhat. This is a mistake we accept in order to avoid upsetting the illusion of solidity of our drawing.
I make mistakes like this all the time. I accept them because in my mind, I am not reproducing the photograph exactly. Instead I am using the photograph as reference to create a general copy of that object. A plausible sibling, for instance, or a member of its species (if it's an animal), but not an exact clone. I use the photograph to tell me of all the things I don't know about it - what its proportions are like, how its parts connect to its other parts, what the texture of its various surfaces are like, etc. but at the end of the day, my goal is not to create a photocopy. My goal is to understand it better, and one can certainly do that while making mistakes. You can even see the mistakes as an opportunity for the sort of reflection and analysis that allows us to learn more about the subject.
At the end of the day, keep in mind what your goals are. There are plenty of artists out there who are exceptional at reproducing a photograph perfectly in full detail, but if you have them draw something new, using several photos as reference, they'll fall apart. What we're doing here is learning how everything fits together, so you're able to extract important information from these sources in order to do with them what you like.
That's why the next lesson ends with the 'hybrid' exercise, where students try and merge different animals together into one creature that feels plausible.
aloneinthedork
2017-09-19 20:26
Hi Uncomfortable! Here's my lesson 4 attempt: https://imgur.com/a/oKfvB
This took a while, but I think they came out well enough. I've noticed I tend to really overdo the line weight at times because I subconsciously try to hide all of the "ugly" construction lines underneath, so I'm working on not doing that as much. I also know my lines get a way scratchy at times, especially when it comes to the legs and parts I might perceive as "less important". So that's one more thing I'm trying to put an end to.
Also, I don't think I had ever actually looked at these things before. They're all way uglier than I thought.
Uncomfortable
2017-09-20 00:31
They're pretty hideous. The little creepy crawlies, that is, not your drawings - your drawings are very well done. You're continuing to demonstrate a good grasp of form and construction and as a result your insects feel solid and believable. While I can certainly see what you mean by overdoing the line weight, it's not to the point that it's doing harm to the end result. I've seen plenty of cases where the artist is far too heavy handed, and it has the tendency to flatten things out. In your case, you've still got a fair bit of control over where that weight goes, and achieve a good range of them in a way that helps push the dynamism of the drawing.
At the end of the day, I'll always vouch for the beauty of construction lines, but at the end of the day that's something for you to come to terms with. As it stands, you've still enough awareness of how your choices impact the end result to keep from doing any significant harm there.
Anyway, I have nothing critical to offer here. Your work's coming along great, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one!
aloneinthedork
2017-09-20 09:05
Thanks for the feedback! I'll get started with lesson 5 right away.
CorenSV
2017-09-26 22:28
and here are my creepy crawlies.
https://imgur.com/a/9XyxK
I think proportion wise there is a lot that's going wrong. Probably was a problem already present in lesson 3. But with plants things being slightly out of proportion might be less obvious.
I like the yellowjacket I did though. The ladybug. I'm very aware the back legs are missing.. But I couldn't find the back legs on the reference for the life of me :/
Uncomfortable
2017-09-28 03:21
I can certainly say with confidence that you've made a massive leap forward compared to the last time you attempted this exercise. Your understanding of construction is vastly better, and while in a few places there are some proportional mishaps (although they're not that major - and being an observational issue, it'll get better with practice as long as you focus on it), the majority of your drawings here feel plausible due to the focus on form and building up the illusion of solidity. Your linework in general also appears to be considerably better controlled, with a lot more subtlety to it.
As you move into the next lesson, you'll find yourself drawing more fur. In the notes there I touch on ways to tackle it that certainly could have applied here - specifically, drawing individual tufts rather than straight lines coming off your surfaces perpendicularly. When you get into that, remember that each line should be drawn individually, the subject of its own planning and intent. The odd perpendicular line like that can be useful to draw one's attention (because it tends to call for it quite strongly), but if overused it'll become distracting.
Anyway, keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
[deleted]
2017-09-28 23:22
[deleted]
LoBoPia
2017-09-30 03:13
Lesson 4:
https://imgur.com/a/kKqGd
Uncomfortable
2017-10-01 19:40
Nice work! Your use of construction is, for the most part, coming along great. There's certainly room for growth, but you're heading in the right direction. I especially like how you handled things like the ladybug's open shell on the right side of this page - they feel distinctly three dimensional, and the contour curves were used to great effect in establishing their distortion through space.
This praying mantis is also quite well done, specifically its arms and legs. The thorax flattens out somewhat, but the rest feels quite solid. Despite having no contour curves, the arms still capture a good sense of form. This is ultimately what we're working towards - the point where the student is themselves convinced that what they are drawing is three dimensional, resulting in little imperceptible shifts in how they draw specific things that better capture the turning of form. It's hard to describe, but the fact that it's occurring here and there is a good sign. It'll still be necessary to keep working through your constructions step by step, but basically - just keep doing what you're doing, and your skills will continue to improve.
The one area you're not doing that great is texture/detail. An example of this is this page. There are a couple issues there. Firstly, you're scribbling those marks (very close to using hatching, which I advised you against in my last critique). You need to take the time to carefully observe your reference images to identify the kinds of specific marks and patterns that exist there, rather than being general and vague. Take a look at this image from the 'other demos' section for an example of different kinds of textures one might find on a beetle's shell.
The other issue is that right now you seem to be using texture (or in this case, scribbling/hatching) as a means to convey light and shadow. It's not uncommon for people to feel that 'shading' is important, because in a lot of methods of drawing they rely on it to convey the illusion of form. In our methodology, this is not the case - by the time we go beyond the constructional linework, we've already captured that illusion of form. Therefore light and shadow is no longer something we must achieve, but instead becomes a tool we can use to other ends.
What we actually want to do here is communicate the surface quality of our objects. Remember that our goal is ultimately 'visual communication' - we're not replicating our reference images, we're communicating with our drawings what is communicated in the image. One of those aspects is, as I mentioned, the texture of those surfaces.
The texture itself is made up of yet more forms, but they're very small, and follow the surface they sit upon. The marks we actually put down to suggest their presence are the shadows they cast - this means that these marks are not necessarily lines, but rather shadow shapes that can merge together when necessary to create large swathes of black. You haven't been afraid to do that at all, which is great - but when we have large shadow shapes, what we end up relying on to communicate is the edges of those large shapes. These have to be designed, and must be the result of specific choices and decisions. This is why scribbling won't be enough.
On another note, while much of your construction is coming along great, there are some areas where you get a little sloppy. For instance, in your scorpion, the thorax/abdomen and especially the layering of those plates along its back is excellent, but you definitely skip some steps with its pincers.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Jaspii
2017-10-11 14:50
Hey uncomfortable, thanks to our earlier conversation on discord I decided it was time to turn in my lesson 4 work .
Submission: https://imgur.com/gallery/OZe8L
Lay-ins which i forgot : https://imgur.com/a/VylFr
The demos were a whole lot of fun and strangely enough I often felt that my first attempt at the demo would turn out best.
When choosing my own anthropoids do draw , I often struggled finding good reference or choosing good postures for them .
The anthropoids I drew were the coconut crab , the bold head hornet and the praying mantis .
Usually I did around 2-3 drawings a day , but the last two days i struggled to draw these insects , maybe I need a short break from those.
Anyway I hope you enjoy my submission , quite some work went into this .
Thanks once again for doing all of this , this community has been fantastic and you brought it to life.
Uncomfortable
2017-10-11 21:46
Very nice work! You're presenting a great body of work, and demonstrating a pretty well developing grasp of the constructional method. I don't see any major areas where you've jumped into forms that are too complex too early, so in general things tend to feel quite solid. For the most part, you also balanced your textures well so as to keep from undermining your underlying constructions.
On the topic of texture, I do think I preferred the ones where you were a little lighter with it - for example, this coconut crab had a fairly sparse application of texture, but it fit well and helped convey the surface quality of its carapace as well as any other.
I really did like this wasp drawing, but for its abdomen, I definitely would recommend having put down a couple contour curves or ellipses along its length, to help give you reference for the actual layered features that are there. Basically, since none of those segments wrap all the way around the form, but rather are a little offset from each other, I think the layers extending towards the back ended up feeling a little off. Having drawn a couple of underlying contour lines would have helped you maintain their curvature.
I'd also recommend a few contour lines to help reinforce the praying mantis' core, as they tend to be the sort of forms don't hold their volume as easily as others.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work - there's definitely room for improvement, and that will happen with continued practice, but you're absolutely heading in the right direction. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
perlatus
2017-10-12 17:13
Hello, here's my submission for lesson 4: https://perlat.us/blog/drawabox-submission_lesson-4/
Uncomfortable
2017-10-13 01:31
You've got some great stuff here. Overall your constructions are really solid. I especially liked the whip scorpion, the tick, the scorpion fly, the pillbug and the male stag beetles. Usually I keep that list to two or three things, but I kept flipping through your drawings and found more and more that I liked. Your use of texture was also well done - fairly sparse and light, enough to communicate the surface quality in most cases, but not nearly enough to distract the viewer and compete with or undermine the form and construction.
