Hi there. I finished my homework for lesson 4 and would like to receive your critique on it. Largely finished these drawing a while ago but with your advice on lesson 3 I went over a few again and made some more.
In the beginning I was struggling with textures and hatching, but I think I got somewhere at the end. A brush and a pot of ink helped me out a lot here. Something I'm still struggling with are the wings the bugs. I tried to solve it in different ways, but I'm still not enterly convinced.
Your work is looking great as usual. I'm actually pretty pleased with your progression as far as your texture goes (you're doing a lot of great experimentation with different ways to approach it, and I feel that your willingness to use large areas of solid black is really working to your benefit. As far as the wings go, they can be tricky as wings are generally the opposite of what we strive for in our constructions (they're light, as opposed to weighty and solid), but I think you're capturing them quite well. You're simplifying them and building up their patterns in a way that communicates their essence effectively. This one was definitely rather rough, and it seems like less thought went into the marks individually - but your later wings were much better and more representative of your subject matter.
I do have one thing that I want to draw your attention to - in a couple of places (not often by any means) I noticed you ignoring the initial mass you'd put down in favour of a more refined shape/form. It is extremely important that when you place a form onto the page, that you regard it as being solid and present - like a mass of marble floating in a 3D world that cannot simply be ignored at will. If you disregard the solidity of one of the forms present in your drawing, it will effectively undermine that of the rest of the object.
I explain this further in these notes I've written on top of two of your pages. When you've placed an object in the scene, it must be dealt with as though you respect its presence in that space. If you must cut away pieces of it, you must do so in a way that establishes how both the piece that's being removed and the piece that is left over sit in 3D space (usually by defining the cut itself as a cross-section rather than just a simple 2D line). Better yet, construct those initial masses as the core forms and then build on top of them as needed, as you did with the less detailed fly construction.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Overall you're doing very well, and your drawings are remarkably successful. Just keep that one point in mind - you may not be doing it much, but it is a core principle of construction, that we respect the solidity of all our forms, and that we express to the viewer our own belief in the illusion we've created starting from the initial steps and all the way through.
Read this a couple of days ago but still wanted to thank you for the awesome feedback. It has helped me a lot with lesson 5 so far.
I feel that I'm finally starting to get it in terms of mass. Which was one of te bad habits you noticed in the beginning and I can see now how it was holding me back. It's about being really deliberate with every line I put down and not just draw a 2D approximation, which are more shapes. The notes are invaluable!
You've got some nice drawings here, although there are a few points I want to bring to your attention. In a lot of cases, you're getting a bit too preoccupied with detail, or at least with more complex visual information that you're skipping certain constructional steps, or are at least overlooking aspects of the initial, simpler constructional phases that ultimately end up causing problems later on.
Always remember that while what's most interesting to draw is all the detail and complexity, that is not what we should be focusing on here. We want to ensure that the core construction is solid, and build on top of that as needed. You'll also want to put every mark down as part of a complete and planned form - don't think of your linework as being individual marks.
One significant issue I caught was that you have a tendency to get chicken scratchy and rough. You're not exhibiting the kind of controlled, pre-planned and confident linework the exercises in lesson 1 encourage. Are you continuing to practice those exercises as part of a regular warmup routine?
Here are some notes I've written on top of your work, pointing out issues I'd like you to deal with. I'd like you to submit four more pages of insect drawings. Ease up on the amount of detail - focus on the core construction, not the fancy stuff. In your last few pages of scorpions, you pretty much stop doing construction altogether, for whatever reason. While that very last scorpion tail with the heavy shadow work is really beautiful, it's not what this lesson is about.
Most recent was first - the last 2 scorpion bits (tail / body/claw) were detail-studies without construction at all (while I was on vacation); I meant to make a note of that. The black widow is the most recent drawing, and the scorpion was the first thing I did. Thank you for the feedback! More insects coming.
There is some improvement, but overall there are clear signs that you're rushing through these drawings and there are quite a few things that you're ignoring in regards to the critique I gave you previously. For example, the point about drawing sausages instead of ellipses for your leg constructions, and treating every form you put down as a solid form that must be dealt with and cannot be ignored. There are also numerous cases where you stop drawing forms where they become occluded by others, rather than drawing through them completely. You must draw each form in its entirety, as this will help you better grasp how they each sit in space and how they relate to one another.
All three of these issues are present in your lice drawing, so I set aside the time to create a demo specifically from the reference you used. You'll find it here.
In order to help you give these drawings a little more time and attention (the fact that you submitted so soon after receiving the critique was a bit of a red flag), and also because of the number of lessons you've submitted for critique this month (5 submissions across 3 lessons and 1 challenge), I'd like you to hold your next submission until at least April 1st. Please take your time with each construction and focus only on the forms. For the demo I just did, the drawing alone took me at least 20 minutes, likely more. I don't want to see any detail, and ignore the surrounding environment. Every mark you draw must be planned and thought through.
It took me a while to finish this lesson, partially because of time constraints and partially due to my own lack of desire to draw insects. Nevertheless, the research process itself turned out to be quite interesting, so thank you for this lesson!
For the bee I have included 3 different stages of me drawing it, as it seems like I've over rendered it to the point that you cannot see the construction. There's also not much study of the bee, only the leg.
The beetle appears to have had it's head broken. It's not the reference image, it's me going with the lines I have put down on paper. Poor Mr Beetle :(
It also seems like I've messed up the proportions on the scorpion, specifically the far legs and one of the pincers. This particular scorpion does have small pincers overall, but one of them is still off.
I believe that's all from my side. Will be waiting for your critique.
You've got a lot of solid constructions here. While proportion can take some time to gauge successfully, and we're not necessarily going to be easily matching our reference images, what I focus on most is the solidity of the resulting drawings, and their believability. If a construction has been successful, when we put the reference image away and show the drawing to someone, they'll feel like it could absolutely be some plausible creature.
I'd say your strongest construction was the spider. I don't like looking at it too long, as it's that creepy. One thing I did notice however was that while the forms convey a strong sense of volume, they're misaligned. The center line you've got going down the abdomen isn't following the actual balanced center of the critter, and its head ends up being a little off to one side. The grasshopper is also very well done. The mosquito too.
While that bee doesn't look like anything I've ever seen, it does look solidly built - pretty close to being some kind of creature, even if I wouldn't necessarily be able to identify it as a bee (maybe I just haven't seen that species before).
I definitely do feel like you may be getting a bit ahead of yourself in terms of detail - that moth for instance is a good example of detail vastly overshadowing the core construction, resulting in an object that doesn't feel entirely solid.
Another thing I noticed, going back to Mr. Beetle's head, is that you seem to have constructed by drawing an ellipse that would ultimately contain the entirety of its head. You basically started big, and then cut back - which can work (though it's tricky), but in this case when you cut it back, you did so by treating it like a 2D shape rather than a 3D form. Cutting a form in a way that retains its three dimensionality means doing so such that the show an understanding of the various sides of the pieces you're cutting away, as well as those left behind. More often than not it is easier to simply start with a smaller ball and build up forms around this. I demonstrate this in the lice demo I did yesterday for Slate.
Here are some redline drawings that touch on the bits I've mentioned here. The bit about the sausage legs is also demonstrated pretty well in the lice demo.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the points I've mentioned here in mind, and feel free to move onto lesson 5.
The bee was actually suppose to be a bumble bee. That's how off I was with it ^^' I think my biggest mistake was to give it a sort of belly that overshadowed the thorax and it's frontal connection to the abdomen. The fuzziness really confused me.
Good morning and happy Easter! http://cattail.nu/dab/lesson4/ - most recent at the top, boxed off from the ones you've previously seen. There's more than 4 drawings (6 insects total) - a few of the same bug because I didn't like the drawings, and two more from yesterday that did not follow your "don't add any shadow/detail", and one included solely for the happy-factor that isn't counted.
Thanks for providing your references. I spent about forty minutes going over four of your drawings and writing out notes - while the ones on the left side are a bit disorganized as they require pointing to specific things, those on the right are overarching issues or potential issues that I've noticed. Here you go.
I quite liked your aphid (the green one, third from the top).
Deviation from your reference is quite normal - as we draw, we end up making mistakes that accumulate, and we then have to compensate for them which results in a construction that is not likely to match the reference perfectly. There are areas here however where I feel it's far enough that you may not be looking back at your reference frequently enough. Always remember that as human beings, we were are not evolved to retain a perfect mental image of the things we've seen.
The second we look away from a reference, our brains go to work simplifying what we can recall, and throwing away a great deal of information. For this reason it's integral that we continually look back at our reference again and again, even when we feel we can recall information well.
The process of doing studies does help rewire our brains to at least focus in on the key information, but for quite a long time to come, it's going to be integral that you look back at your reference after every mark or two.
Finding high-resolution reference is also extremely important. The praying mantis for example was low resolution enough that I could barely make out how its head was supposed to fit together. If I myself struggled with it, then it is definitely going to pose unreasonable challenges for you.
I want you to go over the notes I've written there, and take your time in absorbing them. Once you have, I want you to do one more drawing of this specific ant. You may reference other images as needed to understand how it fits together (for example, how the legs connect under the thorax, which is something you struggled with in the last few drawings).
I also want you to take pictures of your process, after every individual phase of construction. I don't want you to apply any detail, and I want you to draw this entirely with one 0.5mm pen. Apply line weight only where you need to clarify certain overlaps, do not go over the entirety of shapes. Focus on fleshing out your 3D forms, and use contour lines where necessary - but don't overdo them. Whenever you add a contour line, be aware of what you're trying to achieve with it. Students often draw too many when they stop thinking about why they're drawing them in the first place.
Looking at photographs of each individual stage will help me to provide you with additional advice on things that aren't entirely clear in final drawings.
Thank you very much for taking the time to do such a complete review. I truly appreciate your feedback and comments.
Answers: lesson 1/2 practice every day since the last review (except today). Every insect is on it's own 8.5x11 page, although I do not fill the page. I have an issue with not spacing/measuring correctly across figure drawing and I cut off people's legs or arms a lot - so I've been very careful to keep things at a size I know wont chop. I am on one size pen since your note on that previously - I'm kind of pleased you couldn't tell if it was a different size pen because that means my control is improving. Some general comments (not excuses): the lady bug spots were intended contour, not detail. The mantis and ladybug were both from yesterday (and were me playing around with random stuff from pinterest - that's how I ended up with just 1 image each and small). The invisible leg drawn anyway was from your note to draw through everything. The opposite legs were giving me more than a little trouble in the first drawings of this set. I look at the reference constantly, but my measurements/angles are awful (constant struggling point for me - some days are better than others), and then (like in the case of the ladybug wing) sometimes the line doesn't go where I told it to, and I've been making an effort not to try to correct them. Again, I really appreciate your critique!
My homework :) Sorry it took so long! Spend too long on practicing each one at first... towards the end learned to obsess a little less and actually finish some drawings.
Nice work! Overall you're doing a great job of capturing your forms and constructing objects that retain a good sense of solidity and believability. Even that ant with the ridiculously large head (which I'm guessing is actually how they are) looks weird, but still entirely believable because of how you've built it up applying the constructional methodology.
I definitely appreciate that you included a couple of shots through the drawing process, before adding detail.
I think the only particularly weak drawing was this one, which seems to be a pretty strong outliner compared to the others. The legs are kind of stiff, and the rest of it feels rather awkward - but I'm sure that was just an off day or something.
I do have a couple suggestions and observations, but rather than trying to explain them here, I wrote them out directly on your work. Here you go.
I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
I think this shows a much better grasp of the issues I mentioned previously. You've been quite meticulous in your documentation, and I can now confidently say that though there's room for growth, you're moving in the right direction. So, I'll go ahead and mark it as complete.
As you move onto the next lesson, here are some things to keep in mind:
Take advantage of as much of the space on the page as you can. More room will make it easier to think about the forms you're drawing as they sit in 3D space - this is particularly critical for features of the head, like the ant's beak. When you're forced to be quite cramped, it's harder to consider how these forms relate to the larger ones.
Whenever two forms touch each other, think about how one wraps long the surface of the other, or how the intersection itself runs along their surfaces. Understanding how things flow along the surfaces of other objects is definitely key, so the contour line exercises from lesson 2 are very useful.
I did notice from your video that you have a tendency to draw towards your body (or at least, along the diagonal that runs from the upper left to the bottom right, relative to your body). In my experience, most right handed people find bottom left to upper right to be most comfortable. That doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, I'd imagine, but it is something to consider. It could be a factor when considering that things like your ant's antennae tend to be a little wobblier than other marks in your constructions.
Anyway, keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Your grasp of 3D space, and your ability to capture forms that feel solid and concrete is strong, no question of that whatsoever. The only thing I do want to point out however is that you are, at least in some places, notably loose with your construction.
In the grand scheme of things, that's fine. You've clearly already pushed far enough for that grasp of 3D space to be internalized, so the marks you put down are really all you need (for the most part) to work through the spatial problems and determine how the various parts relate to one another. That said, being able to actually sit down and construct everything in its entirety, on the page, is still important, and it is the focus of this lesson (as opposed to just focusing on drawing pretty pictures).
That means a few things:
Drawing each form in its entirety, even when they're blocked by other forms, so we can fully see how they relate to one another, and ensuring that each form is represented by a closed circuit. If you lookat your dragonfly, you'll see that its tail actually flattens out quite a bit - it's because the way the segments were drawn, each one reads more as a 2D shape on the page, rather than being presented as each being an individual three dimensional form that were then connected. Of course, if you were doing a finished drawing, you wouldn't be able to draw through each form - but the point is that drawing through them here in these exercises trains your brain to figure out all of the subtle nuances that would be visible in that final-drawing scenario.
Understanding that each and every form or mass or mark we put down represents a solid 3D form present in the scene (so if you put down a circle to represent, say, the thorax of an insect, that is not just an arbitrary mark on a piece of paper, it should actually be treated as though it were a ball of clay or marble set into a 3D world. Meaning, that if you then realize that the sphere is too big, or that you want a piece of it to be taken away, you can't simply draw on top of it in hopes that the original mark will be ignored. That tells the viewer that it wasn't solid or 3D after all, and undermines that very illusion for the rest of your drawing. As a result, one would more often start out with smaller masses and build up around them by adding additional volumes and layers. If you look at the top of this page, you can see the three loose balls that make up the abdomen of that spider. Those initial ellipses don't actually feel three dimensional, and rather than being a sort of scaffolding for the resulting construction, they're really just 2D explorative sketches that you used to draw the composite shape. Construction as we use it goes much further than just putting down a few marks - they tell us about how things sit in space. Your resulting compound shape still doesn't actually read as being terribly three dimensional - there's nothing there leveraged to communicate to the viewer how that surface turns in space. Had you taken the time to think about how its building blocks were solid and 3D, that belief in the illusion would have likely carried over, making you think more about the resulting 3D nature of the abdomen as a whole. Long story short, don't rush through the early phases - take the time to ensure that every component you put down feels solid and three dimensional, as you see in my demonstrations. This is after all a series of exercises - not an attempt at impressing folks with your pretty drawings (though they are indeed both pretty and impressive).
Anyway, aside from that, you really are doing phenomenal work here. While the issues I mentioned certainly have their impact, the majority of your forms and drawings feel very convincing, and you've done a great job of balancing texture and detail without undermining the underlying solidity.
Keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Since this was your 7th submission this month, I'd like to ask that you hold onto your next one until May 1st. I cut off most people at about 5 submissions, but your work wasn't as challenging to critique in most cases, and your pledge is a little higher than what you needed to receive critiques for the lessons you submitted, so I gave you a little more leeway.
I definitely found this more difficult than plants, but I was getting more comfortable with it by the end. Since I was doing one drawing per page I went ahead and did four pages of lay-ins; I wasn't sure exactly how many you wanted.
So I went to town writing notes on your first page, and while I think doing so is probably the most valuable thing I could do, you show improvement over this set. Some of the issues with construction that you have on that first page definitely get better to varying degrees on the rest of it, but I think being able to point them out as directly as I could with that wasp is definitely important.
So here are the notes. There's a lot written there all over the place, so I kind of ordered them, from points 1 to 4.
A few other things I noticed:
Your linework's a bit stiff. Make sure you're ghosting your lines and drawing from your shoulder, as you may have slipped back to drawing from your wrist, and drawing less confidently.
Drawing through your initial masses (as we do with all of our ellipses) is definitely useful to keep them more evenly shaped, fluid and smooth.
Your contour lines have a tendency to be a little rushed and weak in places. I can't remember if these pages were done earlier (before I actually critiqued lesson 2 or not), but that area does need work if it's recent. Be sure to continue practicing the exercises from the first two lessons as part of a regular warmup so you don't get rusty on that front.
Here's an additional demo that I did for another student some time ago that covers the whole construction process in great detail. It's currently present on the lesson 4 page's 'other demos' section, though as it's fairly new it may not have been there if your work for this lesson is a little outdated.
I want you to do another 5 pages of insect drawings. Focus entirely on construction - I don't want to see any detail or texture whatsoever, just focus on the forms you're building, how they sit in 3D space, how they relate to one another, and generally mind the constructional method more closely.
One thing I should reiterate about the construction method is that it is built around the idea of dealing with one problem or decision at a time. Drawings consist of a lot of decisions that have to be made. How different sections relate to one another, proportions, the arrangement of things, and so on. Construction is all about breaking the decisions into steps - once you make a decision though, you may decide later on that the decision was incorrect. By that point, it's TOO LATE. You cannot do anything about it - the biggest mistake one can make is to try and correct and change a decision that has already been made. Ultimately all you can do is work within the framework you've set out. If early on you happened to make the head too big, you need to respect that decision and keep working to draw something that happens to have a head that is larger than it should be.
If you try to correct it, the whole thing will start to unravel. Keep that in mind as you push onwards. Every step is a decision.
Ok thank you, I will get to work on the additional pages. I want to comment on a few things and make sure Im understanding this correctly:
Your example of the wasp abdomen is very helpful; I wasnt understanding that method of layering forms. Ill be sure to apply this in my additional pages. I considered tossing the wasp drawing because I knew undermining the forms like that was bad, but good thing I kept it in since it allowed you to explain some things I wasnt getting.
Some of the stiffness in my major forms may be the result of me worrying too much about copying the reference exactly. One thing Ive been doing, because I dont trust myself with proportions yet, is measuring with my pen to get the initial masses to be the right size in relation to each other. Should I just be eyeballing these proportions?
Not all leg segments keep a consistent width throughout their length, such as the hind leg of the honey bee. Would you then still want an even sausage shape for the initial form, and then build another form on top to more accurately represent its true shape?
As for contour lines, I think just I wasnt treating them with enough importance, probably me worrying about cluttering up the drawing. I'll try to be more deliberate with them.
People often fuss about posting only work they feel met a certain standard, and as a result grinding out far more pages than were assigned. I regularly try and discourage this due to the reason you've found here - the shitty drawings tell us a lot.
Your understanding of proportion and relationships between forms will improve over time, but yes - don't fuss over them too much right now. Your initial masses are what's meant to make those initial proportional decisions, and sometimes they end up off by a fair bit. That's totally fine, and with lots of mileage and iteration, your ability to eyeball those proportions will improve. You can also delve into ways to improve your proportions later - but right now our focus is on the use of the constructional method to create objects that feel solid and three dimensional.
Exactly right - use sausages to create the bases, then build up the areas where you see greater volumes.
Remember that every technique that you're introduced to is a tool with a purpose. Only use the tools when you need them, and if you need them, give them the appropriate amount of attention. I often see students covering things with sloppy contour lines, and only getting about half the effect they were striving for. Often times one or two well-placed and well-executed contour lines will be enough to reliably reinforce the volumes of a form.
Much, much, much better! You've definitely applied much of what I mentioned in my last critique to great effect. I can see two issues that I'd still like to point out, but overall you're doing well:
Lets look at this page. Notice how you've got a ball for the head, and it's floating a bit inside of the final form of the head? Same goes for the thorax. This kind of floating inside of a relatively arbitrary outer form is still contributing to a sense of weak construction. You want to build up - don't obliterate the original mass, but attach more forms to it. Don't wrap a single highly complex form around the original one, either, as this means that your subsequent form doesn't have enough scaffolding to support it from the previous step. You can think of it kind of like constructing a building, where if a wall is erected without the appropriate support system put up to hold it together, it will fall apart. If you look at my demos, you'll notice that wherever possible, I tend to still have parts of the initial masses still play a role in the final drawing, because I haven't replaced it - I've built onto it.
Keep an eye on your insects' feet - you're definitely still being a bit sloppy there, not putting enough time and effort into actually observing and constructing them. This isn't an uncommon issue - people tend to disregard the feet, putting the odd afterthought of a line or two. If you put any marks down for anything, they should be considered, planned, confidently executed, and reflect the forms you actually see present in your reference image.
I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to continue to apply what I've mentioned here in the next lesson. I believe my first point is reflected fairly well in the otter and head-construction demos in the animal lesson, so be sure to give those a watch.
I think you show a great deal of growth over this set, and while there's certainly room for more, you're got some clear signs of improvement where your understanding of form and 3D space is concerned. I was especially pleased with this page, specifically how the interaction between the head, thorax and abdomen show that you're really grasping how everything sits in space.
There are a few things that I'd like to point out that should help you as you continue to move forwards, but overall I'm quite pleased with your improvement.
You've got varying degrees of success with your legs. In some places you're drawing the leg sections as sort of stretched ovals. This isn't a great idea, because they tend to come out quite stiff. In other places you're drawing them more as sausages, which have a consistent width through their lengths - this is much better, but you should also be paying more attention to how those legs flow from segment to segment. This is a common issue, which I explain towards the bottom of these notes I wrote for another student. Make sure that the ends of your sausages overlap comfortably - you can then add a contour curve at the joint itself to reinforce the illusion of form - but I don't recommend putting contour curves along the length of a segment, as this can cause things to feel a little stiff at times.
For the ladybug, I noticed that you laid in some spots there. One thing to consider when doing so is how those spots wrap around the surface of the form they're on. You've drawn them as pretty evenly shaped ellipses, but since the surface of the shell actually turns in space, you're going to end up with the ellipses being more curved and warped. It's little details like this that really help sell the illusion of 3D form.
I do think that you may be getting a little bit distracted by the detail, texture and rendering of your drawings, to the point that you might be thinking ahead to that when you should be focusing more on ensuring that your construction captures all of the forms present in your insect. This results in some areas being a little oversimplified at times. The ends of legs, where they have their little feet, tends to be a pretty big victim of this sort of thing.
I've got a couple extra demonstrations that I'd like you to look at. This one looks to be done using one of the reference images you used for your ladybugs, so it should help to see how I'd tackle the same one you attempted. Also, this one's pretty recent and goes into a lot of detail in regards to the whole process, and how I deal with each problem one at a time.
You've got plenty of room to grow, and you will continue to do so with practice, but your work is coming along quite well. Be sure to keep practicing this stuff on your own, but I'm going to mark this lesson as complete - so feel free to move onto the next one.
Really nice work! You're demonstrating a really well developed grasp of how your forms sit in space, and how you can combine them to create more complex objects. You're also demonstrating a well developing grasp of texture and detail. I do believe however that in some cases, where you decide you want to go particularly heavy on texture, you sometimes skimp on otherwise important construction lines. Make sure that you push any thought to texture and detail out of your head while you're moving through construction - only think about how you're going to deal with it after the fact, once you've got something that feels solid and well built up.
One thing that stands out to me in this regard is the thorax of this mosquito (or I assume it's a mosquito). It's quite clean, but it also feels a little flat - so focusing on its construction and giving it even one contour line could have helped give it a sense of volume. In general, it does look like texture and detail took the wheel here, which should generally not be the case.
Aside from that, there's two suggestions that I have to offer, and I outline them in these notes. For the first, when you've got two forms that intersect with one another - especially when they're early masses at the beginning of your construction - place a contour line right where the two forms intersect. This will help reinforce the sense of solidity and will improve the believability of what you're constructing. It's also important to always draw through forms when they overlap, rather than letting one get cut off where it is hidden by another. You do both, sometimes drawing through them, other times stopping lines where they should continue on.
Secondly, when dealing with insect legs, try and start them out as simple sausages, and focus on how they flow. Dont' worry about where they might bulge or pinch - just build their cores and pay attention to how they flow back and forth. You can always add additional forms afterwards if they get particularly bulgy at certain places.
Sausages are important, over stretched ellipses, as they maintain a consistent width through their length, and only round off at the ends. This allows them to be more directional and maintain a stronger sense of flow, whereas stretched ellipses tend to feel more stiff and rigid.
Anyway, I hope those points help. Other than the things I mentioned, you're doing a pretty great job, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Hi! Here are my insects. My self-critique is that my shadows (both on the insect and the drop shadow below) are sometimes odd looking. This is something I need to work on.
I put the practice/mess ups at the end. Thanks for your time!
Advance warning: my critique here is definitely kind of scatterbrained, you'll have to bare with me - I got hammered with a bunch of submissions today, and this is my last of seven after a full day at work. Luckily this has resulted in me ranting about important things that I may not have thought to mention otherwise.
This submission has a nice, healthy mix of solid constructions with strong forms and clear volumes, as well as some that fall a little flat. Some of your strongest include:
I also liked the study on the bottom left of this page, though technically that's not technically a full insect drawing. still cool though, and demonstrates a good grasp of construction and form.
On the other end of the spectrum, some of your weakest included,
There's a very clear pattern, and it's not at all uncommon. I see it quite frequently. The issue is that when you move into tackling detail, you have a tendency of doing two things to varying degrees. Firstly, there are signs that when you know you're going to take a drawing into further detail, that you subconsciously hold yourself back from drawing the construction lines as confidently as you otherwise might. As a result, you move onto later phases of construction and detail without having fully convinced yourself of the solidity and threedimensionality (i hereby declare that to be a word) of the forms you've already put down.
By drawing, we are effectively telling lies. Lies that the things we draw on a flat piece of paper are in fact three dimensional objects. The best liars are those who have fully invested themselves in their own lies, and who believe in them completely. At every stage of construction, you must be convinced in the illusion you are trying to create - and if you aren't, then leverage the tools you've been given in previous lessons.
Here's a demonstration of what I mean. You jumped straight from ellipse to layering on those segmented plates without yet having bought into the idea that the ellipse represented a ball, whose surface turned in space. As a result, the segmentation came out quite flat.
Also worth mentioning is the bit I wrote across the top of that page. Detail is all about the cast shadows. Texture manifests as a bunch of tiny forms - the little bumps and layers and divets and whatnot that cause little shadows to be cast across the surface of a larger form. When you've got a series of plates that are layered on top of one another, you get a particular kind of shadow pattern where the shadow is cast from one onto the other. There's a hierarchy there if you look for it, and that's the sort of thing you need to leverage when you want to get into that level of visual complexity.
You've been through plenty of drawing courses, so you've probably noticed by now that I never mention anything about rendering. When it comes to form shadows, I haven't made a peep. This is very intentional. I've found that a lot of drawing courses teach us to convey form through shading. The result of this, I find, is often that the illusion achieved is kind of weak, because that shading is used as a crutch, and a way to avoid learning how to properly convey how those forms turn in space, and how the silhouettes are shaped to reflect this. By steering clear of shading, I force my students to figure out how to convey that sense of form with the tools I've limited them to (which at their core all come down to contour lines).
The contour lines we've been using since lesson 2 are really obvious, manufactured things that are not present in our reference images. So obviously if we were striving to draw pretty renderings of those objects, they wouldn't be of much use. That's why it's important to keep in mind that each drawing you make for these lessons is just an exercise. It's an exercise meant to develop your understanding of construction and 3D space, of how these simple forms can be combined, manipulated and built up to create highly complex, yet structured objects that sell the grand lie that they're not just lines on a page.
Once this grasp of space, and this illusion is firmly ingrained in your mind, you'll be able to draw an ellipse and believe it to be a 3D mass. From there, you'll be able to wrap exoskeletal layers around it directly, grasping fully how they'd curve along its surface. This is ultimately the goal, but since you're not there yet, it's important that you go through all the steps.
And there are a lot of drawings here where you have done just that. The subtle contours you drew on that moth's head and along its legs go a long way to pave the path for other choices you've made that absolutely sell that illusion.
Jumping back momentarily to the whole form shadow thing - I did notice that when you went to add detail to your drawings, that is one way you approached doing it. This is something I want to advise against. There is room for form shadows, but rather than being something we use to convey form, we use it as a tool to convey texture. After all, since we're working with fineliners, which allow us only hard blacks or solid whites, we have to achieve a transition between them somehow. This is where we sneak in our textures. I dig into this a lot deeper on the texture challenge page, so I recommend you give that a read. The long and the short of it is, however - if you're not looking to use it to convey a specific texture, then leave out the form shading altogether. This all but excludes hatching, since we tend to use it as a sort of filler texture for the express purpose of shading.
Ages ago, I mentioned that there were two common issues I was seeing that was holding your work back. I actually touched on the second one already, but to put it plainly, it is that when you jump into detail, you focus too much on the details themselves and get a bit of tunnel vision. This is an issue because the details themselves can very easily come to contradict what our core construction has already described about our object's forms. Remember that every single mark serves as a contour line in its own right, so it can either agree or disagree with what has been described about those underlying forms.