While there certainly were some that were weaker, you're demonstrating that you've clearly learned from the blunders and circumvented them in your follow up attempts. Over all you've shown a considerable improvement in your confidence and general execution of form over this set.
Sadly, I don't have a whole lot of negative to offer. Every point I think to raise, I see you having conquered it in a later drawing. What I can offer though is that for this photo, I'd recommend treating the forms of the abdomen and thorax as two separate forms each - one for the inner section, and another for the shell that wraps around it.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, and keep up the great work!
perlatus
2017-10-13 02:12
Thanks for the critique, but are you sure you don't see any problems?
Finishing up this lesson gave me some serious anxiety, and your critique was honestly not what I expected. My expectations may be off and I know you're focused on looking for improvement, but...
Some things I feel like I seriously struggled with, things that I don't think I've made good enough progress on by the end of the lesson:
Proportions: e.g. the curled pillbug's head compared to the body is off by almost double in size.
Angles and relative placement: e.g the first male stag beetle's head-box isn't centered on the body, so looks displaced and unnatural; the thoraces of most of the bugs appear to be sideways rather than front-back, which makes the bugs generally look like they're twisting.
Subtleties in the organic forms: abdominal and thoracic masses tend to be too rounded and miss things like the slight flatness of the bodies. (Pulled it off with the vinegaroon/whip scorpion, but think I messed it up later with the male stag beetles.)
Uncomfortable
2017-10-13 02:28
The first two points aren't important. It's extremely easy to get caught up in the specifics of a given drawing, and a lot of students tend to get overly concerned with how faithfully they're reproduced their subject. Ultimately, that's not what this course is about, so when I critique work, I'm looking for other queues that suggest that you're grasping the material.
Most importantly, it's the plausibility of your constructions. Yes, you may accidentally make a form look flatter (that is, as if it'd been squished down) than it does in your source, but take away the reference image and there's not much sign that it's incorrect. The bigger problem would be if the form itself was flat (as in no longer looking three dimensional, but rather just another shape on the page).
So, while observation is important (as it influences your use of proportion, and the precision with which you match your reference), these lessons are about constructing things that feel real. The skill being trained ties in more with being able to then go on to create something new that feels like it could be real - be it from multiple reference images, or off the top of your head. You are currently showing that you're barreling down that path at great speed.
Other artists however who focus purely on observation may be able to perfectly match the proportions and features of a given photograph in high detail will fall apart when asked to draw the same creature from a different angle, or in a different pose. While at this point you may struggle with that still, you will manage far better.
That's why the next lesson ends off with hybrids of animals, where students are unable to rely entirely on reproducing a single image. So, yes - you're doing perfectly fine.
kangoroopaw
2017-10-14 13:31
Hey, here is my lesson 4, https://imgur.com/a/LXonA
really enjoyed doing the homework, the legs posed a little bit of a problem to me.
imguralbumbot
2017-10-14 13:31
^(Hi, I'm a bot for linking direct images of albums with only 1 image)
https://i.imgur.com/VYr5BIL.jpg
^^Source ^^| ^^Why? ^^| ^^Creator ^^| ^^ignoreme ^^| ^^deletthis
Uncomfortable
2017-10-14 23:41
Overall, great work. You clearly have a strong understanding of 3D space, the relationships between your forms are solid, and you know exactly what you're doing.
My only concern is that your linework, at least in parks (especially the legs) tends to be more timid than it should be. We can see places where your forms are not drawn to completion, but rather made up of a few strokes, with the rest left implied. That's not a bad thing when it comes to actually producing finished drawing, but keep in mind that these drawings are just exercises to improve your understanding of form and space.
I'm not eager to have someone change their approach when they're already demonstrating a good understanding of what some of our goals are - so I'm going to leave the decision of how to go about it all up to you. I'll likely mention the matter in the same way in the future (regardless of what you choose), but I'll let you know if it becomes an issue that needs to be dealt with, or another one of those if-you-want-to deals.
Anyway, your drawings look great. Keep up the fantastic work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
kangoroopaw
2017-10-16 07:16
Thank you!
svendogee
2017-10-18 22:15
https://imgur.com/a/WG8hy
4 pages of lay ins and 8 of more fleshed out. Thank you as always for your time!
Uncomfortable
2017-10-19 01:13
Your first few pages definitely are a bit of a struggle as you start to get your head around how to piece your forms together. From there however, you show considerable improvement, and come out the other side with a handful of very successful drawings and what appears to be a much stronger understanding of form and construction. Some of my favourites include the fly on the top right of this page, and most definitely your dragonflies.
A lot of people tend to get very distracted and overwhelmed by both the detail on dragon flies, as well as the complexity of their constructions, but I think you did an excellent job balancing both, and keeping your mind on what you were doing at a given moment (rather than trying to think ahead and lose focus).
There were still some areas where perhaps you did think too much about detail, too early - like this page where your construction was not quite solid before you moved onto the more 'fun stuff'. That said, you are still showing considerable improvement and are heading in the right direction.
Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, and keep in mind what I've said here about always looking past detail towards the underlying forms, and ensuring that they feel solid and believable before moving onto detail.
EmpiricSpirit
2017-10-25 17:30
I finished lesson 4:) https://imgur.com/a/xHMtb as a bonus I also drew some digital versions of my initial felt-tip pen drawings:)
Uncomfortable
2017-10-26 23:13
So one thing that stands out to me in a big way is something I actually mentioned in regards to the last lesson a couple times. Draw through your forms. If your drawing is made up of two spheres that intersect with each other, I want you to draw two full spheres that overlap - not draw one full sphere, and another that stops where it hits the first.
This is VERY important. While practicing and learning this stuff, we draw through our forms because it gives us an understanding of how EACH form sits in 3D space, and how they all relate to one another. If you only draw the portions of each component that is visible, you only end up looking at those forms like they're 2D shapes on a flat page, with no understanding of their three dimensional qualities.
Construction is all about looking at a 2D image, breaking it down into its 3D forms and reconstructing those 3D forms into a 2D drawing. Currently you are jumping from 2D to 2D, instead of 2D --> 3D --> 3D --> 2D.
There are other issues (proportions could use some work, and your textures are very, very scribbly) but this matter of construction and drawing through your forms is the most important one. I want you to try the homework again, and this time I want you to focus entirely on construction. No texture, no detail, draw through all of your forms and strive to understand how they all exist in 3D.
On, one other thing - your contour curves aren't that great. Work on getting them to wrap around forms more convincingly and use the overshooting technique mentioned there.
EmpiricSpirit
2017-10-27 19:27
Okay:)
https://imgur.com/a/5XJsT
I did just that today.
Uncomfortable
2017-10-28 03:50
That actually is considerably improved on the points that I mentioned (drawing through forms, and your contour curves). I honestly didn't expect to see that, since you finished it in basically a day or less. I expected more of garbage fire, so I've been pleasantly surprised.
The next thing I'd like you to do is try and reproduce all three of the demos from the lesson. I want to see exactly how you approach these - pay special attention to your proportions, and really take your time observing your reference images. Remember that you don't want to rely at all on memory. Look at your reference, study it closely, and look away only to draw one or two very specific marks before looking back.
For this next submission, I'd like you to take several photos throughout the process, so I can see each phase of construction.
EmpiricSpirit
2017-10-30 16:53
Okay :)
https://imgur.com/a/WEa63
I hope this one is okay
Uncomfortable
2017-11-01 22:57
So I've identified a few things where your attempts differ from my demos. Take a look and try all three again. I'd also like to see what your lesson 1/2 warmups look like.
EmpiricSpirit
2017-11-03 19:27
Okay:)
https://imgur.com/a/5SG8f
Uncomfortable
2017-11-05 22:52
A lot of the things in my last critique still stand. I've also added this additional page of notes for you: https://i.imgur.com/S5TAgla.jpg. It's not that you're not improving, but that you're continually missing important instructions. You absorb some, but not most of what is expressed in my critiques and in the lesson.
I have a question - why is it that you think you're struggling to absorb what is being shared? What is it about your approach to following these demos that makes things slip by? I think reflecting on this may help you make more efficient use of these resources.
As for the warmup stuff you included, I'm definitely glad that you're doing exercises like that. In general your linework is definitely still stiff. I have brought this up before, but I'll just repeat what I probably said in the past: draw your lines with confidence, don't allow yourself to hesitate. Apply the ghosting method so you can build up muscle memory before executing the mark. The flow and smoothness of your lines is infinitely more important than your accuracy.
For your organic forms with contour ellipses/curves, make sure you vary the degree of your ellipses, as the degree will shift through the length of a form as described here, because those circular cross-sections are going to be oriented slightly differently in relation to the viewer. I also mention this in the fly notes I linked above, where I've drawn a form with contour curves towards the upper left.