You need to be constantly thinking about those core constructional forms, and often times when it comes to texture and detail, less is more. If given the option to approach texture with a light touch - just a little here, a little extra detail there, etc. - do that, instead of covering everything. This drawing course, and at its essence, drawing in general, is not about capturing a scene in perfect and complete detail. That is something that a camera does, and it does it so well that photographers have to employ a variety of tricks to keep the wealth of visual information from ruining their shot (a task usually handled by the brain as it filters what our eyes see in the world around us).
Drawing is better described as visual communication. That is, our goal is to communicate an idea. Whether that idea is a grasshopper, or a strawberry, or a lush field of poppies under a cloudy sky. No matter how simple or complex the idea, the act of drawing it is a matter of transmitting it into the viewer's head. This does not inherently require us to try to capture every little detail and bit of visual information, as this can often manifest as noise, obscuring and confusing what we're trying to say. Unlike this rambling critique/rant, communication is at its best when it is succinct, clear, and free of all but what is necessary. Where the main ideas are emphasized and clear, and things of lesser importance are left as an afterthought.
This bee, which I pointed out before as being very well done, is an example of succinct communication. The core idea being presented are the forms. The head, the thorax and the abdomen, as well as the legs and the particular way they are bent to carry the insect's weight. They are not obscured or obfuscated in any way. Next, the segmentation of the abdomen - clearly wrapping around the core form and emphasized with the cast shadows you've suggested through your use of line weight. Lastly, and given only a word or two (were this drawing a paragraph), the texture of the fur you've captured - primarily along its silhouette where the slightest marks can achieve the greatest impact. You've made it clear that there's varying degrees of fuzz all over the body, but without really drawing much of it at all. The majority is implied, but that is all that was needed in order to communicate the idea of it clearly.
I'm running up on my character count for this post, so I'll bring it to a close. With all the successful drawings you've got here, you're clearly on the right track. Still, I'd like you to do three more insect drawings. For each of them, I want you to draw them focusing purely on construction. Complete each one separately, and take photographs of them all. Then, once all three have solid constructions, I want you to communicate their texture and detail. Go only as far as you need to communicate the idea of what you see. Focus on cast shadows, and use them to communicate how things are layered, and the general structure of things. Stay away from form shadows, except when necessary as a tool to capture texture in those transition areas between light and dark (as mentioned in the texture challenge notes.
And now I have hit the 10,000 character limit for this post.
Thank you, this is very thorough and helpful. I completely see what you are saying and did a few more studies to help solidify the concepts. I added them at the end of the album (and moved the originals to the bottom for comparison). I think the structures are looking WAY better but the texture needs work. Would it make sense to start the Texture Challenge now?
On a side note, when I first glanced over your critique I thought you were saying you got hammered while writing the critique and I was like, "Wow... this is going to be exciting!"
It's a little known fact that I always get hammered before my critiques :P
Your new drawings are considerably improved, and show a good application of all of the points I raised in my critique. They feel much sturdier and more believable, and continue to maintain that even as you push your detail and texture a little further. Very well done.
The only thing I wanted to comment on as far as advice goes was the head of your grasshopper. Where you started off with a sort of stretched ball encompassing most of the head, I would perhaps have started with a more spherical, smaller ball instead and then added boxy/planar forms onto that to flesh out the rest. You'll see a lot more of this in the next lesson, especially in the head construction video, and you can also see the same principle in this animal head demo that I did for a student very recently (specifically the bottom right).
Anyway, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
This Lesson was so much fun! Each drawing I did took up a whole page but to save you the trouble of looking through 27 pages I grouped them up into 10 pages.
Not bad! You've got a lot of great drawings here, and are demonstrating an understanding of many of the core principles covered in the lesson. I did notice one issue though, and it gives me the opportunity to reiterate a particularly important point.
It has to do with taking the necessary steps to convince yourself that these flat shapes we're drawing on a piece of paper are in fact 3D forms. It's an illusion, a lie we're telling the viewer, and the best way to sell a convincing lie is to believe in it yourself.
Ultimately that's why we draw through forms, and use contour lines where they may not actually exist in what we're drawing. We're not going to be doing that forever, but as far as these drawings go, they're really exercises to get us used to thinking in that manner. Far in the future, you'll have done this so much that you'll be able to visualize these additional lines in your mind's eye, and you'll be able to look at a sausage shape and simply believe that it's three dimensional.
The reason this belief is important comes to light when we look at the abdomens of your wasps. Looking at the segmentation, I'm not getting a very strong sense that they wrap around the rounded form you used in the earlier phase of construction. Instead, they read as being rather flattened out. The reason for this is that you skipped the step to reinforce the illusion of that basic form beforehand with contour lines, and so you weren't entirely convinced of its roundedness when you moved onto this further detail.
You're actually doing this much better in some other areas, like your cricket drawings, but drawing in one or two contour lines to really reinforce the illusion will help considerably.
Aside from that, your work is really well done. Your lines are confident, your legs flow nicely, and the majority of your forms feel solid (aside from the areas I mentioned above). You're clearly taking things steadily from simple to complex, applying the constructional method to great effect.
Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Overall you're doing really nicely with your constructions. You've got a good mind for 3D space, and are manipulating these forms quite effectively to build up believable and interesting objects. I especially like your fly constructions - they're extremely confident, and you're not afraid at all of piling on forms on top of forms on top of forms, and drawing through everything as you do so. I also loved how you stacked the segmented plates on the giant weta on this page.
I noticed that depending on the drawing, sometimes you'd treat an initial organic form as being a "container" for what the result was going to be (so the segmented plates would end up sitting inside of it), and sometimes you'd use it as a form on top of which the plates were attached. I want you to keep moving forwards with the second approach, as this is more in line with what we're after with the construction method.
I did get the feeling that when you tried to play more with that stippling texture and deeper, more confident shadow shapes on some of the drawings, you allowed some of the construction to slip through the cracks a bit. That is to say, perhaps when you were drawing these, you were thinking ahead to how you'd handle the detail, and didn't think as hard about construction as you had demonstrated in other drawings. It's very important to focus on the step you're on, rather than thinking ahead. Think detail when you get there, but until then, you shouldn't even be considering whether or not you'll take a drawing to a further stage of completion.
Here are some notes on the container vs. base form issue I mentioned above, and a couple other observations I had. Keep those points in mind as you move forwards - I'll be marking this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. Keep up the great work!
Ok, gotcha, thanks for the feedback! I realize now that I've been switching back and forth between the "container" approach and the "stacking" approach, without much thought as to why. Anyway, I'll continue stacking forms moving forwards, and hold off on the detail until my constructions are solidly established. Thanks again.
I took a different approach for this lesson, where instead of doing 2 pages of lay ins, I sort of did individual analyses for each bug. Let me know if you disapprove of this--or the red pen at the end--because I am thinking I might approach animals this way too.
I know you prefer the construction lines to be placed boldly, but I was finding that I got a lot less confused when I started with thinner lines. I was also unsure how much to push detail, so i went pretty easy on it by the end there.
Thaat's.... a little overwhelming. You've done some pretty remarkable work here and show a strong grasp of construction and the other various principles covered in this lesson.
One thing I especially like, which I find myself having to do demos for, is how you approached drawing legs (like for this spider. You've done a really good job of capturing how those sections flow, and by using these sausage forms, you've maintained their solidity without making them feel stiff.
Now, on that same note however, take a look at the abdomen of your dragonfly. Notice how it feels somewhat rigid and stiff? Well, you could certainly say, "well it's totally straight in my reference" and you probably wouldn't be wrong. But the question is, does it feel stiff? It doesn't, because those various segments can articulate, allowing the whole thing to bend a fair bit.
So, when we're communicating the idea of this critter, we need to think about the impression it gives off. Often times when we look at something that's straight, there will be minute details that we won't necessarily perceive easily that make the difference between being corpse-stiff and a flexible thing that happens to be straight at that moment in time. But when we draw it, if we think of it only as being straight as we've observed, stiffness is what will be communicated.
So, it often becomes necessary to give a little extra bend to something where it doesn't exist initially. This is frequently something that comes into play with legs, and it's the reason I like that spider so much. The segments aren't afraid to bend a little. I'm not sure how much of that bending is present in your reference, but the point is that it doesn't matter - we know they're not overly rigid regardless, and you've accomplished your goal in communicating this fact.
So, when you're drawing something from a reference, focus on the idea that what you're doing is communicating the idea of what you're looking at, rather than reproducing the image. For the most part, you are fully aware of this already, based on your in-depth analyses and thoughtful constructions.
Aside from that, you're doing extremely well and show a wonderful grasp of space and form, along with highly confident linework and an eager eye that seems to absorb everything it sees. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one and keep up the fantastic work.
I has taken me a long time because lack of motivation when things dont go well. Copying your drawings and doing some studies eventually helped me over these hurdles.
You've done a pretty good job over all. You did show some uncertainty at the beginning, but quickly got used to the general process of building up from simple to complex, and using clear, intentional marks rather than rough, sketchier explorations.
By the end you also showed some interesting texture explorations, which shows a fair bit of improvement over pages like this where you still relied quite heavily on hatching in places, and didn't seem to be entirely clear on which kinds of features each mark was meant to represent. By the time you hit the spider on the right side of this page you showed a much clearer grasp of the purpose of each line you put down, and focused more on communicating the idea of certain textures and surface qualities, over just getting some interesting nonsense down on the page.
I do however want to discourage you from playing with shading for shading's sake for now however. You'll notice that none of the drawabox lessons actually talk about how to deal with light and shadow outside of texture. This is because I see a lot of art students learn about shading too early, and rely on it as a means to convey form (instead of using the techniques we apply - construction and contour lines). This often results in those drawings falling a little flat, or generally being less solid than those my students produce.
The only shadows we really deal with are those that are cast from one object occluding a light source, most commonly in textures (with every mark of a texture really being a shadow cast by little bump or irregularity on the surface). If you ever catch yourself just adding shading for its own sake in my lessons, stop yourself. You'll have plenty of opportunities to do that outside of drawabox, but in this case it'll only serve as a distraction.
The other thing I wanted to mention was in regards to how you draw the legs of your insects. I see a lot of cases where you draw a segment of a leg, and then have its lines stop before completing the form/shape. This is usually because the form you're drawing is overlapped by some other form, so you avoid drawing over it. Give these notes I've written a read. You'll see that I'd like you to draw every form as a complete, enclosed shape on the page, drawing through forms wherever necessary. This helps you to maintain the simplicity and the solidity of each form as an individual, before considering how it interacts with the rest of the construction.
Anyway, aside from that, you've done very well. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
You demonstrate some good qualities in this set, but there are a number of things I want to draw your attention to. Rather than trying to type out explanations for each one, I'm going to draw out some demonstrations that should help express them clearly. For the most part, they're a matter of approach, so implementing these changes should help a great deal.
I've summed up my whole critique in these images. Give them a read, then I want you to try another four pages of insect drawings.
I've been looking at your drawings for several minutes now, scrolling up and down the album. There's something off about your approach that I can't entirely put my finger on. I think it's that all of your linework feels very... stiff. Your lines don't flow smoothly and continuously, there's little kinks and bends and jerks throughout. Now, I don't really have any clear gauge for scale, but this is often something one sees from students who draw much too small on the page, which always results in a lot of cramped linework and a decreased ability to think through spatial problems. Another factor can be drawing more from the wrist than the shoulder.
Of course, both of these points may or may not be the case - they're points you'd have to confirm or deny yourself. All I can remark upon is what I see.
Furthermore, your drawings - at least these ones - give the impression that you're still seeing your drawings as marks across a flat page. You're attempting to draw forms, but there's no sense of the relationship between them. For example, if you look at this treehopper, you haven't fully established the volume of the main body before you start moving onto the wing. You're drawing through some areas, but in others you're doing the same thing I advised you against in my last critique - that is, allowing forms to stop where they are occluded by others.
That said, in the very last drawing, you did do a much better job when it comes to layering the various segments along its thorax and abdomen - so that's a move in the right direction (although its legs are both flat and stiff).
I want you to try and draw this spider. It's fucking disgusting and I hate looking at it, but it's an excellent subject to work from, as it's not nearly as complex as some of the subjects you've attempted here. I want you to focus ONLY on construction, with no detail whatsoever. At the end of each phase of construction, I want you to photograph your work, and then submit it all together so I can see your process. Remember that each phase should end with forms that feel solid.
Also worth mentioning: a question that's been ringing through my head as I've looked over your work is whether or not you've kept up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warmup routine. Your current work suggests that you haven't been practicing your organic forms and organic intersections as much as you should, which has caused you to get rusty.
I drew all insects on a dinA 4 page so scale shouldn't be it. I do think I draw with my wrist/elbow unconsciously sometimes.
I didn't really warm up before drawing and obviously that is negatively impacting my work. I will start doing those warm up exercizes from now on.
I wouldn't say I think of a flat page when drawing those insects but I definitely don't understand how the hell the lines flow over the surface of it's body/how to capture it's volume.
This is actually considerably better than before, and you're doing a much better job of capturing most of your volumes. There's still room for improvement, and one issue that I'm seeing is that your contour curves often (but not always) have a habit of failing to accelerate in their curvature enough near the edges to give the impression that they wrap around a properly rounded form. Overshooting, as explained here can help.
Contour curves are used to give the impression of volume because they give the viewer a very specific sign of how that surface turns through space. It's a path our eye can follow - because our eyes understand the idea that these lines are meant to be "straight" relative to the object they're on, so how they curve is directly related to the surface they run along.
Being able to pull off this curvature comes from how well you're currently able to hold the idea of the surface being three dimensional in your head. Those who feel that they're drawing along a flat page, will find it difficult to achieve much curvature. Those who are fully convinced in the idea that what they're drawing is 3D will conversely not be able to just draw a straight, 2D line across a rounded object in their drawing, because it simply won't make sense. It constitutes a whole spectrum between these two extremes, and it does take time and practice to move from one end to the other. That's what the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 are all about - gradually building up those skills and shifting how you see the world, and how you perceive your own drawings.
There's one other thing worth mentioning - in my initial critique's notes, I mentioned that one should construct legs with sausage forms (which you're mostly doing), and reinforce the joints between these forms with contour curves. You may have misunderstood this last part. Right now you seem to be placing contour curves around the joints (one on either side), but that's not what I'm asking for. Here's a better demonstration of what I mean. You are to actually define the location where the two forms intersect. This helps immensely with all forms that intersect with one another (including the abdomen and thorax in your drawing), as it makes very clear how those two forms relate to one another in space.
Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, as this spider drawing shows considerable improvement. Make sure you do a lot of refreshing with those lesson 1 and 2 exercises before moving onto lesson 5 however - and of course, keep up with them as a regular warmup. This is something I recommend quite explicitly in that first lesson and intro video for a reason.
It took me 7 months, but I finally made it through this one. Once I got the hang of the process though this one was a lot of fun. I've only got 7 insects/arachnids here. However, I did a lot more layin/observation pages ala spelling_expirt's approach. I hope this satisfies the homework requirements.
In a lot of these drawings, you're demonstrating a good sense of 3D space, and the relationships between objects and forms. You've got a number of strong and interesting constructions, my favourites being the wasp, these black widows, and the ground beetle on the lower right.
That said, I definitely agree with the assessment you had on that first image, about your boxier methods making things come out rather stiff. The grasshoppers are a good example of that. One thing to keep in mind is that when we draw these objects, we're not just drawing what is present - we're drawing how those objects seem to us.
That is to say, you might look at the abdomen of a dragonfly and think that well, it's straight - so I'm going to draw it straight. And as a result it ends up feeling quite stiff. But those fuckers aren't stiff - they're quite flexible, and can have a lot of grace to them. And even when looking at a photo, we can still tell that they don't seem stiff and rigid, despite the fact that they still look straight to us.
That's some of the interpretation we need to factor into our drawings - and we usually do so in exaggerating the imperceptible. Pushing what we know is there, even if we can't see it explicitly. Usually it has to do with taking something that feels straight and geometric, and forcing the fact that it's organic, by exaggerating its curves and flow.
This is where a boxier approach tends to get in the way. Boxes are great for getting your head around the 3D nature of things, but they can be limiting when what you're drawing isn't perfectly geometric. So rather than constructing animals and creatures with explicit boxes, I try and think about what a box is, and apply that. Boxes are planar - they have distinct edges that separate their faces. If you apply this to an organic sausage, you can start distinguishing its sides, and find where the edges come out. This can give your drawings a strong sense of being three dimensional, but since you start out organic, with sausage forms and balls, you maintain the fluidity and flow.
On that topic, the one other thing I want to talk to you about is legs. You're attacking them in a number of ways, from drawing to drawing. My preference goes to how you drew them here, where you drew them with flowing sausage forms linked together - except for one thing. They're not overlapping and intersecting enough.
A sausage form for each segment, intersecting fully and then reinforced with a contour curve at that intersection. Focus on exaggerating how the sausages flow, and try to keep them from being too stiff. Contour curves through the length can definitely add to a sense of stiffness, while keeping them at the joints generally reinforces them enough to hold the illusion of form without becoming too rigid.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
[deleted]
2018-05-26 01:29
Thank you so much for the critique. I definitely get what youre saying about the boxes. Im still a little confused about the legs though, mainly because I had been attempting to do all but the very first ones in that sausage method, as you demonstrate in the scorpion video.
Is there a specific way Im messing it up (ie. not exaggerating enough, not overlapping the ends enough, not contouring them right,etc...)? Or am I just not grasping the concept entirely?
You were close in most of the drawings, but in some of them they weren't overlapping or interpenetrating enough. I'm not sure how big these drawings are, so another factor could just be that the legs may be getting cramped, due to not being given a whole lot of room for that kind of construction. You're not that far off, really. Just make sure they interpenetrate, and avoid putting contour curves along their lengths (keep them at the joints).
Throughout the set, you show definite progress, but I find that as you push through, your priorities shift from focusing on a solid underlying construction to fussing over texture more and more. If you look closely, you'll see that you spend less time on the earlier steps and more on entirely superfluous details. This results in a drawing that feels less solid, and that overcompensates in areas that don't solve that problem.
For example, if you look at this page, you'll see that there are a few major issues with how the construction has been approached and used:
The construction phase itself feels flat - you need to be taking the time to ensure that by the end of a given phase, what you've drawn feels solid and three dimensional. You need to believe in the idea that what you've drawn is 3D, because you will only be able to convince your audience that it's not just a flat drawing if you yourself believe in the illusion you're creating.
You're not even actually following that underlying construction. You shift the abdomen over and end up ignoring what you drew previously. Construction is all about breaking a drawing up into a series of decisions, and making them one by one. If you then go back in and decide to ignore and remake a decision, you're going to severely undermine the drawing as a whole. One a decision is made, you need to follow it for the sake of keeping your drawing solid and believable.
One last issue that I noticed was that you have a tendency to struggle a little bit with the alignment of your major masses. If you look at your wasp and ladybug, specifically at the thorax and abdomen, the center lines you've drawn along the forms do not actually feel as though they run along the actual centers of those forms. As a result, when you try to align them to one another, something feels distinctly off.
You do have areas where you have much more success with this - for example, this spider (though as a side note, your hair/fur texture is extremely scribbly, a quality that should be avoided in favour of more planned, thought out strokes over randomness and chaos). The major difference here is that when you drew that center line, you were focusing on how that line ran along the surface of the single abdomen form, rather than trying to think of how it'd flow across all of them. You considered how the abdomen existed as a 3D form. In the other ones, you were thinking more of the whole drawing as existing on the flat page. So in the future, focus on each form independently, then align them to each other as they sit in 3D space.
Now, I do believe you're making headway, but you fell off the rails a bit and got distracted. To get you back on track, I'd like you to do four more pages of insect drawings, but this time I want you to focus only on construction, on the use of solid 3D forms with no detail or texture whatsoever. As construction is a process that involves building up your drawing over the course of a number of phases, ensure that every phase is well planned and that each one results in something that feels solid as though it exists in 3D space. Don't make the mistake of intending to solidify things in later phases, as that's not how it works - you start with solidity and carry it through.
Honestly, that's really something that comes mostly through practice. There are some little tricks and techniques for gauging proportion, but they relate too much to looking at your reference as just a flat 2D image and comparing the shapes themselves. That's not something I want you to delve into just yet, not until you've got a solid grasp of how everything exists in a 3D world. So for now, just do your best with the proportions, and focus more on the act of constructing things from a series of solid forms.
Looking great. Your constructions are looking solid and your observations are spot on. I'm actually on a plane at the moment, so I can't change your flair just yet, but I will as soon as I can. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, and consider this one complete.
You show a fair bit of progress and growth over the course of this set. There are some recommendations I'm going to make, but where you show most of your improvement is in your ability to observe complex objects and break them down to a finer degree. At the beginning your observational skills weren't terribly keen, and things had a tendency to be quite flat. This is much less so towards the end.
One of the important things I want to outline at this point in the curriculum is the importance of believing in the illusion you are creating. We all understand that what we draw is essentially a series of simple lines and shapes on a flat, 2D page. We leverage various techniques to produce an illusion of depth and form.
It's normal to worry about convincing others of the fact that what you've drawn is three dimensional, but it is far more important to focus on convincing yourself. All of these lessons and exercises revolve around this principle - that the techniques of drawing through forms, drawing contour lines and so on allows us to better believe in our own lies. Once we come to believe in what we're peddling, the little subconscious shifts in approach and technique that come with proper belief is what allows us to sell the illusion to our viewers. That comes naturally, once you're able to fool yourself.
This leads me into one thing I feel you were missing in your drawings, even towards the end. You drew your individual components, but I did not get the impression that you believed anything beyond the idea that you were drawing flat shapes on a page.
One important thing you can do to work beyond this is, when you've got two forms that connect to one another, to actually define how they intersect and connect. Actually establish the area of intersection with a contour line, as if you were to draw over the surface with a marker where the two forms touch.
Getting used to doing this is what will reinforce the idea that these are three dimensional forms. It is quite important that whenever you come to the end of a phase or step of construction, that you are fully convinced that what you've drawn thus far represents solid 3D forms. Never expect that solidity will be something you'll build up or imbue as you go - it's something you start with, and something you strive to maintain throughout.
One other thing I'd like to mention pertains to how you approach your insects' legs. Right now you're drawing each as a series of lines. If a leg is made up of several segments, you'll draw each segment only so far as it is visible. Your lines stop when they meet the previous section.
You should be drawing each one as a complete form. I generally construct mine as sausage forms as shown here, which are specifically forms that maintain a consistent width throughout their lengths, rounding off at the ends - different from stretched balls, which will gradually widen towards the center. Sausages convey a much stronger sense of flow and gesture which is great for legs, whereas stretched ellipses/balls will seem quite stiff (I'm mentioning this because it's a common mistake people make). Where I have two of my sausage forms intersect, I'll reinforce the actual joint, keeping the lengths free of contour lines. I've demonstrated this principle here as well, on another student's work.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do just two more pages. Focus on trying to apply what I've said here, though I understand that the first chunk of it was kind of abstract.
It's spread out across three pages - I drew larger. The legs still came out too small to have decent intersection lines. I made the exact mistake you described - stretched balls instead of sausages, but I noticed, and most leg segments I think are OK.
I keep fiddling with the angles of things, trying to get them to point through 3D space - trying to find an angle that points off or into the page. But I can't - the page is flat. So just I sort of have to pretend, like you describe. It's really tricky!
It certainly is tricky, and it does take a great deal of getting used to. Alongside that, we need to balance observation, making sure that we're not just constructing arbitrary forms without being precisely aware of which features from the actual object we are trying to capture or represent.
I think you might be rushing a little in this regard, perhaps relying too much on memory over direct observation. Make sure you're only putting down a mark or two before looking back at your reference and refreshing your mental model of what you're attempting to draw.
There's also a couple other things I noticed:
With the fly's eyes, and really anything, you need to ignore the local colour. You're not colouring anything else in the drawing, so there's no reason to fill the fly's eyes to be solid black. This actually works against you as you try and convey these forms as being three dimensional, because there's not a whole lot you can do with a solid black ellipse.
When layering the segmentation along the fly's abdomen at the top of page 1, you're again kind of sloppy in how you approach it. You're allowing your segments to cut into the for you've already produced in the previous stage, which undercuts the illusion of form and solidity. You want it to seem like you've taken additional forms and wrapped them around - you don't want to be in a situation where you're subtracting from forms you've actually put in, as that's a lot harder to do convincingly. Take a look at the top right of these notes I've done for another student, as they explain the situation further. I also talk about similar things in these notes.
You are making some definite progress, but I want you to resolve the situations where you draw marks without a proper idea of what you're trying to achieve with a given line. It means getting used to holding yourself back and thinking/observing rather than rushing in and putting down more ink.
Take the weekend and do two more pages of insect drawings.
I thought that by "take the weekend" you meant "take the weekend to do these drawings", but it just occurred to me that you might have meant "take the weekend off".
Nope, you had me right the first time. I meant take the weekend, as I didn't want you to try and bang them out as quickly as possible.
Anyway, across the set you are showing definite improvement, but it's in some places and not in others. For example on the first page, towards the bottom left side, you've got some great segmentation wrapping around. Strong contour lines, that sort of thing. On the last page, bottom right, it's gone back to being quiet weak.
Overall, you're also drawing pretty small, so your constructions are being forced into a fairly cramped space. This results in lines that are a lot heavier relative to your overall drawing, and therefore a lot more stiffness and generally clunky looking construction. You need to be taking far more advantage of the space your pages give you, so you can engage your full arm when drawing, and so you're able to think more about the intricacies and subtleties of your construction as you piece it together.
Lastly, there's varying amounts of sloppiness here and there, especially in regards to observation, which is something I had mentioned before. You need to keep pushing yourself to observe your reference more carefully, and to ensure that every mark or form you put down corresponds with some feature in your reference. These legs with short segments and nubby ends are very clearly an oversimplification of what you're seeing, in a sort of cartoony fashion.
Overall, these are things that fall to you to practice. I've pointed them out, but it's on you to reread the critiques I've offered and to really absorb it all. It does take several passes - the lesson and the critiques are usually fairly dense and it's normal to only absorb select parts at a time, and to have to review it several times before it starts to sink in.
So, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You've got a lot of room for improvement, but you are heading in the right direction. You can start on the next lesson when you feel you're ready, but I do recommend that you take some time to absorb these critiques a little more, and to do more insect studies on your own.
I think I'm going to take a break and do some work on the 250 cylinder challenge. Then I'll come back and re-read your critiques and look over my drawings for this lesson with fresh eyes and then probably redo the whole lesson. I won't ask you do write another lesson 4 critique though, I expect you're plenty sick of my bugs ;)
[deleted]
2018-07-01 16:00
Lesson 4 Sorry if these look messy. The site that contained the reference images I drew these from would not allow me to download any of their images, which is why I could not include them in the submission.
It looks like patreon's attempt to charge you for June was declined. Let me know when you've been able to resolve that issue, and I'll add this submission back to my critique backlog.
It has indeed! Thanks for looking into that for me.
For the most part, your work here is solid. You're demonstrating a good grasp of many things I tend to focus on for this lesson - you're breaking the complex insect bodies into a number of simpler forms, and are paying attention to how they relate to one another. You make this quite clear with your lay-ins, and it continues on into your more developed drawings.
One thing I'm particularly pleased with is the abdomen of this wasp - it shows perhaps better than anything else your awareness of how these objects exist in 3D space, and how you're building things up from simple to complex. You're wrapping those segments around the core mass, creating a sort of layered appearance that really sells the drawing.
There is an issue I want to bring to your attention though.
Firstly, while you build up your drawings quite well, on an individual shape-by-shape and form-by-form basis, the way you're drawing things feels a little rushed, and it give ways to a degree of sloppiness. What this means is that while your results are coming out well, they can definitely be improved to feel more solid and sturdy.
This is best shown in how your legs are approached. You're actually quite close to doing exactly what I want to see, it's just the sense that you need to stop yourself for a moment, think, and perhaps prepare a little further with the ghosting method before executing your marks. I like that you're moving towards using sausage shapes for the individual segments of the legs, but there's a few points I want you to pay more attention to:
Make sure they're sausage shapes, rather than stretched ellipses. The difference is subtle, but basically you want it to be more like two balls connected by a tube with a consistent width throughout its length. That is, rather than a single ball that has just been stretched (resulting in a width that gets wider towards the center of the form).
Always think more form than shape. It really does come down to how you think influencing what you end up drawing, because you're still drawing the same kind of mark regardless - but if you push yourself to believe that what you're drawing is 3D, the care with which you draw it and how you choose to use it will be different than if you simply felt that it was a flat line on a piece of paper. 3D forms are closed loops, they're solid. 2D shapes don't concern themselves with those kinds of limitations.
Focus on how those segments flow - this comes back to using sausages over stretched balls, because a sausage can carry a nice smooth sense of flow, whereas a stretched ball tends to feel more stiff and rigid.
Make sure the ends of your sausage segments overlap/intersect - and define/reinforce that intersection joint with a contour curve.
Here are a bunch of notes/demonstrations I've written in the past that cover the use of this technique:
Aside from that, just one other thing! I could be wrong, but it does feel like you're drawing a bit small, which could be reducing the amount of control you have when drawing these teeny tiny sausages. Try and take advantage of more of the room you've got on the page - you don't need to cram a bunch of drawings onto the same page, you can give them each their own.
Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
You're actually doing a pretty good job here. There are a number of things that I want to draw your attention to, but as far as construction goes, you're applying the principles quite well and are demonstrating a good eye for how objects are broken down into simpler forms, and how to build them back up.
One issue I noticed that stands out to me quite a bit is how you're applying line weight very much as though it is something that must be applied everywhere. The way you're applying line weight suggests that you're approaching this process as though you're laying down your construction, and then going over it with a "cleanup pass" to replace the drawing with a series of heavier strokes. This is not correct.
In addition to this, your linework when adding weight tends to be much less confident, and shows a far greater degree of wobbling and stiffness than your initial construction lines, which results in the overall drawing losing its sense of confidence.
Line weight should not be applied everywhere. Along with being a subtle addition that speaks more to a viewer's subconscious (rather than grabbing them by the shoulders and shaking them while shouting "I AM A HEAVY LINE" in their face), weight should be applied only to help clarify specific overlaps. That means that while you may have a long stroke, you may only want to apply additional weight to a limited section of it. This also applies to ellipses, where instead of applying weight to the whole ellipse, you may only want to push a small portion of it. I mention and demonstrate this in the form intersections video in lesson 2.
I think that's the biggest issue right now. As for more minor ones, whenever you've got two forms that cut into each other, it really helps a lot to draw a contour line right along where they intersect one another, as demonstrated here.
Also, you're making good moves in how you're approaching drawing legs, but you should try constructing them using simple sausage forms as segments. I've done a bunch of demos for other students showing this, which you can see here:
Sausage forms (basically two balls connected by a flexible tube) are great because they can really capture gesture and flow. In some of these you've used stretched ball-forms, which are going in the right direction, but they end up feeling much more stiff because it's harder to have them bend and flow naturally. That's how you end up with segments that feel rigid and too straight. You can also place a contour curve right where those two sausage forms intersect (like my previous point) and that'll usually be more than enough to nicely reinforce the illusion of 3D form (without having to add additional contour lines along the lengths of the segments).
This concept applies pretty nicely to animal drawing too, as shown here.
Anyway, you're doing a good job. Keep an eye on the points I've mentioned here - especially your use of line weight - and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
There are a number of areas where you're doing well, but there are a few issues I need to point out to ensure that you continue heading in the right direction as you practice.
I'm noticing that your use of contour curves is a little hit and miss. That is, when they reach the edge, sometimes it feels as though you may not have put enough thought behind them, as they come out too shallow and don't quite push the illusion that they're hooking around and continuing along the other side. This makes the form, which we know to be rounded, to flatten out and form a sharper edge instead.
At the same time as the previous point, I see you drawing a great many contour lines on the same form. I often see these two points together - a student will lean towards quantity over quality, thinking less about the execution of each contour line but compensate by adding more. This doesn't really work - overdoing the contour lines tends to stiffen an object, while also not quite creating the illusion of rounded form you're after. Conversely, one or two very well executed contour curves can make an entire form feel solid and rounded, conveying a strong sense of volume without contributing much stiffness.
It's not as obvious initially, but once I noticed it and went back to your other drawings, I started to see it everywhere - you're not drawing each form to completion. You're stopping your lines where a form is overlapped and hidden by another. It's really important that you draw each form completely, focusing on making each individual one feel solid and believable. Drawing the entire form also helps us to understand how they exist in relation to their neighbours. Keep in mind that these drawings are not intended to result in something pretty - they will if done well, but that's not really our goal. Each drawing is just an exercise in learning to understand 3D space, and form, and how it can all come together to create complex objects that feel tangible and believable. Yes, neglecting to draw certain lines will make them look cleaner, but it will also take away from the core of the lesson. Long-term, the expectation is that by doing these exercises, you will come to believe completely in the illusion you are creating with these drawings, as the first step of being able to convince someone else that what you've drawn is 3D, is to believe in that lie yourself. Once you reach that point, you'll understand the forms as they exist in space at a level that you won't need to draw the additional lines, because you'll already know that they're there. But that is a long ways off.
While your approach to legs has yielded some decent results, it's quite inconsistent across the various drawings, leading to it being a little bit hit-and-miss. Try constructing the legs using simple sausage forms - that is, basically two balls connected by a flexible tube. These can convey a strong sense of flow and rhythm while maintaining a solid form. You can also draw a contour line right where the sausage forms intersect with one another, which is usually more than enough to convey the solidity of the whole form (saving you from having to draw a bunch of contour lines along their lengths). Here are a few places where I've demonstrated this approach to other students: https://i.imgur.com/rQvn6kV.png, https://i.imgur.com/9kAp6JZ.png, https://i.imgur.com/pPyrBgB.png, https://i.imgur.com/NQBBjvo.png
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do another four insect drawings, taking what I've said here into consideration. Also, something I should have mentioned a while ago - deviantART is a rather inconvenient platform when it comes to being able to move through a gallery for the purposes of a critique. It'd be a huge help to me if you could upload your images to imgur, as it allows me to scroll through the whole set at full size very easily, and to jump back and forth between images as I formulate my response. Imgur doesn't require you to make an account, so it's the image host most students use.
Hi! Thanks for the critique. I didn't realize I did what I'd done until you pointed them out. Here are the four insect drawings. https://imgur.com/a/ruS6aZh
Definitely better, though in the future I do not want you to draw your construction in a different colour and then attempt to do a "clean-up" pass. I actually talk about this back in the video for form intersections in lesson 2 at around 16 minutes in. We're not ever replacing the lines from our construction - we are emphasizing how certain forms overlap, but that is all. There should be no mental separation between the construction lines and your final result - they are one and the same, and this way of looking at them forces you to show a lot more respect to your underlying construction, and to plan and prepare each mark with consideration for what it contributes to the overall exercise.
At the end of the day, as I mentioned in my previous critique, each drawing is just an exercise to better develop your understanding of space and how these forms relate to one another to create more complex objects. What you've accomplished in with your black lines ends up being largely irrelevant (being that it's more focused on creating a pretty final result), and also causes you to treat the construction in a way that is going to benefit you less in the long run.
The end goal is to have such a deeply ingrained grasp of construction, such a thorough understanding of form and space that you'll see each form you draw - partial or complete - as being something that exists beyond just the lines you've drawn on the page. This will allow you to eventually bypass most of your construction because that understanding will be internalized - but that is a long ways away.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the next lesson, but be sure to keep in mind what I've mentioned here.
As usual the resources folder contains all source images.
There is a demos folder. This contains my versions of the lesson, demos and old demo work. Included there are some of the homework critiques for other users that I redid on my own.
Due to moving back to the continent in 8 days this will be the last of the items I have to use google drive to share. Also due to moving I will not have access to do any remedial work, challenges or lessons for about a month.
I had to compromise on which images to include in the homework. I note major problems like proportion control, confusing textures, bad shading or the 'general outlines' you hated so much from the prior lesson 3.
There was no consistency in my results throughout this homework. This required rework or two to three attempts at each image. This involves a large amount of time,, frustration and anxiety. I really would have preferred a small smaller set of lessons here with more feedback in between. I feel that even with community support I went off the rails a lot.
On a positive note, lesson 4 filled out my current Draw-a-box sketchbook (plus one page.) Lesson 1 through 4 fits in a single Arteza 8.5x10 drawing pad at 50 sheets, both sides. This does not include the practice sheets, remedial or practice homework. Those ate most of a different 50 sheet Meede 9in x 12in tablet and two Staedler 0.5mm fine liner pens.
You've actually done a pretty good job here, especially as far as construction goes. I can see a variety of signs that you're demonstrating a much better grasp of 3D space than you had previously, as well as a keener eye when it comes to observation of specific features and details that you may not have picked up on previously. There is also considerable growth over the set (assuming the pages are in chronological order) - even when you drew smaller, you showed a much better ability to manipulate your forms in your later pages.
There are a few things that I want to point out that are areas where you can improve on things the most.
Your linework at times still retains a certain stiffness to it, where your lines feel hesitant. This results in a bit of wavering here and there, as well as a tendency to get a little scratchy with your lines. For example, looking at the ladybug page, on the bottom right you've got a nice construction of the adult, though the lines do detract from it due to how the lines feel like they're hairy. In the central in-flight drawing, the open shell is drawn more cleanly, though the hesitation results in a little but of wobbling. It's still much better there, but can definitely be improved as you focus on executing your marks with more confidence.
When it comes to filling in areas with solid black, a brush pen can be an invaluable tool - but no matter what you use, it's important that those spaces be filled in completely (rather than leaving little slivers of white, which tend to diminish the overall drawing. Also on the same topic, even if something has the colour black in your drawing, that doesn't necessarily mean you should be filling it in - solid blacks are best saved for the areas where cast shadows are added strategically to help separate your forms. It's also used in more advanced approaches to texture, as explored in the texture challenge notes. Different areas on an object will have a "local colour" - this is best ignored, and treated as though the whole object is a single flat colour. That way we can focus more on bringing out the major forms, as well as the subtler textural forms.
Proportion in places is a little weak, but you noticed that yourself (especially on that wasp).
Speaking of the wasp, when it comes to texture and detail, you've got a great combination here of taking your time with the abdomen, and rushing way too much on the thorax. Don't scribble, don't let the urge to let your hand "figure things out" take over (because it won't - our muscle memory is great for executing simple commands like drawing smooth, confident lines, but detail and texture requires careful observation and forethought). Texture is really about spending 90% of your time observing, and 10% actually drawing. I think in the majority of these drawings, your detail work comes mostly from what you remember after either giving cursory glances at your reference image, or what's more likely - studying them closely all at once, then settling in to draw for an extended period of time. Our memories are pretty bad, so we need to get used to making only a couple marks before looking back. You've improved, as I mentioned before, on this note when it comes to your overall construction - but there's a ways to go on the more minute details.
I definitely do get the desire for smaller chunks of homework with more feedback, but there's really no way around that. This is the only way I can balance this many students, and keep the pay wall low enough to be accessible to most. What you save in terms of the cost of a structured lesson plan with feedback, you pay with your own fortitude - which itself isn't a bad thing, as I've found those who push on through find themselves in a much better place relative to their drawing-related anxieties.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congrats on heading back to North America!
Uncomfortable
2018-03-12 23:32
Old thread got locked. If you're eligible for private critiques, feel free to post your work here.
AAARRN
2018-03-13 14:16
Hi there. I finished my homework for lesson 4 and would like to receive your critique on it. Largely finished these drawing a while ago but with your advice on lesson 3 I went over a few again and made some more.
In the beginning I was struggling with textures and hatching, but I think I got somewhere at the end. A brush and a pot of ink helped me out a lot here. Something I'm still struggling with are the wings the bugs. I tried to solve it in different ways, but I'm still not enterly convinced.
https://imgur.com/gallery/pTlKz
Uncomfortable
2018-03-15 16:03
Your work is looking great as usual. I'm actually pretty pleased with your progression as far as your texture goes (you're doing a lot of great experimentation with different ways to approach it, and I feel that your willingness to use large areas of solid black is really working to your benefit. As far as the wings go, they can be tricky as wings are generally the opposite of what we strive for in our constructions (they're light, as opposed to weighty and solid), but I think you're capturing them quite well. You're simplifying them and building up their patterns in a way that communicates their essence effectively. This one was definitely rather rough, and it seems like less thought went into the marks individually - but your later wings were much better and more representative of your subject matter.
I do have one thing that I want to draw your attention to - in a couple of places (not often by any means) I noticed you ignoring the initial mass you'd put down in favour of a more refined shape/form. It is extremely important that when you place a form onto the page, that you regard it as being solid and present - like a mass of marble floating in a 3D world that cannot simply be ignored at will. If you disregard the solidity of one of the forms present in your drawing, it will effectively undermine that of the rest of the object.
I explain this further in these notes I've written on top of two of your pages. When you've placed an object in the scene, it must be dealt with as though you respect its presence in that space. If you must cut away pieces of it, you must do so in a way that establishes how both the piece that's being removed and the piece that is left over sit in 3D space (usually by defining the cut itself as a cross-section rather than just a simple 2D line). Better yet, construct those initial masses as the core forms and then build on top of them as needed, as you did with the less detailed fly construction.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Overall you're doing very well, and your drawings are remarkably successful. Just keep that one point in mind - you may not be doing it much, but it is a core principle of construction, that we respect the solidity of all our forms, and that we express to the viewer our own belief in the illusion we've created starting from the initial steps and all the way through.
AAARRN
2018-03-20 19:51
Read this a couple of days ago but still wanted to thank you for the awesome feedback. It has helped me a lot with lesson 5 so far.
I feel that I'm finally starting to get it in terms of mass. Which was one of te bad habits you noticed in the beginning and I can see now how it was holding me back. It's about being really deliberate with every line I put down and not just draw a 2D approximation, which are more shapes. The notes are invaluable!
CattailNu
2018-03-23 19:56
For your entertainment: http://cattail.nu/dab/lesson4/
Uncomfortable
2018-03-25 04:28
You've got some nice drawings here, although there are a few points I want to bring to your attention. In a lot of cases, you're getting a bit too preoccupied with detail, or at least with more complex visual information that you're skipping certain constructional steps, or are at least overlooking aspects of the initial, simpler constructional phases that ultimately end up causing problems later on.
Always remember that while what's most interesting to draw is all the detail and complexity, that is not what we should be focusing on here. We want to ensure that the core construction is solid, and build on top of that as needed. You'll also want to put every mark down as part of a complete and planned form - don't think of your linework as being individual marks.
One significant issue I caught was that you have a tendency to get chicken scratchy and rough. You're not exhibiting the kind of controlled, pre-planned and confident linework the exercises in lesson 1 encourage. Are you continuing to practice those exercises as part of a regular warmup routine?
Here are some notes I've written on top of your work, pointing out issues I'd like you to deal with. I'd like you to submit four more pages of insect drawings. Ease up on the amount of detail - focus on the core construction, not the fancy stuff. In your last few pages of scorpions, you pretty much stop doing construction altogether, for whatever reason. While that very last scorpion tail with the heavy shadow work is really beautiful, it's not what this lesson is about.
CattailNu
2018-03-25 05:02
Most recent was first - the last 2 scorpion bits (tail / body/claw) were detail-studies without construction at all (while I was on vacation); I meant to make a note of that. The black widow is the most recent drawing, and the scorpion was the first thing I did. Thank you for the feedback! More insects coming.