That same demo shows a contour circle that sits on the "pole" of the ball form - this is important and can help show which side of the form is facing the viewer. Right now none of your organic form practices really have any such poles, so it feels like both sides are pointing away from us, which feels somewhat harder to believe.
Lastly, I did want to mention that the flow of your fly's legs are actually quite nice, and I think you're improving on that front. You do need to put the breaks on trying to add any detail though, as your constructions still aren't up to snuff.
I'm not entirely sure where to move from here, not at least until you're able to reflect on the question I posed earlier. You are absorbing some of this stuff, but it's quite slow, and the stiffness of your lines is as I mentioned before, certainly a problem. I had given you the option before to either move onto this lesson, or to start over from the beginning and deal with the more foundational issues involved in drawing stiff linework.
I think that may be the better option for you now - to go back to the beginning - but before we do that, I want to hear your thoughts on my question.
EmpiricSpirit
2017-11-05 23:05
TBH. I always had problems with absorbing information. I'm schizophrenic. ( I can scan my diagnostic papers to prove it)
I'm also attending a life drawing class. And my teacher said I might not be ever good at drawing straight lines as my hands shake quite a lot. (Neurological issues. Specifically, I had such massive anxiety attacks as a child that my nerve endings kind off got a little destroyed there the psychotic episodes also contributed to that)
Admittedly enough. Right now I'm also going through Scott Robertsons "how to draw" book (which you recommended). So maybe I could just do all the exercises in that book both digitally and traditionally and then give it to you as homework? I mean they'll teach me a lot about perspective and construction which I think I need to learn/practice more before I tackle drawing animals or vehicles. I personally think that's a better idea than going through lesson 1 and 2 from the beginning. As I plan to go through Scott Robertson's book anyway. And I think it's normal for special needs students to need to do some additional reading/exercises.
As it also tackles the same issues as lesson 1 and 2 but also will help me better understand perspective. So I'll be learning two things at once.
Admittedly my ultimate goal with drawing is not to 'be a concept artist' or anything like that. I want to be able to storyboard my animations (I'm learning 3d modeling/animation through self-teaching too) and I think we're going a bit too 'perfectionistic' here.
If I could also approach the 'drawing vehicles' lesson digitally that would be great. Admittedly the huuuuge number of support lines etc really overwhelms me sometimes and I'm really scared of that lesson.
Uncomfortable
2017-11-05 23:18
I was concerned that there may have been underlying issues that were giving you additional obstacles to deal with.
I'm not sure digging into Scott Robertson right now is the best idea - it's extremely dense (much moreso than my material), and may well just overload you. Often times trying to tackle many things at once can result in learning neither thing all that well, so it's often better to give yourself smaller things to focus on.
The fact that you're taking a life drawing class is good - when doing that, I want you to particularly try to focus on observing whatever it is you're drawing from life. Try and think about the proportions of things, and really focus in on specific elements at a time. That doesn't mean focusing on tiny details - a large element of something (like one of its major core forms) can be an element that you can try to focus in on and isolate in your mind while observing it. Observation is a skill that we don't start out with, but rather one we need to actively rewire.
I'm also not 100% convinced that you won't be able to draw a straight line. It's possible that your teacher is correct, but based on what I'm seeing in your ellipses right now, at least part of it is the fact that you are still trying to nail something accurately.
So instead of going directly back to lesson 1 (we may do that anyway in a bit), I want you to do the following for me:
Take a piece of paper, and fill it with ellipses. For each ellipse, just draw it as quickly and as confidently as you can. Don't even think if you don't have to. Just draw ellipse after ellipse, and focus only on being confident. Don't slow down. Don't try and fit it into any specific place. Avoid overlaps for clarity's sake, but if you end up overlapping here or there it's not a big deal.
Do one page filled with super imposed lines, and try to approach them similarly. Lay down your initial line for each set with a ruler (pick a variety of lines, some longer, some shorter, but all straight). Maybe even lay down all of your initial lines first so your page is really packed, and then set to work going over each one 4x. When you go over a line, I want you to take the time to place your pen at the correct starting point, think about where you want your pen to go (which would be to the other end point), then draw confidently and as quickly as you can. Don't worry if it flies off the rails, just focus on being confident and fast.
For both of these, do your best not to use your wrist at all. When you start on each task, I want you to come back here and reread the instructions for that page, and do your best to follow them.
CuddleyCake
2017-10-30 20:41
Halp uncomfortable
https://imgur.com/gallery/EeVCM
Uncomfortable
2017-11-01 23:18
Critiques on your work are always easy, since I've mostly said what comes into my head during your streams. I did catch one thing that I missed though - check out the spideys.
Overall you're doing great though! Since most of your drawings were from the demos, I was very interested in how that mosquito came out, and I think you did a great job applying the understanding of form and construction, and also achieved a very nice flow on those limbs. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
venusflycat
2017-10-31 03:49
https://imgur.com/gallery/HoT7Q
I feel pretty good about these, but the praying mantis was really challenging and I'm still not completely happy with that one. I'm still trying to improve on breaking down forms and confidently make marks flow through 3D space. I'm a bit confused on how to construct shadows too. Also, I think my contour curves could've flown around my forms a bit better. Thanks in advance for your critique, looking forward to it.
no_youre
2017-10-31 03:50
No, you're venusflycat.
Uncomfortable
2017-11-01 23:39
So there's a few things that really jump out at me in terms of both your approach, your general focus and your goals with these drawings. You're going into these drawings intending to create a well detailed piece of work at the end. As a result, you're quite focused on the texture, details and rendering of your drawing, but less so on the actual underlying construction.
You've probably noticed that drawabox is basically devoid of any information relating to lighting your major forms. There's no section on light and shadow, and so it's understandable that you were a little lost on how to approach that (as we can see from some of your experiments on the first page).
I neglect to cover that material because I find it to be a distraction. In fact, don't want students to worry about it. When it comes to a lot of fine art classes, it's one of the first things they teach - class, take out your 2B-8B pencils, here's the core shadow, the bounce light, the specular highlight, etc. I have found, however, that lighting is used as a crutch to convey the illusion of 3D form.
So, by having that element pulled away, students are forced to use the tools given in lesson 2 to capture the illusion that the flat, 2D marks they're making on their page are actually projections of an actual 3D form that exists in a 3D world, to which your piece of paper is only a window. Once one is able to really get a handle on using things like contour lines and generally drawing their forms so they give the impression of solidity, rendering light and shadow can sit on top of what is already there - like a dress on top of a mannequin, being held up by that which is already there, solid with or without its clothing.
So, when approaching this work, it is not that your abilities are lacking, but rather that what you came out to accomplish was a different task than what was requested.
Another thing I noticed was that your observation habits could use some adjustment. From what I can see, you're likely looking at your reference in small bursts, but largely focusing on your drawing. Instead, do the opposite. Get in the habit of spending 99% of your time looking at and studying your reference. Our memory tends to be unreliable, so the moment you look away from the image, your brain will go to work simplifying elements. In order to deal with that, we look long and hard at specific parts of the reference (like the nature of some major form), and then go and draw that singular element immediately - before looking back and refreshing ourselves as to where everything else is.
Currently your proportions are off due to this (for example, compare your black widow to mine and you'll notice the legs I've drawn are considerably longer), and your details/textures tend to be highly oversimplified rather than replicating existing elements that are present there. I talk much more about this in the notes on the texture challenge page, so give that a read.
Anyway, I'd like you to take another stab at this lesson, starting from rewatching the intro video and rereading the notes. Then, when you do the homework drawings, focus entirely on construction. I don't want to see any detail, rendering, texture, etc. I've found this kind of limitation to go a long way in helping students keep their focus where it needs to be.
venusflycat
2017-11-25 19:19
https://imgur.com/gallery/mB5KE
I tried to keep all of my forms and shapes really simple but I think the only insect that really turned out accurately is the bee. I really struggled with the grasshopper and I feel like my legs need work with proportion and size, in addition to everything lacking dimension and flowing into 3D space. Oh well, I hope the construction aspect is a little better at least.
Uncomfortable
2017-11-26 21:11
You misunderstand somewhat. We need to make sure that we start simple, in order to give our drawings a solid foundation on which we want to build. This is combined with careful observation to identify the nature and proportions of this underlying foundation. Starting simple does not mean ignoring the information that is presented to us, but rather learning to sort through it.
I regularly divide the process of drawing into construction and detail. Detail constitutes the additional touches we may add where we're not overly preoccupied with what those marks tell us about the solid forms that make up the object. Everything else, however, is construction - and it can still convey a great deal of information.
Construction consists of successive passes, building on top of the previous stage to go from a very solid foundation to something that strongly represents whatever it is that we're drawing, while maintaining that solidity throughout. Jumping into the more complex phase of an object immediately will result in that solidity being lost. Now, that doesn't mean that we should just start at the first, simplest phase and just stop.
For example, take a look at your grasshopper heads.
You drew a ball, and more or less stopped. If you look at mine there, I also started with a ball, which I then carved with contour lines to clarify the various planes of the form and built on top of it to capture the segmentation and layering of exoskeleton.