CattailNu
2018-03-25 19:49
Most recent first. New 4 on top. You may need to refresh if your cache doesn't show the new ones.
http://cattail.nu/dab/lesson4/
Uncomfortable
2018-03-25 20:42
There is some improvement, but overall there are clear signs that you're rushing through these drawings and there are quite a few things that you're ignoring in regards to the critique I gave you previously. For example, the point about drawing sausages instead of ellipses for your leg constructions, and treating every form you put down as a solid form that must be dealt with and cannot be ignored. There are also numerous cases where you stop drawing forms where they become occluded by others, rather than drawing through them completely. You must draw each form in its entirety, as this will help you better grasp how they each sit in space and how they relate to one another.
All three of these issues are present in your lice drawing, so I set aside the time to create a demo specifically from the reference you used. You'll find it here.
In order to help you give these drawings a little more time and attention (the fact that you submitted so soon after receiving the critique was a bit of a red flag), and also because of the number of lessons you've submitted for critique this month (5 submissions across 3 lessons and 1 challenge), I'd like you to hold your next submission until at least April 1st. Please take your time with each construction and focus only on the forms. For the demo I just did, the drawing alone took me at least 20 minutes, likely more. I don't want to see any detail, and ignore the surrounding environment. Every mark you draw must be planned and thought through.
LairaKlock
2018-03-25 21:07
Few notes:
It took me a while to finish this lesson, partially because of time constraints and partially due to my own lack of desire to draw insects. Nevertheless, the research process itself turned out to be quite interesting, so thank you for this lesson!
For the bee I have included 3 different stages of me drawing it, as it seems like I've over rendered it to the point that you cannot see the construction. There's also not much study of the bee, only the leg.
The beetle appears to have had it's head broken. It's not the reference image, it's me going with the lines I have put down on paper. Poor Mr Beetle :(
It also seems like I've messed up the proportions on the scorpion, specifically the far legs and one of the pincers. This particular scorpion does have small pincers overall, but one of them is still off.
I believe that's all from my side. Will be waiting for your critique.
https://imgur.com/gallery/P3EGP
Uncomfortable
2018-03-27 02:07
You've got a lot of solid constructions here. While proportion can take some time to gauge successfully, and we're not necessarily going to be easily matching our reference images, what I focus on most is the solidity of the resulting drawings, and their believability. If a construction has been successful, when we put the reference image away and show the drawing to someone, they'll feel like it could absolutely be some plausible creature.
I'd say your strongest construction was the spider. I don't like looking at it too long, as it's that creepy. One thing I did notice however was that while the forms convey a strong sense of volume, they're misaligned. The center line you've got going down the abdomen isn't following the actual balanced center of the critter, and its head ends up being a little off to one side. The grasshopper is also very well done. The mosquito too.
While that bee doesn't look like anything I've ever seen, it does look solidly built - pretty close to being some kind of creature, even if I wouldn't necessarily be able to identify it as a bee (maybe I just haven't seen that species before).
I definitely do feel like you may be getting a bit ahead of yourself in terms of detail - that moth for instance is a good example of detail vastly overshadowing the core construction, resulting in an object that doesn't feel entirely solid.
Another thing I noticed, going back to Mr. Beetle's head, is that you seem to have constructed by drawing an ellipse that would ultimately contain the entirety of its head. You basically started big, and then cut back - which can work (though it's tricky), but in this case when you cut it back, you did so by treating it like a 2D shape rather than a 3D form. Cutting a form in a way that retains its three dimensionality means doing so such that the show an understanding of the various sides of the pieces you're cutting away, as well as those left behind. More often than not it is easier to simply start with a smaller ball and build up forms around this. I demonstrate this in the lice demo I did yesterday for Slate.
Here are some redline drawings that touch on the bits I've mentioned here. The bit about the sausage legs is also demonstrated pretty well in the lice demo.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the points I've mentioned here in mind, and feel free to move onto lesson 5.
LairaKlock
2018-03-27 14:37
Thank you for the feedback!
The bee was actually suppose to be a bumble bee. That's how off I was with it ^^' I think my biggest mistake was to give it a sort of belly that overshadowed the thorax and it's frontal connection to the abdomen. The fuzziness really confused me.
CattailNu
2018-04-01 10:31
Good morning and happy Easter! http://cattail.nu/dab/lesson4/ - most recent at the top, boxed off from the ones you've previously seen. There's more than 4 drawings (6 insects total) - a few of the same bug because I didn't like the drawings, and two more from yesterday that did not follow your "don't add any shadow/detail", and one included solely for the happy-factor that isn't counted.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-01 18:37
Thanks for providing your references. I spent about forty minutes going over four of your drawings and writing out notes - while the ones on the left side are a bit disorganized as they require pointing to specific things, those on the right are overarching issues or potential issues that I've noticed. Here you go.
I quite liked your aphid (the green one, third from the top).
Deviation from your reference is quite normal - as we draw, we end up making mistakes that accumulate, and we then have to compensate for them which results in a construction that is not likely to match the reference perfectly. There are areas here however where I feel it's far enough that you may not be looking back at your reference frequently enough. Always remember that as human beings, we were are not evolved to retain a perfect mental image of the things we've seen.
The second we look away from a reference, our brains go to work simplifying what we can recall, and throwing away a great deal of information. For this reason it's integral that we continually look back at our reference again and again, even when we feel we can recall information well.
The process of doing studies does help rewire our brains to at least focus in on the key information, but for quite a long time to come, it's going to be integral that you look back at your reference after every mark or two.
Finding high-resolution reference is also extremely important. The praying mantis for example was low resolution enough that I could barely make out how its head was supposed to fit together. If I myself struggled with it, then it is definitely going to pose unreasonable challenges for you.
I want you to go over the notes I've written there, and take your time in absorbing them. Once you have, I want you to do one more drawing of this specific ant. You may reference other images as needed to understand how it fits together (for example, how the legs connect under the thorax, which is something you struggled with in the last few drawings).
I also want you to take pictures of your process, after every individual phase of construction. I don't want you to apply any detail, and I want you to draw this entirely with one 0.5mm pen. Apply line weight only where you need to clarify certain overlaps, do not go over the entirety of shapes. Focus on fleshing out your 3D forms, and use contour lines where necessary - but don't overdo them. Whenever you add a contour line, be aware of what you're trying to achieve with it. Students often draw too many when they stop thinking about why they're drawing them in the first place.
Looking at photographs of each individual stage will help me to provide you with additional advice on things that aren't entirely clear in final drawings.
CattailNu
2018-04-01 21:00
Thank you very much for taking the time to do such a complete review. I truly appreciate your feedback and comments.
Answers: lesson 1/2 practice every day since the last review (except today). Every insect is on it's own 8.5x11 page, although I do not fill the page. I have an issue with not spacing/measuring correctly across figure drawing and I cut off people's legs or arms a lot - so I've been very careful to keep things at a size I know wont chop. I am on one size pen since your note on that previously - I'm kind of pleased you couldn't tell if it was a different size pen because that means my control is improving. Some general comments (not excuses): the lady bug spots were intended contour, not detail. The mantis and ladybug were both from yesterday (and were me playing around with random stuff from pinterest - that's how I ended up with just 1 image each and small). The invisible leg drawn anyway was from your note to draw through everything. The opposite legs were giving me more than a little trouble in the first drawings of this set. I look at the reference constantly, but my measurements/angles are awful (constant struggling point for me - some days are better than others), and then (like in the case of the ladybug wing) sometimes the line doesn't go where I told it to, and I've been making an effort not to try to correct them. Again, I really appreciate your critique!
James_Rautha
2018-04-03 18:08
https://imgur.com/a/9dMGO
My homework :) Sorry it took so long! Spend too long on practicing each one at first... towards the end learned to obsess a little less and actually finish some drawings.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-03 23:54
Nice work! Overall you're doing a great job of capturing your forms and constructing objects that retain a good sense of solidity and believability. Even that ant with the ridiculously large head (which I'm guessing is actually how they are) looks weird, but still entirely believable because of how you've built it up applying the constructional methodology.
I definitely appreciate that you included a couple of shots through the drawing process, before adding detail.
I think the only particularly weak drawing was this one, which seems to be a pretty strong outliner compared to the others. The legs are kind of stiff, and the rest of it feels rather awkward - but I'm sure that was just an off day or something.
I do have a couple suggestions and observations, but rather than trying to explain them here, I wrote them out directly on your work. Here you go.
I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
James_Rautha
2018-04-04 08:51
That's great, thank you very much!
CattailNu
2018-04-06 22:49
http://cattail.nu/dab/lesson4/ - one ant, multiple iterations, with step-increment photos of the most recent, and video of another.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-07 04:38
I think this shows a much better grasp of the issues I mentioned previously. You've been quite meticulous in your documentation, and I can now confidently say that though there's room for growth, you're moving in the right direction. So, I'll go ahead and mark it as complete.
As you move onto the next lesson, here are some things to keep in mind:
Take advantage of as much of the space on the page as you can. More room will make it easier to think about the forms you're drawing as they sit in 3D space - this is particularly critical for features of the head, like the ant's beak. When you're forced to be quite cramped, it's harder to consider how these forms relate to the larger ones.
Whenever two forms touch each other, think about how one wraps long the surface of the other, or how the intersection itself runs along their surfaces. Understanding how things flow along the surfaces of other objects is definitely key, so the contour line exercises from lesson 2 are very useful.
I did notice from your video that you have a tendency to draw towards your body (or at least, along the diagonal that runs from the upper left to the bottom right, relative to your body). In my experience, most right handed people find bottom left to upper right to be most comfortable. That doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, I'd imagine, but it is something to consider. It could be a factor when considering that things like your ant's antennae tend to be a little wobblier than other marks in your constructions.
Anyway, keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
ILikeRatBellies
2018-04-10 14:33
Lesson 4 Submission
Aaand again, I omitted the practice pages.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-12 23:00
Your grasp of 3D space, and your ability to capture forms that feel solid and concrete is strong, no question of that whatsoever. The only thing I do want to point out however is that you are, at least in some places, notably loose with your construction.
In the grand scheme of things, that's fine. You've clearly already pushed far enough for that grasp of 3D space to be internalized, so the marks you put down are really all you need (for the most part) to work through the spatial problems and determine how the various parts relate to one another. That said, being able to actually sit down and construct everything in its entirety, on the page, is still important, and it is the focus of this lesson (as opposed to just focusing on drawing pretty pictures).
That means a few things:
Drawing each form in its entirety, even when they're blocked by other forms, so we can fully see how they relate to one another, and ensuring that each form is represented by a closed circuit. If you lookat your dragonfly, you'll see that its tail actually flattens out quite a bit - it's because the way the segments were drawn, each one reads more as a 2D shape on the page, rather than being presented as each being an individual three dimensional form that were then connected. Of course, if you were doing a finished drawing, you wouldn't be able to draw through each form - but the point is that drawing through them here in these exercises trains your brain to figure out all of the subtle nuances that would be visible in that final-drawing scenario.
Understanding that each and every form or mass or mark we put down represents a solid 3D form present in the scene (so if you put down a circle to represent, say, the thorax of an insect, that is not just an arbitrary mark on a piece of paper, it should actually be treated as though it were a ball of clay or marble set into a 3D world. Meaning, that if you then realize that the sphere is too big, or that you want a piece of it to be taken away, you can't simply draw on top of it in hopes that the original mark will be ignored. That tells the viewer that it wasn't solid or 3D after all, and undermines that very illusion for the rest of your drawing. As a result, one would more often start out with smaller masses and build up around them by adding additional volumes and layers. If you look at the top of this page, you can see the three loose balls that make up the abdomen of that spider. Those initial ellipses don't actually feel three dimensional, and rather than being a sort of scaffolding for the resulting construction, they're really just 2D explorative sketches that you used to draw the composite shape. Construction as we use it goes much further than just putting down a few marks - they tell us about how things sit in space. Your resulting compound shape still doesn't actually read as being terribly three dimensional - there's nothing there leveraged to communicate to the viewer how that surface turns in space. Had you taken the time to think about how its building blocks were solid and 3D, that belief in the illusion would have likely carried over, making you think more about the resulting 3D nature of the abdomen as a whole. Long story short, don't rush through the early phases - take the time to ensure that every component you put down feels solid and three dimensional, as you see in my demonstrations. This is after all a series of exercises - not an attempt at impressing folks with your pretty drawings (though they are indeed both pretty and impressive).
Anyway, aside from that, you really are doing phenomenal work here. While the issues I mentioned certainly have their impact, the majority of your forms and drawings feel very convincing, and you've done a great job of balancing texture and detail without undermining the underlying solidity.
Keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Since this was your 7th submission this month, I'd like to ask that you hold onto your next one until May 1st. I cut off most people at about 5 submissions, but your work wasn't as challenging to critique in most cases, and your pledge is a little higher than what you needed to receive critiques for the lessons you submitted, so I gave you a little more leeway.
DynamicRaccoon
2018-04-13 15:22
Here is my Lesson 4 homework! https://imgur.com/a/uy5MV. References: https://imgur.com/a/W9Fel.
I definitely found this more difficult than plants, but I was getting more comfortable with it by the end. Since I was doing one drawing per page I went ahead and did four pages of lay-ins; I wasn't sure exactly how many you wanted.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-14 18:07
So I went to town writing notes on your first page, and while I think doing so is probably the most valuable thing I could do, you show improvement over this set. Some of the issues with construction that you have on that first page definitely get better to varying degrees on the rest of it, but I think being able to point them out as directly as I could with that wasp is definitely important.
So here are the notes. There's a lot written there all over the place, so I kind of ordered them, from points 1 to 4.
A few other things I noticed:
Your linework's a bit stiff. Make sure you're ghosting your lines and drawing from your shoulder, as you may have slipped back to drawing from your wrist, and drawing less confidently.
Drawing through your initial masses (as we do with all of our ellipses) is definitely useful to keep them more evenly shaped, fluid and smooth.
Your contour lines have a tendency to be a little rushed and weak in places. I can't remember if these pages were done earlier (before I actually critiqued lesson 2 or not), but that area does need work if it's recent. Be sure to continue practicing the exercises from the first two lessons as part of a regular warmup so you don't get rusty on that front.
Here's an additional demo that I did for another student some time ago that covers the whole construction process in great detail. It's currently present on the lesson 4 page's 'other demos' section, though as it's fairly new it may not have been there if your work for this lesson is a little outdated.
I want you to do another 5 pages of insect drawings. Focus entirely on construction - I don't want to see any detail or texture whatsoever, just focus on the forms you're building, how they sit in 3D space, how they relate to one another, and generally mind the constructional method more closely.