In addition to this, observation is extremely important, and on many occasions you still identify the elements of things but neglect to think about their proportions, how they sit in relation to one another, and so on. We can see from this spider that you didn't actually look all that closely, and were even missing the forms of its pedipalps, among other things. You cannot expect to absorb all of this visual information at once - you MUST continuously observe and study your reference (and rely on other reference to give you information about the parts you may not be able to see), and you must continuously ask yourself questions about how these forms relate to each other.
You also are definitely struggling with the positioning of your center lines. I'm very glad that you've made big strides towards using center lines, but this shows that you do have a ways to go in terms of developing your understanding of 3D space. I hope you are still practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warmup routine - the organic form exercises in lesson 2 are very helpful with developing an understanding of how organic forms sit in space.
Lastly, you did have some constructions that were decent like the cockroach, though I would leverage some additional contour curves to help define the actual volume of its abdomen. There are some forms that simply do not communicate certain information as well as others might (like a sphere can tell us fairly easily how it sits in space without additional contour lines) but some are very easily perceived as flat without the additional support.
Anyway, I'd like you to try another four pages of insect drawings, taking into consideration what I've said here.
venusflycat
2017-12-27 01:42
https://imgur.com/gallery/JR3xA
I feel like adding a bit more segmentation and contour lines helped with the beetles. Obviously my caterpillars proportions are off and it's really fat, but I feel like it's alright. I did have some problems with it looking 3D and flowing in space. I guess I'm not entirely sure how to make the head look like its curving and coming out in front of the body. My proportions and observational skills need work but I hope it's a step in the right direction. I'm not really happy with any of them, and these few were pretty frustrating in general, but oh well. Hope you have a good holiday and new year. Thanks for the work you put in
Uncomfortable
2017-12-27 02:14
You had some great successes with your first and last pages, but those beetles definitely gave you a hell of a time. So I drew out some steps on how I'd approach thinking through handling its head. It probably covers the approach better than if I'd just written it out.
Overall though your grasp of form and construction is coming along well. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Shajitsu
2017-11-01 14:34
Hey! Just finished lesson 4 =)
https://imgur.com/gallery/0HzDZ
Greetings!
Uncomfortable
2017-11-02 00:17
Excellent work! You're demonstrating a great grasp of form and construction, and are doing a pretty good job of observing your proportions and details quite carefully. There are some areas where your proportions are somewhat off (like the housefly's thorax being too big) but that's pretty normal, and you handled it well by just rolling with it.
I have just one bit of critique to offer. In a lot of the lay-ins at the end of your submssion, you have a bit of a tendency in certain places to draw the segments of your legs as stretched, but straight ellipses. This tends to mess with their general sense of flow, due to the sort of regular ballooning-and-pinching through their length. Instead, try to draw them more like sausages. I pointed this out in another student's work, so you can see what I mean in the square on this page.
Aside from that, excellent work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Shajitsu
2017-11-02 08:23
Hey, thank you for your reply!
The legs were the part i struggled the most. It was hard for me to ghost the outlines of another form which was not an ellipse.
I want to mention that i found a nice 3D viewer for different animals on the internet which helped me a lot at the spider for example. Maybe you want to take a look at it
http://de.wowhead.com/item=137570/blutfangkokon
Just click on 3D viewer
Sorry for my bad english, i'm from germany.
Greetings!
Uncomfortable
2017-11-02 14:26
That's pretty neat! I do still think there's a lot more to be gained from drawing from high-resolution photos (more accurate information, less stylization) but it's definitely an interesting tool on its own.
berd_is_ded
2017-11-02 17:14
Here's Lesson 4: http://imgur.com/a/diCzR
I lost track of what's what so you can ignore the page numbers. But it is from oldest to most recent!
Uncomfortable
2017-11-03 21:06
You're definitely moving in the right direction here. There are some less successful pages, while others demonstrate a lot of strengths. Specifically the pages where you applied additional line weight and strategically placed cast shadows, as they really go a long way to help separate out your forms and clarify the drawings.
For this page, I can't be sure but I feel like it definitely could have used more careful observation for proportions and such. That said, I do still feel like your forms and construction are still very convincing and believable, which really is the goal of the lesson.
One thing I noticed was that you have two different approaches to drawing legs throughout your drawings. For some of them, you use a sort of stretched ellipse, and for others you'll use more of a sausage. The difference is that the width throughout the length of the sausage remains fairly consistent, whereas a stretched oval will have considerably more tapering throughout.
Stick to the sausages - stretched ellipses result in the legs following a pattern of pinch, swell, pinch, swell, which ends up feeling kind of static and stiff. The sausages tend to flow much better, and maintain gesture.
So, keep that in mind as you continue to move forwards. Also, push yourself to take more care in observing your reference carefully and studying proportions, as that will continue to help push your work to the next level.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
berd_is_ded
2017-11-14 05:39
It's probably too late but I found the reference image again. After comparing the image with my drawing I noticed that the left wing needs to be sharper and higher up. Maybe you can find something I can't.
Uncomfortable
2017-11-14 20:30
Excuse how shitty my lines are, my tablet's acting up and i really don't want to restart my computer. https://i.imgur.com/LgByFub.png
The most important thing that I'd add is a center line, running along the surface of your forms to help align things in space.
[deleted]
2017-11-05 21:23
Hey,
Here's my lesson 4 homework. I hate insects, but it was actually pretty interesting to take a look at some up-close photos and study them properly!
https://imgur.com/a/wYXB7
Thanks,
Uncomfortable
2017-11-07 06:18
Overall there's a lot of good things here. I do have one big concern though, and it comes up as a general aspect of how you're approaching these drawings. It seems to me that you're somewhat timid, and perhaps too focused on the cleanliness and clarity of your end result. That is, you're making a lot of decisions that err towards a pretty drawing at the end over really exploring and learning about forms, imbuing them with a sense of solidity and weight, and ultimately using them to construct objects with those same qualities.
So, for example - when you draw your ball forms, which are generally fairly ellipsoidal, you're not drawing through them as covered in lesson 1 and 2. As a result, you're drawing them more slowly and less confidently, which adds little wibbles and some stiffness to them, ultimately undermining the illusion of form.
You are however drawing through your forms, which is definitely good. Though when you draw two intersecting forms, it helps considerably to actually draw the intersection that occurs between those two forms. So if two balls intersect, you're going to have a cross-sectional ellipse where they meet - if you actually draw it in, it'll reinforce the intersection itself, and in turn help solidify the two forms involved.
Another thing I want you to keep in mind is the idea that when constructing something, you're not placing flat shapes on a page and connecting them together. Think of it as though the page is a window into a boundless 3D space, into which you are inserting solid chunks of matter - like balls of marble. This means that once you place a solid form into that space, you cannot simply override it with a new line or two. You have to actually cut and carve it, which means being aware of how the resulting pieces actually sit in space, and in relation to each other. You need to grasp how everything exists in 3D, and not allow yourself to take certain shortcuts that the fact that you're drawing tends to afford you.
I'd like you to do three more pages of insect drawings, but this time I don't want to see any detail or texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on just capturing the forms themselves, and leverage everything you've learned thus far to focus on making them feel solid, and as though they carry weight. Draw entirely in felt tip pen - leave the grey markers aside for now, and focus primarily on capturing form with line. Ultimately there's a lot of additional decoration you can add (rendering, detail, etc.) on top of your forms when they're already solid, but right now I think the prospect of doing that is distracting you from what you really need to set your mind to.
[deleted]
2017-11-07 08:49
Hey,
I totally get that - I think I've been avoiding drawing over the ellipses a couple of times to make it neater rather than going for form. I'll have to keep that in mind!
I've had a free evening so I've had another go at these already. Looking forward to your feedback!
https://imgur.com/a/pL3H3
Uncomfortable
2017-11-07 15:21
Very, very nice. You caught onto exactly what I was saying. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Just a couple things to keep in mind:
Definitely way too many contour lines on your fly's head. There definitely is a point where you get diminishing returns on them, and building a wireframe doesn't really end up doing you a lot of good. I think you managed the density quite nicely elsewhere, esepcially on the last page, but here it's definitely too much.
Watch those contour curves' curvature on the wasp's abdomen. They're almost there, but they're not quite hooking back around enough to give the impression that they continue along the rounded surface on the other side.
alexvostrov
2017-11-12 19:44
I've discovered an unexpected love of stag beetles! I wish I had a giant one to ride to work.
Here's lesson 4:
https://imgur.com/a/JVyoS
Overall, the biggest discovery for me has been that I need to loosen up when drawing. Often I focus so much on flaws that drawing becomes a big chore.
In the middle of drawing the bugs, I decided to accept that everything I draw will be a bit crap and to fill the page with "lovable monsters". Weirdly enough, accepting that every drawing will be seriously flawed somehow helps me draw better. Even the lines flow smoother.
Uncomfortable
2017-11-13 19:09
Very nice work! You definitely improved in confidence over the set, and as a result your constructions end up coming out more solidly. One thing I noticed early on was that you were trying to draw very faintly, and then clean up your linework with a successive pass. The thing about cleaning up linework is that your next pass ends up inherently being much slower and more deliberate, and as a result the lines tend to stiffen up. It's not something I recommend at this stage, because we still want to focus on being able to draw everything smoothly and boldly - so we want to avoid multi-stage cleanup processes like that and focus instead on drawing our initial forms as confidently as possible.
You may be considering the clean up process as being the same thing as adding line weight, but it's not. Line weight is more about clarifying very specific overlaps by applying additional thickness to portions of existing lines, rather than the entirety of a long stroke. Because of the limited length, it's actually fairly straight forward to apply line weight this way.
I think your wasps were probably the most successful of the lot, due to the shift towards being much bolder with your initial linework. The forms feel considerably more tangible and weighted, and there's no sense that you're trying to hide anything.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - as you move onto the next lesson, definitely push yourself to continue this trend towards greater confidence in your approach, and try to avoid any situation where you're actively trying to make certain lines get "hidden" later on. Techniques like manipulating line weight will result in that, but you don't want to concern yourself with what is being hidden while drawing a given mark. You want to leave that for later.
alexvostrov
2017-11-13 21:06
Thanks for the feedback.
I'm a bit surprised by the wasp comment. I considered them to be the most troublesome of the lot.
If I understand correctly, you think that I'm worrying too much about making a "finished" drawing and not focusing enough on solid construction.
The wasp in the lower-left is the only one where it's just pure construction - no fancy stuff on top. Is that why it's more successful?
It sounds like I need to hide all pens but one. No more switching from Micron 01 to 05 whenever I feel like it. Playing around with "Let's go over everything with a brush pen" is making it harder to focus on the fundamentals. Is that right?
Uncomfortable
2017-11-13 21:29
That's exactly right. Everything else becomes a distraction, and it's easy to get caught up in what you're going to do, rather than what you're doing at that moment. And yes - stick to the 05.
Enkadery
2017-11-15 19:23
Lesson 4 here: https://imgur.com/a/6k8QD
Some of these I really enjoyed and some felt like such a grind - the spider was so hard to study because they are so creepy. I had trouble with the ladybug just trying to get a decent ellipse to start with that even looked like a ladybug body. Also found the 'bugs have triangles' notes really useful for these exercises.
Anyways, thanks in advance for checking these out!
Uncomfortable
2017-11-15 20:13
A lot of these are quite well done. The fly on the first page is an especially good example of balancing form/construction against detail and texture. Other constructions were somewhat less good (like the scorpion), and the texture on your... spider dog? was definitely very scribbly. Don't scribble!
The wasp's abdomen on this page really demonstrates a great, more subtle grasp of form in how those segments curve as they hook back along the underside. That's a very good sign as far as your understanding of 3D space goes, and your personal belief in the illusions you're producing.
I have just a few recommendations to make:
Don't let yourself get too caught up in texture. I definitely see this with some of your drawings, like your ladybugs, where your focus from the beginning is producing a clean, pretty drawing. If you neglect your construction in favour of that, your end result will be mediocre at best, and worse still, you won't get the same value out of the exercise. That's what this is after all - an exercise. We're not in it for the drawing at the end.
Try and keep in mind that the act of adding a form to a drawing is not that you're just putting a mark down on a page - you're placing a solid mass into a 3D world, and once that mass is there, you have to deal with it somehow. This beetle isn't bad, but I did notice that you used the initial abdomen's ellipse as a more of a guideline/experiment, and then you draw more confidently around it. That is certainly one way of going about things, but it treats your underlying construction as more of a sketch, marks on a flat page, than actual solid forms you're building up. You want to make sure that you respect their solidity, and take that into consideration when adding new forms alongside them.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, just keep what I've mentioned here in mind.
Enkadery
2017-11-15 23:07
Thank you for your critique! I appreciate the time you take doing this. I will keep this in mind as I move on and as I practice exercises from earlier lessons. Sometimes I ghost my starting ellipse or shape way too many times. I need to learn to commit and work with what I've put on the paper.
[deleted]
2017-11-20 03:28
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2017-11-22 04:40
So your drawings do get better through the set, but there is definitely still a strong tendency to flatten your constructions out. Also, one extremely important part of construction is to draw complete forms. When drawing the segments of your legs, you draw them more like layered scale (the next segment has a start and end point, rather than being a full, solid loop. When you don't draw things to completion, they will come out flat.
Also, try and draw your leg segments more like flowing segments (as mentioned in this demo, closer to the bottom).
Aaaaand it helps a lot to draw a center line along the surface of your forms, helps both to keep things aligned and also to ensure that you're giving the appropriate amount of volume to your forms.
Here are some additional, disorganized notes.
I think it'd be a good idea to do another three pages of insect drawings. Focus on construction, don't add any detail/texture. When you do deal in texture (later), stop scribbling. Scribbling is not a texture - texture needs to be carefully observed and intentionally executed. But again, leave that alone for now, focus only on drawing forms in whose solidity you fully believe. 90% of this is creating an illusion (of form, that you're drawing 3D forms in a 3D world and not marks on a flat page) and then buying into that lie yourself.
[deleted]
2017-11-25 20:21
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2017-11-27 00:17
No need to apologize for taking your time. Rushing is not a good thing, and each submission is going to take time for me to critique. Better that you give yourself the opportunity to read through my critique carefully, so you can successfully apply everything I've mentioned there.
That said, there's one thing that jumps out at me that I did point out previously that you seem to have missed. It was in the hand-written notes I provided.
Your cast-shadows should not be drawn as one continuous blob, or anything of the sort. If a line's trajectory changes dramatically, then you should be breaking it up into individual drawing movements, not striving to keep them going.
As for other stuff, here are some more notes and observations: https://i.imgur.com/CYPOpsp.png
I do think that you may generally be rushing things a little. Take more time in observing your reference and identifying different forms that sit there. You can even try drawing on top of your references to help figure out what forms exist (doing it digitally, using tracing paper, or printing stuff out and drawing on it) before drawing the object.
Also from the looks of it, your organic forms with contour curves aren't coming out as well as they could. Watch the degrees of your ellipses read these notes if you haven't already, or if you've forgotten. They're used to communicate the orientation of those cross-sections of the form, and this will shift as we move down along a given organic form.
Lastly, use line weight to clarify which forms overlap others. Looking at the page I redlined (or purple lined as the case may be), the insect on the bottom's torso is quite light relative to the legs, so their interaction/overlap is not at all clear. This serves to confuse the viewer.
Ultimately when I say to focus on construction, simplicity is a strong starting point as it allows you to lay down a strong foundation. That does not however mean that this is all construction is. It is a series of phases, on which you build up your forms and break things down to convey all of the major forms and elements that exist in an object.
I'd like to see another four pages of insects. Take your time, and spend most of that time observing your reference rather than drawing. For every second of drawing, there should be nine seconds of observation and study, trying to understand what it is you're looking at before you attempt to reproduce a given form on the page.
[deleted]
2017-12-20 08:17
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2017-12-20 19:57
So I definitely think that the way you've kind of spread out the work over time is hindering you. I totally get that you've got school, finals, etc. and you can only devote so much time to this kind of work, but as a result, you are definitely forgetting a lot of important concepts covered in earlier lessons.
That isn't to say you aren't having some successes - you certainly are. Also, a lot of the mistakes I see you making are more a matter of forgetting not to approach things in a particular way.
I've outlined all the major issues I've seen from this set on this page of notes. Many of these points are things I've mentioned in previous redline notes I've given you - it's very important to keep revisiting the material especially when you've got long gaps between drawing sessions.
The especially important points listed there are:
1) Drawing complete forms, not just letting them stop when something else overlaps them
4) Respecting your construction and not using line weight as an excuse to replace those construction lines. Every form you add is like adding a solid mass of marble to a 3D world - once it's there, you can't just ignore it. You need to deal with it. So then drawing a line that deviates from the existing construction without adding the appropriate structure/scaffolding to support it will result in your drawing looking flat.
5) Solidity comes from simplicity. You cannot start a form out like some complicated blob, it needs to be simple. You can then build up and combine multiple simple forms to create more complex ones that still hold onto the same sense of solidity, but you cannot just jump into a more complicated stage and expect it not to come out flat.
Also, another area you definitely need to think about more is observation. Look more, draw less. You're dealing with a lot of guesswork in some of these. Others are better demonstrations of observation, but you've got a significant number that show the kind of sloppiness that comes with simply not taking your time and paying attention. It's normal to become overwhelmed by these things, because there's a lot to discern and take apart. We usually respond to being overwhelmed by just guessing and drawing and hoping for the best. Instead, respond by stopping, taking a step back and looking closer.
Lastly, how big are you drawing? It's hard to tell the scale of your pages, though some of them look kind of stiff and cramped. The wolf spider looks like a good size, but in many of the others your linework tends to look heavier in comparison - it may just be because you're pressing harder, or because they really are just proportionally quite small.