One thing I should reiterate about the construction method is that it is built around the idea of dealing with one problem or decision at a time. Drawings consist of a lot of decisions that have to be made. How different sections relate to one another, proportions, the arrangement of things, and so on. Construction is all about breaking the decisions into steps - once you make a decision though, you may decide later on that the decision was incorrect. By that point, it's TOO LATE. You cannot do anything about it - the biggest mistake one can make is to try and correct and change a decision that has already been made. Ultimately all you can do is work within the framework you've set out. If early on you happened to make the head too big, you need to respect that decision and keep working to draw something that happens to have a head that is larger than it should be.
If you try to correct it, the whole thing will start to unravel. Keep that in mind as you push onwards. Every step is a decision.
DynamicRaccoon
2018-04-14 20:49
Ok thank you, I will get to work on the additional pages. I want to comment on a few things and make sure Im understanding this correctly:
Your example of the wasp abdomen is very helpful; I wasnt understanding that method of layering forms. Ill be sure to apply this in my additional pages. I considered tossing the wasp drawing because I knew undermining the forms like that was bad, but good thing I kept it in since it allowed you to explain some things I wasnt getting.
Some of the stiffness in my major forms may be the result of me worrying too much about copying the reference exactly. One thing Ive been doing, because I dont trust myself with proportions yet, is measuring with my pen to get the initial masses to be the right size in relation to each other. Should I just be eyeballing these proportions?
Not all leg segments keep a consistent width throughout their length, such as the hind leg of the honey bee. Would you then still want an even sausage shape for the initial form, and then build another form on top to more accurately represent its true shape?
As for contour lines, I think just I wasnt treating them with enough importance, probably me worrying about cluttering up the drawing. I'll try to be more deliberate with them.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-14 20:56
People often fuss about posting only work they feel met a certain standard, and as a result grinding out far more pages than were assigned. I regularly try and discourage this due to the reason you've found here - the shitty drawings tell us a lot.
Your understanding of proportion and relationships between forms will improve over time, but yes - don't fuss over them too much right now. Your initial masses are what's meant to make those initial proportional decisions, and sometimes they end up off by a fair bit. That's totally fine, and with lots of mileage and iteration, your ability to eyeball those proportions will improve. You can also delve into ways to improve your proportions later - but right now our focus is on the use of the constructional method to create objects that feel solid and three dimensional.
Exactly right - use sausages to create the bases, then build up the areas where you see greater volumes.
Remember that every technique that you're introduced to is a tool with a purpose. Only use the tools when you need them, and if you need them, give them the appropriate amount of attention. I often see students covering things with sloppy contour lines, and only getting about half the effect they were striving for. Often times one or two well-placed and well-executed contour lines will be enough to reliably reinforce the volumes of a form.
DynamicRaccoon
2018-04-18 19:35
Alright here are my additional pages. I added the references to my previous album.
I didn't do any measuring of proportions, and I tried to focus on building up forms, as well as getting even, flowing legs.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-18 22:59
Much, much, much better! You've definitely applied much of what I mentioned in my last critique to great effect. I can see two issues that I'd still like to point out, but overall you're doing well:
Lets look at this page. Notice how you've got a ball for the head, and it's floating a bit inside of the final form of the head? Same goes for the thorax. This kind of floating inside of a relatively arbitrary outer form is still contributing to a sense of weak construction. You want to build up - don't obliterate the original mass, but attach more forms to it. Don't wrap a single highly complex form around the original one, either, as this means that your subsequent form doesn't have enough scaffolding to support it from the previous step. You can think of it kind of like constructing a building, where if a wall is erected without the appropriate support system put up to hold it together, it will fall apart. If you look at my demos, you'll notice that wherever possible, I tend to still have parts of the initial masses still play a role in the final drawing, because I haven't replaced it - I've built onto it.
Keep an eye on your insects' feet - you're definitely still being a bit sloppy there, not putting enough time and effort into actually observing and constructing them. This isn't an uncommon issue - people tend to disregard the feet, putting the odd afterthought of a line or two. If you put any marks down for anything, they should be considered, planned, confidently executed, and reflect the forms you actually see present in your reference image.
I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to continue to apply what I've mentioned here in the next lesson. I believe my first point is reflected fairly well in the otter and head-construction demos in the animal lesson, so be sure to give those a watch.
DynamicRaccoon
2018-04-19 00:03
Ok great, thank you! I'll keep those points in mind moving forward.
NotchDaMc
2018-04-15 16:52
Your feedback is very much appreciated.
Here were im at thus far. Thanks.
https://imgur.com/gallery/8hcOW
Uncomfortable
2018-04-15 20:16
I think you show a great deal of growth over this set, and while there's certainly room for more, you're got some clear signs of improvement where your understanding of form and 3D space is concerned. I was especially pleased with this page, specifically how the interaction between the head, thorax and abdomen show that you're really grasping how everything sits in space.
There are a few things that I'd like to point out that should help you as you continue to move forwards, but overall I'm quite pleased with your improvement.
You've got varying degrees of success with your legs. In some places you're drawing the leg sections as sort of stretched ovals. This isn't a great idea, because they tend to come out quite stiff. In other places you're drawing them more as sausages, which have a consistent width through their lengths - this is much better, but you should also be paying more attention to how those legs flow from segment to segment. This is a common issue, which I explain towards the bottom of these notes I wrote for another student. Make sure that the ends of your sausages overlap comfortably - you can then add a contour curve at the joint itself to reinforce the illusion of form - but I don't recommend putting contour curves along the length of a segment, as this can cause things to feel a little stiff at times.
For the ladybug, I noticed that you laid in some spots there. One thing to consider when doing so is how those spots wrap around the surface of the form they're on. You've drawn them as pretty evenly shaped ellipses, but since the surface of the shell actually turns in space, you're going to end up with the ellipses being more curved and warped. It's little details like this that really help sell the illusion of 3D form.
I do think that you may be getting a little bit distracted by the detail, texture and rendering of your drawings, to the point that you might be thinking ahead to that when you should be focusing more on ensuring that your construction captures all of the forms present in your insect. This results in some areas being a little oversimplified at times. The ends of legs, where they have their little feet, tends to be a pretty big victim of this sort of thing.
I've got a couple extra demonstrations that I'd like you to look at. This one looks to be done using one of the reference images you used for your ladybugs, so it should help to see how I'd tackle the same one you attempted. Also, this one's pretty recent and goes into a lot of detail in regards to the whole process, and how I deal with each problem one at a time.
You've got plenty of room to grow, and you will continue to do so with practice, but your work is coming along quite well. Be sure to keep practicing this stuff on your own, but I'm going to mark this lesson as complete - so feel free to move onto the next one.
Hodor42
2018-04-24 05:14
Here is my lesson 4 submission. Thanks so much for your help!
https://imgur.com/a/xsOv3gp
Uncomfortable
2018-04-24 20:45
Really nice work! You're demonstrating a really well developed grasp of how your forms sit in space, and how you can combine them to create more complex objects. You're also demonstrating a well developing grasp of texture and detail. I do believe however that in some cases, where you decide you want to go particularly heavy on texture, you sometimes skimp on otherwise important construction lines. Make sure that you push any thought to texture and detail out of your head while you're moving through construction - only think about how you're going to deal with it after the fact, once you've got something that feels solid and well built up.
One thing that stands out to me in this regard is the thorax of this mosquito (or I assume it's a mosquito). It's quite clean, but it also feels a little flat - so focusing on its construction and giving it even one contour line could have helped give it a sense of volume. In general, it does look like texture and detail took the wheel here, which should generally not be the case.
Aside from that, there's two suggestions that I have to offer, and I outline them in these notes. For the first, when you've got two forms that intersect with one another - especially when they're early masses at the beginning of your construction - place a contour line right where the two forms intersect. This will help reinforce the sense of solidity and will improve the believability of what you're constructing. It's also important to always draw through forms when they overlap, rather than letting one get cut off where it is hidden by another. You do both, sometimes drawing through them, other times stopping lines where they should continue on.
Secondly, when dealing with insect legs, try and start them out as simple sausages, and focus on how they flow. Dont' worry about where they might bulge or pinch - just build their cores and pay attention to how they flow back and forth. You can always add additional forms afterwards if they get particularly bulgy at certain places.
Sausages are important, over stretched ellipses, as they maintain a consistent width through their length, and only round off at the ends. This allows them to be more directional and maintain a stronger sense of flow, whereas stretched ellipses tend to feel more stiff and rigid.
Anyway, I hope those points help. Other than the things I mentioned, you're doing a pretty great job, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
BeccaRand
2018-05-07 18:32
Hi! Here are my insects. My self-critique is that my shadows (both on the insect and the drop shadow below) are sometimes odd looking. This is something I need to work on.
I put the practice/mess ups at the end. Thanks for your time!
https://imgur.com/a/3JaPXVq
Uncomfortable
2018-05-08 03:24
Advance warning: my critique here is definitely kind of scatterbrained, you'll have to bare with me - I got hammered with a bunch of submissions today, and this is my last of seven after a full day at work. Luckily this has resulted in me ranting about important things that I may not have thought to mention otherwise.
This submission has a nice, healthy mix of solid constructions with strong forms and clear volumes, as well as some that fall a little flat. Some of your strongest include:
The top 2 on this page
This bee
These (excluding the adorable jumping spider)
I also liked the study on the bottom left of this page, though technically that's not technically a full insect drawing. still cool though, and demonstrates a good grasp of construction and form.
On the other end of the spectrum, some of your weakest included,
this beetle
the cricket to the left of this page
this grasshopper
There's a very clear pattern, and it's not at all uncommon. I see it quite frequently. The issue is that when you move into tackling detail, you have a tendency of doing two things to varying degrees. Firstly, there are signs that when you know you're going to take a drawing into further detail, that you subconsciously hold yourself back from drawing the construction lines as confidently as you otherwise might. As a result, you move onto later phases of construction and detail without having fully convinced yourself of the solidity and threedimensionality (i hereby declare that to be a word) of the forms you've already put down.
By drawing, we are effectively telling lies. Lies that the things we draw on a flat piece of paper are in fact three dimensional objects. The best liars are those who have fully invested themselves in their own lies, and who believe in them completely. At every stage of construction, you must be convinced in the illusion you are trying to create - and if you aren't, then leverage the tools you've been given in previous lessons.
Here's a demonstration of what I mean. You jumped straight from ellipse to layering on those segmented plates without yet having bought into the idea that the ellipse represented a ball, whose surface turned in space. As a result, the segmentation came out quite flat.
Also worth mentioning is the bit I wrote across the top of that page. Detail is all about the cast shadows. Texture manifests as a bunch of tiny forms - the little bumps and layers and divets and whatnot that cause little shadows to be cast across the surface of a larger form. When you've got a series of plates that are layered on top of one another, you get a particular kind of shadow pattern where the shadow is cast from one onto the other. There's a hierarchy there if you look for it, and that's the sort of thing you need to leverage when you want to get into that level of visual complexity.
You've been through plenty of drawing courses, so you've probably noticed by now that I never mention anything about rendering. When it comes to form shadows, I haven't made a peep. This is very intentional. I've found that a lot of drawing courses teach us to convey form through shading. The result of this, I find, is often that the illusion achieved is kind of weak, because that shading is used as a crutch, and a way to avoid learning how to properly convey how those forms turn in space, and how the silhouettes are shaped to reflect this. By steering clear of shading, I force my students to figure out how to convey that sense of form with the tools I've limited them to (which at their core all come down to contour lines).
The contour lines we've been using since lesson 2 are really obvious, manufactured things that are not present in our reference images. So obviously if we were striving to draw pretty renderings of those objects, they wouldn't be of much use. That's why it's important to keep in mind that each drawing you make for these lessons is just an exercise. It's an exercise meant to develop your understanding of construction and 3D space, of how these simple forms can be combined, manipulated and built up to create highly complex, yet structured objects that sell the grand lie that they're not just lines on a page.
Once this grasp of space, and this illusion is firmly ingrained in your mind, you'll be able to draw an ellipse and believe it to be a 3D mass. From there, you'll be able to wrap exoskeletal layers around it directly, grasping fully how they'd curve along its surface. This is ultimately the goal, but since you're not there yet, it's important that you go through all the steps.
And there are a lot of drawings here where you have done just that. The subtle contours you drew on that moth's head and along its legs go a long way to pave the path for other choices you've made that absolutely sell that illusion.
Jumping back momentarily to the whole form shadow thing - I did notice that when you went to add detail to your drawings, that is one way you approached doing it. This is something I want to advise against. There is room for form shadows, but rather than being something we use to convey form, we use it as a tool to convey texture. After all, since we're working with fineliners, which allow us only hard blacks or solid whites, we have to achieve a transition between them somehow. This is where we sneak in our textures. I dig into this a lot deeper on the texture challenge page, so I recommend you give that a read. The long and the short of it is, however - if you're not looking to use it to convey a specific texture, then leave out the form shading altogether. This all but excludes hatching, since we tend to use it as a sort of filler texture for the express purpose of shading.
Ages ago, I mentioned that there were two common issues I was seeing that was holding your work back. I actually touched on the second one already, but to put it plainly, it is that when you jump into detail, you focus too much on the details themselves and get a bit of tunnel vision. This is an issue because the details themselves can very easily come to contradict what our core construction has already described about our object's forms. Remember that every single mark serves as a contour line in its own right, so it can either agree or disagree with what has been described about those underlying forms.
You need to be constantly thinking about those core constructional forms, and often times when it comes to texture and detail, less is more. If given the option to approach texture with a light touch - just a little here, a little extra detail there, etc. - do that, instead of covering everything. This drawing course, and at its essence, drawing in general, is not about capturing a scene in perfect and complete detail. That is something that a camera does, and it does it so well that photographers have to employ a variety of tricks to keep the wealth of visual information from ruining their shot (a task usually handled by the brain as it filters what our eyes see in the world around us).
Drawing is better described as visual communication. That is, our goal is to communicate an idea. Whether that idea is a grasshopper, or a strawberry, or a lush field of poppies under a cloudy sky. No matter how simple or complex the idea, the act of drawing it is a matter of transmitting it into the viewer's head. This does not inherently require us to try to capture every little detail and bit of visual information, as this can often manifest as noise, obscuring and confusing what we're trying to say. Unlike this rambling critique/rant, communication is at its best when it is succinct, clear, and free of all but what is necessary. Where the main ideas are emphasized and clear, and things of lesser importance are left as an afterthought.