So instead of asking you to do a bunch of pages again, I'm going to ask for just one. One drawing of an insect - preferably something you find to be easy, but not done from one of my demos. If you can apply the principles I've mentioned in my redline notes, I will mark the lesson as complete. Like before, no detail, no texture. Construction only.
While you're drawing it, I want you to take pictures at every stage of construction.
[deleted]
2017-12-23 09:16
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2017-12-23 20:21
I'm a man of much patience! I'm not going to get angry at you, but I will cut on occasion with a scalpel. That shit hurts.
So there are two primary issues here. First off, you picked a downright shitty reference image. It's very low res, and it's hard to tell what's going on. If you're using google image search, hit 'tools' and set the size to large.
The other issue is related to the first one, but is definitely a problem of its own - you've got very clear signs here that you're not really looking at your reference image all that much. There are basic proportional issues, which aren't entirely abnormal, but if you look at the back leg (the one that bends into a triangle and tucks back under the abdomen), your version of this is totally different.
I stressed the importance of observation in my last critique. I'm not really sure what the deal is - it was far less of an issue here - my only guess is that you've gotten rusty and are rushing ahead with your drawing despite that.
Here are my notes for this one: https://i.imgur.com/ZArIDCH.png. Try again. Pick a higher resolution reference image and take your time actually looking at what you're doing.
[deleted]
2017-12-26 09:53
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2017-12-27 01:29
Okay you did pretty well here. The construction of the body is solid, the only thing I didn't like at all is how you handled those eyes. They're not just little dots, they're actually solid forms.
I do get why you drew them in solid black though, because you were trying to replicate the colour you saw. You gotta keep pushing yourself to think in terms of form, ignore the local colours, all the lighting and the rendering. Just focus on what you actually know to be there.
Anyway, like I said - you did a pretty good job, so I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. The next lesson will continue to push your ability to observe your reference, and to think about things in terms of form. I strongly recommend that when you do the next lesson's homework, that you focus again purely on construction and ignore texture for now.
0700u
2017-11-23 13:24
Lesson 4
Thanks.
Uncomfortable
2017-11-24 06:05
There's a lot of great stuff here, and what's more important is that you demonstrate a lot of development in your skills and understanding of form/construction over the set. Earlier on in the set, your constructions were somewhat weaker, but you steadily improved upon it. As far as your later work goes, I'm especially impressed by this last page - the way you've layered the forms, establishing a strong sense of solidity and volume while also maintaining the general flow and fluidity is very impressive.
The only recommendation I want to make is that on pages like this one, you've treated the underlying construction as more of a rough sketch. I want you to consider every single form you put down as being a solid form. They should be drawn confidently, without trying to go out of your way to make them faint or hidden. Think of it as though you're placing a solid mass of marble into a 3D world - once it's there, you cannot "override" it with a different line, because it's effectively not just a bunch of marks on a flat piece of paper. You have to respect and abide by what already has been added to the world. Adding line weight isn't a means to 'clean things up' in this way, either - line weight is to be applied locally to sections of lines in order to clarify very specific overlaps, and make it clearer as to which form comes in front of which.
Anyway, generally you're doing pretty well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
0700u
2017-11-27 06:31
I tried to draw the abdomen again
Uncomfortable
2017-11-28 22:56
Here you go.
0700u
2017-12-01 15:41
Thank you! [I tried again] (https://imgur.com/gallery/rWUpo)
Uncomfortable
2017-12-01 20:01
Better. Watch your leg segments though - for some of them you're not drawing them to completion, you're stopping them where they get hidden by other forms, so they don't end up retaining enough solidity.
0700u
2017-12-04 00:26
Thank you, Sorry I couldn't upload on imggur , It's not working in China [Legs] (https://postimg.org/gallery/325m7sm0s/)
I tried two more drawings, the first one, I notice was too much detail, the second I just tried to focus on the forms.
Uncomfortable
2017-12-04 01:18
That's certainly looking much better. Keep up the good work, and remember that you're welcome to move onto the next lesson.
AllHailSpacesnail
2017-11-26 19:38
Hi uncomfortable. Here's my Lesson 4. I ran out of fineliners for the last drawing, so it is drawn with charcoal. I hope you will overlook this little break of the rules.
Edit: forgot one
Uncomfortable
2017-11-28 22:30
You've got a lot of nice constructions going on. I like the house fly a lot, the ants and cricket are decently done, and so on - but I'm going to use that one extra page to hammer home a few important points that you seem to have forgotten about in that particular page.
Take a look at these notes. Basically, always make sure you're working from simple to complex, and always draw through all of your forms. We're drawing complete forms, not letting them come to a stop where they get blocked by something else. I do think that the texture/detail in that praying mantis was probably a big distraction for you, and you were probably preoccupied with that when you should have been thinking more about construction. For that reason, it can help quite a bit to just do drawings where you don't even intend to put any texture in later on, as then you're left with nothing but construction to think about.
Anyway, overall you're still doing well, so keep those points in mind and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
AllHailSpacesnail
2017-11-28 23:05
Thank you for the feedback. I'll try focus more on construction in the next lesson.
Talyna
2017-12-02 23:35
Hello!
Here is my lesson 4 submission.
The first 8 pages were done a little while ago, with the remaining 6 (from the Rhino Beetle onwards) were done much more recently. (In-between I went through the ctrl-paint unplugged tutorials)
I also tried to push myself to experiment with texture & detail a bit more with the recent pages.
Thanks!
Uncomfortable
2017-12-03 23:02
You're doing quite well. In general, the drawings where you focused primarily on construction were more successful than those where you pushed more into the realm of detail and texture. You're doing alright on that front, but I do want you to always remember that construction is paramount. People often have a tendency to get caught up in knowing that they're going to move onto detail, so they'll put less attention towards their construction. Always treat your drawings the same, and consider detail/texture to be more of an after thought.
Another issue I noticed was in the very last page. Notice how you started out by laying in those two ellipses, but then ignored them for the rest of the drawing. In general, you don't want to be treating your phases of construction as being something you can easily ignore. Treat it as though you're adding solid masses of marble to a 3D world - if you want to change them after the fact, you need to cut and carve into them, which is a process where you're aware of how the resulting pieces (the piece you're cutting away, and the piece you're leaving behind) sit in 3D space. If you allow yourself to treat the forms you draw with less regard, then you will fail to fully convince yourself of their solidity, and in turn will fail to convince the viewer of that same thing.
Aside from that, really great work. A lot of your constructions are very solid and well put together - I especially like the fly and the scorpion. The weevil was also one of your more successful detailed ones.
I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
GreenInterest16
2017-12-10 19:20
Lesson 4 stuff;
https://imgur.com/a/l2wxX
I figured you'd want to see the more recent stuff rather than my earlier drawings, there's quite a lot of them.
These here I drew in relation to the critique you gave me from Lesson 3. Hopefully I've learned my lessons. :)
Some of these I'm satisfied with, others not so satisfied.
My grasshopper didn't turn out well, but I'm very satisfied with my Wolf Spider and my first House Fly.
Thanks for looking over my stuff. :)
Uncomfortable
2017-12-10 19:35
I can definitely see a hell of a lot of improvement in your understanding of form and construction, even across this set. So great work with that! Overall you're demonstrating a sort of internalized grasp of 3D space, which is definitely what we're looking for.
Your textures do still leave something to be desired, but that will improve with time and practice. This page in particular felt quite disorganized. Try and consider where your focal point is, and how you want to guide the eye around your piece. Also, lesson 5's got some tips on how to approach drawing fur/hair.
The only other thing I wanted to mention is that you can probably ease up on those contour curves. A couple here and there is fine, but try not to suggest that there's a sort of wireframe thing going on. Things started to get a little excessive on this one.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Wyrine
2017-12-15 00:23
Here is my lesson 4: https://imgur.com/a/s31Sk
I had some problem with my line weight from the 3rd page because I had to change my pen ink. It's getting better, but I could felt a loss of quality in my line weight for a while.
Thanks for the review :)
Uncomfortable
2017-12-16 19:31
Fantastic work. You're demonstrating an excellent sense of form and construction here. There are however some pages where I think you get too preoccupied with making a clean, pretty drawing and as a result skip over important steps. For example, on your scorptions, you're not drawing each form in its entirety (like the segments of its claws) - you draw them until they get blocked by a neighbouring form, which results in those shapes/forms being more complex, and therefore less solid. Always follow the process of working from simple to complex, especially when that requires you to draw through your forms. The end result is unimportant, and it can be organized and clarified through lineweight.
While it is important to be mindful of line economy, it's more about making sure the lines you put down are worth something, rather than just trying to cut corners.
I really liked this page of spiders. Overall you were pretty light on texture (which is totally fine), though where you did add textures you had a bit of a tendency to rush through it a little - in the future, try not to use hatching, and try to look more closely at what kind of textures are present on the surfaces you're drawing. When you draw marks for those textures, remember that the marks we see are the result of shadows being cast by small forms - these shadows can blend together into larger areas of pure black. Texture, like everything else, should always look deliberate and planned. You can read more about this on the texture challenge page.
Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. While I did have some things to say here, you're still doing very well. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Letsgo1
2017-12-20 20:33
Evening Uncomfortable,
Here is my submission for this lesson. https://imgur.com/a/xbgqt
Thanks a lot.
Uncomfortable
2017-12-20 21:03
Overall you're doing pretty well, and your forms are generally coming out feeling quite solid and your constructions believable. There are just a couple things I want to point out.
Firstly, I wanted to remark that on pages like this one, there seems to be a little bit of detachment between the initial forms of your construction (like that fainter ball/ellipse/thing that you started with) and your final forms. Keep in mind that every form you add to a construction is like a chunk of marble being added to a 3D scene. Once it's there, you have to deal with it somehow, and ignoring it so you can replace it with other later forms is going to undermine the solidity of your construction more times than not. Get into the habit of accepting that these forms are present, and build up around them rather than letting them float arbitrarily.
For your cerasini nymphs, I did notice that you were a bit neglectful of the segmentation of their carapaces - the layering there is a great way to describe the curvature of their forms (free contour lines). A lot of objects will have freebies like this, so it's important to take advantage of them - not just to be accurate, but also to help convey the illusion of solidity. This is how I'd have approached it, with considerably more attention paid to that exoskeletal layering.
Anyway, you're generally doing a good job with the rest of these. I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Letsgo1
2017-12-20 22:10
Thanks for your feedback, I see what you mean about the carving and the freebies to take advantage of. Your response nymph is annoyingly good. Ill crack on with the next lesson! Thanks for your rapid reply!
dda0
2017-12-23 08:39
My creepy crawlies https://imgur.com/a/xsM9g
Uncomfortable
2017-12-23 19:48
Overall you're doing a really good job. You're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of form and construction in most areas, resulting in objects that look and feel believable. There are two things that I'd like to bring to your attention however.
Firstly, when scanning your work, you've got the contrast ramped way up, and it makes it considerably more difficult for me to see your underlying construction lines, as the fainter ones tend to get blasted away. So while I can see hints that you are drawing through all of your forms properly, it's not always that easy to tell.
The other issue - which actually pertains to your approach to construction - is about this rhinoceros beetle, specifically how you've gone about building up its head. The way you approached it suggests that you're building it up in two dimensions - that is, blocking in the silhouette, rather than actually considering the forms that are present. Because of this, you end up with no options but to jump straight to the more complex stage of construction (the horn, the swooping carapace of the head, etc.) and as a result those elements end up lacking the structure.
Instead of thinking of the head mass as being something that encompasses the entirety of the head, think of it as the core building block, on top of which the rest of the head is constructed. Like a ball that holds everything else together.
Aside from that, the rest of your constructions are quite well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
dda0
2017-12-23 20:25
Thank you!
I did struggle a lot with rhinoceros beetle's head. I was aware of sloppy 2D border that I carved out of the sphere, and could not quite wrap my head around doing it any other way. I will work on improving that.
About the images, I have been using an app called iScanner to take pictures. It has some cool features for border detection and perspective correction. Looks like when I have flash turned on(which i had to do because of low lit room), it does some image enhancement that increases the contrast. I will make sure to upload better pictures next time.
Cheers!
CrashPosition
2018-01-19 20:53
I did it! (hopefully)
Here's my lesson 4 homework: https://imgur.com/a/7qpvy
Uncomfortable
2018-01-20 18:50
Overall you're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of construction. I went and looked at the steps for the beetle that you'd posted, and I'd say it's the best example there of a good understanding of how your forms sit in 3D space, and how they all connect together.
I have a couple things to point out though:
You're generally not drawing through most of your ellipses. You should be doing that for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons, without exception.
At times your linework can be a bit vague at the earlier stages. You do cover this up as you go along, but the result is that the underlying construction doesn't always end up as solid as it could and should be. This has an impact on the resulting drawing. Take more care with things like contour lines (making sure they go from edge to edge and hook around confidently so they appear to continue on along the other side - it wasn't quite achieved in your dragon fly, for example, overshooting your curves a little as they hook around can help here), and generally take more time planning your marks. Vagueness tends to come from rushing into the execution phase too early.
If you look at the dragonfly's tail, you constructed it with a ball that has been stretched quite dramatically. In most cases, such forms are better off handled with sausages. This applies to legs too. I explain this in one of the insect video demos, here.
Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There certainly are areas for you to grow, but you're heading in the right direction. Feel free to move onto the next one.
CrashPosition
2018-01-21 17:28
Thank you! I definitely noticed the problems you mentioned with the contour lines, but I hadn't picked up on the issues you mentioned with the ball vs. sausage shape, that's a great point. As for drawing through the ellipses, I don't know at what point I dropped that habit but I'll get back on it. Thanks again!
Carlton_Honeycomb
2018-01-30 18:05
I've been working hard on these critters all week.
I now find myself looking at everyday objects and thinking of how I could deconstruct it or simplify them and then draw using the construction method. I've caught some type of "bug"
...I'll see myself out.
But FIRST! Here's my submission.
Uncomfortable
2018-02-01 21:23
Things definitely start off kind of weak, but you certainly get the ball rolling and end up with a pretty good grasp of construction. The biggest challenge you were facing at the beginning was definitely proportion. Over the course of the set, you improve on this front considerably, while building up a better understanding of how your forms convey solidity, how they relate to one another, and even your use of texture.
Your last two pages are quite well done. I do have one thing to point out however - you've got to be more deliberate with the lines you put down, and you must draw through each one entirely. Take a look at this page. The construction is solid, but we can clearly see that the lines of the abdomen distinctly stop where they get overlapped by the form of the thorax. You're purposely expending mental energy to stop yourself from drawing marks beyond these points. Drawing each form in its entirety gives you a much stronger grasp of how they sit in space, which is ultimately what we're forcing you to internalize. You won't have to do this forever, but I want you to do it in all of my lessons. Additionally, by spending that additional focus on stopping your lines early, you're also taking away the resources your brain could be applying to the other problems you're attempting to solve here.
Aside from that, you're doing great. Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Carlton_Honeycomb
2018-02-03 23:48
Thanks so much for the feedback. I do need to work on being more deliberate and selective with the lines I put down; its something Ive been being mindful of lately. Ill focus on your suggestions, and apply them in lesson 5!
joe_coke
2018-02-10 15:34
Here's my submission for lesson 4:
https://imgur.com/a/0UErV
Uncomfortable
2018-02-10 19:17
There's definitely some good here, but also some things I want to bring to your attention.
First and foremost, in many of these drawings you're allowing detail and texture to distract you from construction. When you do decide that you're going to move forward with texture, you seem to have that on your mind while working on the earlier steps. As a result, your constructions end up sloppier, less solid, and perhaps end up being given less time before you jump the fence and frolic in the fields of detail.
Detail and texture are irrelevant. They are not what you're here to learn, and they are not the focus of these lessons. First and foremost, before touching any texture or even giving it any thought, you must have a solid construction. Then you can decide whether or not you want to take it further, but not before then.
I like how you handled the segmentation of the body for this grasshopper, (the lines wrap very nicely around that rounded form, giving it a sense of solidity) but it's very clear that you did not observe what you were drawing very carefully when drawing it. After all, you've given it a head and an abdomen, but no thorax. In the lesson, I explain the three components of the body, so you should have already been looking for them.
For this beetle, it's definitely a good start, but there are two major issues with it. First of all, you should be drawing through all of your ellipses. You didn't do this for the three major masses, and as a result the shapes are drawn more slowly, less confidently, and are generally uneven and don't give off a sense of solidity. Secondly, always work from simple to complex. The way you've handled the legs there definitely started off way too complex - focus on establishing the flow of the forms, then add additional forms on later to add bulges and other matters of greater visual complexity.
Overall I think your spiders were quite well done, especially the one on the bottom there. I have one major issue I want to mention however - when drawing the legs, you drew them in segments, where the lines of a given segment would stop as soon as they hit the previous one (you didn't draw the lines where they'd be hidden by other forms). I absolutely want you to draw through all of your forms, regardless of overlaps. If you draw incomplete forms, they will not feel as solid, and this will influence the resulting construction.
One day you'll be able to draw those forms focusing only on that which is visible, but for now each drawing is merely an exercise in learning to wrap your head around constructing complex objects from simple forms, and in developing a stronger sense of 3D space.
Lastly, this drawing has a lot of really cool texture work going on, but the abdomen is totally flat. Those layered segments should have been wrapping around the rounded abdomen (which itself wasn't really being sold as a solid 3D form to begin with), but they didn't seem to demonstrate a good grasp of how that form existed in 3D space. So, that lack of understanding of the form was then communicated to the viewer. So construction is important!
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do four more pages of construction-only drawings. No detail, no texture. I think your detail work is actually quite good, especially near the end of the lesson, but you need to build it up on top of a stronger foundation of form.
joe_coke
2018-02-18 12:45
Ok, thanks for the feedback. here's the extra insects:
https://imgur.com/a/GeNNP
Uncomfortable
2018-02-19 00:55
I gotta say, you are going CRAZY with those contour ellipses. I had to go back and see if I specifically told you to add more contour lines.
Whenever a student starts overusing contour lines like this, it raises the question whether or not they understand what they are trying to achieve with them. Usually when a student doesn't really grasp the goal of the technique, they tend to just go to town on adding them, hoping that it'll work out in the end.
Contour lines have a very specific purpose. They run along the surface of a form, and in doing so, convey how that surface turns through 3D space. In doing so, it reinforces the volume and illusion of three dimensionality.
Even just ONE contour line has a great deal of impact, but the more you add, the smaller your returns and the stiffer your construction gets. Instead of adding a wealth of them, think through each individual one you draw and add as few as you can to achieve the effect you're after. Plan them out, consider their positioning and always work towards a specific goal. Don't just add them for the sake of having more.
As far as form goes, you are definitely doing much better - they do feel solid, and that is definitely in a big part due to the contour ellipses. Of course, the downside is that your drawings are extremely messy and you're being quite wasteful when it comes to line economy.
The other thing I wanted to point out was in regards to how you drew legs in the first page. I outlined it, along with a few points relating to contour lines, in these notes.
You are improving, but you need to balance how you approach things and perhaps think more and draw less. Right now you're doing a lot on each drawing, but also are doing each individual component with a little more sloppiness than you ought to. Uneven ellipses, lines getting hairy and generally being less planned out. Slow down, think about what you're doing, and invest more time into the planning phase.
I'd like to see two more pages.
joe_coke
2018-02-21 20:33
I know you asked for 2 but i needed the practice:
https://imgur.com/a/97gz2
Uncomfortable
2018-02-22 00:55
Not bad! I do feel like the main bodies feel a little squished - not flat, but like their forms despite being obviously three dimensional have been pancaked. Not this one though. I'm quite fond of how you handled its legs. One suggestion that can help as well is to place a contour curve right where the segments of the legs meet. Keep the lengths of those tubes clear, but reinforce the joints to kind of show how those two forms intersect.
Oh, I can see you're still not drawing through all of your ellipses.. but you are getting most of them.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
-PixelManiac-
2018-02-14 08:18
Hello Uncomfortable !
Here is my homework for lesson 4 : https://imgur.com/a/7aWkQ.
Uncomfortable
2018-02-15 01:54
Hooooot damn, that is some nice work. Unfortunately I have no real criticism to offer. Your use of form is spot on, your constructions are are broken down into the simplest of components and maintain a strong sense of fluidity while remaining solid in every way.
I mean, I could offer that you should always remember to construct cylindrical things around a minor axis. On that last page, you've got some branchy things that could benefit from that - also watch the way your contour curves wrap around said branchy things, as it's not quite as good as elsewhere in your drawings. Or rather, I think the other drawings benefit from that sort of segmented look, whereas a branch is a continuous tube, so the contour curves on it need to appear as though they are running directly on the surface of the form, not marking dips within it like you'd see between segments on an exoskeleton.
I did mention in my last critique that you should draw bigger. I'd say here that your most successful drawings were the bigger ones. Some of your smaller ones were perfectly fine, while, say - the praying mantis on the top of page 3 felt a bit scrunched.
Anyway, really great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
-PixelManiac-
2018-02-15 08:20
Thank you for the helpful feedback ! I wanted to go faster with the branches but it ended up messy indeed ^^. Onto the next lesson then !
Blargas
2018-02-15 07:49
Alrighty, here is my lesson 4 homework ready for critique: https://imgur.com/a/UBrx9
Uncomfortable
2018-02-16 01:37
Good golly, your forms and constructions have really improved by leaps and bounds with this one. If we compare them to the cactus I called out in your lesson 3 work, the sense of weight and solidity of these insects is miles ahead. Each one feels tangible and three dimensional, without becoming stiff. Your use of line weight has gone a long way to really build a cohesive sense that these are not merely individual lines on a page, but marks that cannot be separated from one another.
I really love the legs on this spider - their flow is spot on, and they have a wonderful sense of direction. You've really done a phenomenal job here. I also like the fact that you pushed some experimentation with texture and detail, but maintained a sort of subtle, light touch to it, rather than going to town. Because of this your constructions stay strong throughout, while still managing to communicate the presence of different surface qualities.
I'd say the furry thorax of the bee was probably your weakest area. In the animals lesson, you'll see some notes on how to approach fur. You actually were heading right in that direction, so you may have already seen them. I believe the trick here would just be to try and draw fewer tufts, and focus more on the individual groupings as they break the silhouette. If you decrease the number but take more time in designing them, your impact should be greater.
Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Blargas
2018-02-18 18:35
Thank you for the critique, I will keep the fur thing in mind as I move forward to the next lesson.
ToaztE
2018-03-02 00:06
Hi Uncomfortable! Here are the creepy crawlies https://imgur.com/gallery/nNbow
Uncomfortable
2018-03-02 01:01
To be entirely honest with you, I'm a bit on the fence as to whether or not I should critique this submission. Ultimately I have decided to go ahead and do it, but the reason I'm conflicted over it is that you haven't followed one of the most important rules of these lessons:
Draw the entire thing in ink. I don't want to see the kind of loose, sketchy linework you've done in pencil, and I don't want to see you going back over your drawing with a slow-and-steady hand to line it in pen again. Even when adding line weight normally, you should never be going over the entirety of a shape - line weight should be applied locally to certain areas to clarify specific overlaps, rather than to clean up or replace existing lines.
Your work has its strong points and its weak areas. You've got some drawings, or even some parts of drawings that really push a strong grasp of form, while others come out entirely flat without much application of the principles of construction. I felt it was best to convey my observations by writing directly on your work.
I'd like you to do another four pages of drawings, with only a 0.5mm fineliner this time. Think more about each individual form that goes into your construction, and focus on starting your constructions off as simply as possible. Simple is always best when it comes to conveying the illusion of form. You'll notice that in the little example doodles I added to my notes there, my forms often start off as completely even ellipses with no wavy lines or additional visual detail. Keeping them evenly shaped keeps them solid - I can then build on top of them, add the odd contour line, etc. to achieve the specific arrangement I require.
Also make sure you draw through all of those forms - explore how forms connect to one another, even where you wouldn't be able to see them. You did this in some places (in pencil), but not in others, and the latter group tended to come out quite flat.
Peronade
2018-03-03 07:07
Due to my diploma work I didn't have as much free time as I'd like to. It took some days but I managed to finish the assignment. However I think I need to makes my strokes cleaner. Here is the assignment: https://imgur.com/a/ZLQxb
Uncomfortable
2018-03-04 18:33
You've got some nice work here, though I do have a few points to bring to your attention that should help you develop your skills.
Overall your grasp of form is coming along well, as is your general use of construction. You're showing a good understanding of the components that go into a more complex object, and are quite mindful of how they connect to one another. This establishes a good sense of 3D space.
There are a couple things that jump out at me as holding you back a little however.
Your linework is quite timid, and relies heavily on you drawing with a light hand at first, drawing many marks for a single line, and 'choosing' one to emphasize. This ultimately undermines the solidity of your forms and makes things look a little chicken scratchy, or at least sketchy. We want to ensure that every mark we put down is the result of conscious planning beforehand, ghosting, and ultimately a confident execution. When we draw timidly, it's because we don't feel confident in our ability to nail something beforehand. We draw lighter, and do more of our thinking directly on the page, and it really gives the impression that we're not buying into the illusions we're creating. This in turn erodes the effectiveness of that illusion for the viewer.
Commit to your decisions. Part of drawing confidently means committing to the marks we've made. Our marks aren't all going to come out as we want them to, but we need to learn to roll with the punches. Demonstrating that you are of two minds in a drawing will again, undermine the illusion of solidity. Take a look at this beetle. Notice how at the far left of its abdomen, you've got two curves - one goes a little further out, and another darker one cuts across the original shape that was placed on the page. This "trimming" doesn't take how the forms exist in 3D space into consideration at all - it acts on the shapes that are on the page, and as such it reinforces the idea that these are just flat marks on a flat piece of paper.
You might be drawing too many contour lines. They're not too bad because you're drawing them faintly, but in essence, since that undermines the methodology we're after here, you're going to have to be more economical with your contour curves. For the most part, a lot of those curves aren't really contributing anything of their own. One or two will usually do the job along a fairly long length of form, and any more you add after that will have drastically diminishing returns.
Always work from simple to complex. Generally you're doing a good job of this, but the abdomen of this wasp stood out to me. It doesn't look like there was any sort of underlying construction onto which the layers of segmentation were constructed. The form itself came out quite flat as well because of the inherent complexity to it - it should have been broken down more from the outset.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You bring a lot of great stuff to the table, and have a good grasp of how 3D space works, but you've got to work on being more decisive. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.