This bee, which I pointed out before as being very well done, is an example of succinct communication. The core idea being presented are the forms. The head, the thorax and the abdomen, as well as the legs and the particular way they are bent to carry the insect's weight. They are not obscured or obfuscated in any way. Next, the segmentation of the abdomen - clearly wrapping around the core form and emphasized with the cast shadows you've suggested through your use of line weight. Lastly, and given only a word or two (were this drawing a paragraph), the texture of the fur you've captured - primarily along its silhouette where the slightest marks can achieve the greatest impact. You've made it clear that there's varying degrees of fuzz all over the body, but without really drawing much of it at all. The majority is implied, but that is all that was needed in order to communicate the idea of it clearly.
I'm running up on my character count for this post, so I'll bring it to a close. With all the successful drawings you've got here, you're clearly on the right track. Still, I'd like you to do three more insect drawings. For each of them, I want you to draw them focusing purely on construction. Complete each one separately, and take photographs of them all. Then, once all three have solid constructions, I want you to communicate their texture and detail. Go only as far as you need to communicate the idea of what you see. Focus on cast shadows, and use them to communicate how things are layered, and the general structure of things. Stay away from form shadows, except when necessary as a tool to capture texture in those transition areas between light and dark (as mentioned in the texture challenge notes.
And now I have hit the 10,000 character limit for this post.
BeccaRand
2018-05-10 16:30
Thank you, this is very thorough and helpful. I completely see what you are saying and did a few more studies to help solidify the concepts. I added them at the end of the album (and moved the originals to the bottom for comparison). I think the structures are looking WAY better but the texture needs work. Would it make sense to start the Texture Challenge now?
https://imgur.com/a/3JaPXVq
On a side note, when I first glanced over your critique I thought you were saying you got hammered while writing the critique and I was like, "Wow... this is going to be exciting!"
Uncomfortable
2018-05-10 21:24
It's a little known fact that I always get hammered before my critiques :P
Your new drawings are considerably improved, and show a good application of all of the points I raised in my critique. They feel much sturdier and more believable, and continue to maintain that even as you push your detail and texture a little further. Very well done.
The only thing I wanted to comment on as far as advice goes was the head of your grasshopper. Where you started off with a sort of stretched ball encompassing most of the head, I would perhaps have started with a more spherical, smaller ball instead and then added boxy/planar forms onto that to flesh out the rest. You'll see a lot more of this in the next lesson, especially in the head construction video, and you can also see the same principle in this animal head demo that I did for a student very recently (specifically the bottom right).
Anyway, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Zeon1xx
2018-05-12 01:26
This Lesson was so much fun! Each drawing I did took up a whole page but to save you the trouble of looking through 27 pages I grouped them up into 10 pages.
https://imgur.com/a/Nln2RiE
Uncomfortable
2018-05-13 18:21
Not bad! You've got a lot of great drawings here, and are demonstrating an understanding of many of the core principles covered in the lesson. I did notice one issue though, and it gives me the opportunity to reiterate a particularly important point.
It has to do with taking the necessary steps to convince yourself that these flat shapes we're drawing on a piece of paper are in fact 3D forms. It's an illusion, a lie we're telling the viewer, and the best way to sell a convincing lie is to believe in it yourself.
Ultimately that's why we draw through forms, and use contour lines where they may not actually exist in what we're drawing. We're not going to be doing that forever, but as far as these drawings go, they're really exercises to get us used to thinking in that manner. Far in the future, you'll have done this so much that you'll be able to visualize these additional lines in your mind's eye, and you'll be able to look at a sausage shape and simply believe that it's three dimensional.
The reason this belief is important comes to light when we look at the abdomens of your wasps. Looking at the segmentation, I'm not getting a very strong sense that they wrap around the rounded form you used in the earlier phase of construction. Instead, they read as being rather flattened out. The reason for this is that you skipped the step to reinforce the illusion of that basic form beforehand with contour lines, and so you weren't entirely convinced of its roundedness when you moved onto this further detail.
I demonstrate what I mean here: https://i.imgur.com/iIv4pca.png
You're actually doing this much better in some other areas, like your cricket drawings, but drawing in one or two contour lines to really reinforce the illusion will help considerably.
Aside from that, your work is really well done. Your lines are confident, your legs flow nicely, and the majority of your forms feel solid (aside from the areas I mentioned above). You're clearly taking things steadily from simple to complex, applying the constructional method to great effect.
Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Zeon1xx
2018-05-13 19:08
Thank you for the feedback Uncomfortable sensei, I will definitely keep this in my mind moving forward!
jordan_dean
2018-05-15 01:41
Hi! Thanks so much for your critique on the last lesson. Here's some creepy bugs for ya!
https://imgur.com/a/VfmHDY2
Uncomfortable
2018-05-15 20:14
Overall you're doing really nicely with your constructions. You've got a good mind for 3D space, and are manipulating these forms quite effectively to build up believable and interesting objects. I especially like your fly constructions - they're extremely confident, and you're not afraid at all of piling on forms on top of forms on top of forms, and drawing through everything as you do so. I also loved how you stacked the segmented plates on the giant weta on this page.
I noticed that depending on the drawing, sometimes you'd treat an initial organic form as being a "container" for what the result was going to be (so the segmented plates would end up sitting inside of it), and sometimes you'd use it as a form on top of which the plates were attached. I want you to keep moving forwards with the second approach, as this is more in line with what we're after with the construction method.
I did get the feeling that when you tried to play more with that stippling texture and deeper, more confident shadow shapes on some of the drawings, you allowed some of the construction to slip through the cracks a bit. That is to say, perhaps when you were drawing these, you were thinking ahead to how you'd handle the detail, and didn't think as hard about construction as you had demonstrated in other drawings. It's very important to focus on the step you're on, rather than thinking ahead. Think detail when you get there, but until then, you shouldn't even be considering whether or not you'll take a drawing to a further stage of completion.
Here are some notes on the container vs. base form issue I mentioned above, and a couple other observations I had. Keep those points in mind as you move forwards - I'll be marking this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. Keep up the great work!
jordan_dean
2018-05-15 23:03
Ok, gotcha, thanks for the feedback! I realize now that I've been switching back and forth between the "container" approach and the "stacking" approach, without much thought as to why. Anyway, I'll continue stacking forms moving forwards, and hold off on the detail until my constructions are solidly established. Thanks again.
spelling_expirt
2018-05-17 14:32
I took a different approach for this lesson, where instead of doing 2 pages of lay ins, I sort of did individual analyses for each bug. Let me know if you disapprove of this--or the red pen at the end--because I am thinking I might approach animals this way too.
I know you prefer the construction lines to be placed boldly, but I was finding that I got a lot less confused when I started with thinner lines. I was also unsure how much to push detail, so i went pretty easy on it by the end there.
Uncomfortable
2018-05-17 22:55
Thaat's.... a little overwhelming. You've done some pretty remarkable work here and show a strong grasp of construction and the other various principles covered in this lesson.
One thing I especially like, which I find myself having to do demos for, is how you approached drawing legs (like for this spider. You've done a really good job of capturing how those sections flow, and by using these sausage forms, you've maintained their solidity without making them feel stiff.
Now, on that same note however, take a look at the abdomen of your dragonfly. Notice how it feels somewhat rigid and stiff? Well, you could certainly say, "well it's totally straight in my reference" and you probably wouldn't be wrong. But the question is, does it feel stiff? It doesn't, because those various segments can articulate, allowing the whole thing to bend a fair bit.
So, when we're communicating the idea of this critter, we need to think about the impression it gives off. Often times when we look at something that's straight, there will be minute details that we won't necessarily perceive easily that make the difference between being corpse-stiff and a flexible thing that happens to be straight at that moment in time. But when we draw it, if we think of it only as being straight as we've observed, stiffness is what will be communicated.
So, it often becomes necessary to give a little extra bend to something where it doesn't exist initially. This is frequently something that comes into play with legs, and it's the reason I like that spider so much. The segments aren't afraid to bend a little. I'm not sure how much of that bending is present in your reference, but the point is that it doesn't matter - we know they're not overly rigid regardless, and you've accomplished your goal in communicating this fact.
So, when you're drawing something from a reference, focus on the idea that what you're doing is communicating the idea of what you're looking at, rather than reproducing the image. For the most part, you are fully aware of this already, based on your in-depth analyses and thoughtful constructions.
Aside from that, you're doing extremely well and show a wonderful grasp of space and form, along with highly confident linework and an eager eye that seems to absorb everything it sees. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one and keep up the fantastic work.
kasefresser
2018-05-21 19:56
Here we go: https://imgur.com/a/hkoNO8c
I has taken me a long time because lack of motivation when things dont go well. Copying your drawings and doing some studies eventually helped me over these hurdles.
Failed drawings are also included :)
Uncomfortable
2018-05-22 00:32
You've done a pretty good job over all. You did show some uncertainty at the beginning, but quickly got used to the general process of building up from simple to complex, and using clear, intentional marks rather than rough, sketchier explorations.
By the end you also showed some interesting texture explorations, which shows a fair bit of improvement over pages like this where you still relied quite heavily on hatching in places, and didn't seem to be entirely clear on which kinds of features each mark was meant to represent. By the time you hit the spider on the right side of this page you showed a much clearer grasp of the purpose of each line you put down, and focused more on communicating the idea of certain textures and surface qualities, over just getting some interesting nonsense down on the page.
I do however want to discourage you from playing with shading for shading's sake for now however. You'll notice that none of the drawabox lessons actually talk about how to deal with light and shadow outside of texture. This is because I see a lot of art students learn about shading too early, and rely on it as a means to convey form (instead of using the techniques we apply - construction and contour lines). This often results in those drawings falling a little flat, or generally being less solid than those my students produce.
The only shadows we really deal with are those that are cast from one object occluding a light source, most commonly in textures (with every mark of a texture really being a shadow cast by little bump or irregularity on the surface). If you ever catch yourself just adding shading for its own sake in my lessons, stop yourself. You'll have plenty of opportunities to do that outside of drawabox, but in this case it'll only serve as a distraction.
The other thing I wanted to mention was in regards to how you draw the legs of your insects. I see a lot of cases where you draw a segment of a leg, and then have its lines stop before completing the form/shape. This is usually because the form you're drawing is overlapped by some other form, so you avoid drawing over it. Give these notes I've written a read. You'll see that I'd like you to draw every form as a complete, enclosed shape on the page, drawing through forms wherever necessary. This helps you to maintain the simplicity and the solidity of each form as an individual, before considering how it interacts with the rest of the construction.
Anyway, aside from that, you've done very well. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Leerxyz
2018-05-24 19:25
Hi, I've completed lesson 4: https://imgur.com/a/bKENi5m
This was quite a frightening and disturbing exercize.
Reference images are linked under each drawing.
Uncomfortable
2018-05-25 23:53
You demonstrate some good qualities in this set, but there are a number of things I want to draw your attention to. Rather than trying to type out explanations for each one, I'm going to draw out some demonstrations that should help express them clearly. For the most part, they're a matter of approach, so implementing these changes should help a great deal.
I've summed up my whole critique in these images. Give them a read, then I want you to try another four pages of insect drawings.
Leerxyz
2018-05-31 14:19
Thanks for the feedback, here are the requested pages: https://imgur.com/a/1ABc1gh
Uncomfortable
2018-05-31 23:50
I've been looking at your drawings for several minutes now, scrolling up and down the album. There's something off about your approach that I can't entirely put my finger on. I think it's that all of your linework feels very... stiff. Your lines don't flow smoothly and continuously, there's little kinks and bends and jerks throughout. Now, I don't really have any clear gauge for scale, but this is often something one sees from students who draw much too small on the page, which always results in a lot of cramped linework and a decreased ability to think through spatial problems. Another factor can be drawing more from the wrist than the shoulder.
Of course, both of these points may or may not be the case - they're points you'd have to confirm or deny yourself. All I can remark upon is what I see.
Furthermore, your drawings - at least these ones - give the impression that you're still seeing your drawings as marks across a flat page. You're attempting to draw forms, but there's no sense of the relationship between them. For example, if you look at this treehopper, you haven't fully established the volume of the main body before you start moving onto the wing. You're drawing through some areas, but in others you're doing the same thing I advised you against in my last critique - that is, allowing forms to stop where they are occluded by others.
That said, in the very last drawing, you did do a much better job when it comes to layering the various segments along its thorax and abdomen - so that's a move in the right direction (although its legs are both flat and stiff).
I want you to try and draw this spider. It's fucking disgusting and I hate looking at it, but it's an excellent subject to work from, as it's not nearly as complex as some of the subjects you've attempted here. I want you to focus ONLY on construction, with no detail whatsoever. At the end of each phase of construction, I want you to photograph your work, and then submit it all together so I can see your process. Remember that each phase should end with forms that feel solid.
Also worth mentioning: a question that's been ringing through my head as I've looked over your work is whether or not you've kept up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warmup routine. Your current work suggests that you haven't been practicing your organic forms and organic intersections as much as you should, which has caused you to get rusty.
Leerxyz
2018-06-01 22:28
I drew all insects on a dinA 4 page so scale shouldn't be it. I do think I draw with my wrist/elbow unconsciously sometimes.
I didn't really warm up before drawing and obviously that is negatively impacting my work. I will start doing those warm up exercizes from now on.
I wouldn't say I think of a flat page when drawing those insects but I definitely don't understand how the hell the lines flow over the surface of it's body/how to capture it's volume.
That being said, here's my spider drawing: https://imgur.com/a/hZPULqH
Uncomfortable
2018-06-02 17:28
This is actually considerably better than before, and you're doing a much better job of capturing most of your volumes. There's still room for improvement, and one issue that I'm seeing is that your contour curves often (but not always) have a habit of failing to accelerate in their curvature enough near the edges to give the impression that they wrap around a properly rounded form. Overshooting, as explained here can help.
Contour curves are used to give the impression of volume because they give the viewer a very specific sign of how that surface turns through space. It's a path our eye can follow - because our eyes understand the idea that these lines are meant to be "straight" relative to the object they're on, so how they curve is directly related to the surface they run along.
Being able to pull off this curvature comes from how well you're currently able to hold the idea of the surface being three dimensional in your head. Those who feel that they're drawing along a flat page, will find it difficult to achieve much curvature. Those who are fully convinced in the idea that what they're drawing is 3D will conversely not be able to just draw a straight, 2D line across a rounded object in their drawing, because it simply won't make sense. It constitutes a whole spectrum between these two extremes, and it does take time and practice to move from one end to the other. That's what the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 are all about - gradually building up those skills and shifting how you see the world, and how you perceive your own drawings.
There's one other thing worth mentioning - in my initial critique's notes, I mentioned that one should construct legs with sausage forms (which you're mostly doing), and reinforce the joints between these forms with contour curves. You may have misunderstood this last part. Right now you seem to be placing contour curves around the joints (one on either side), but that's not what I'm asking for. Here's a better demonstration of what I mean. You are to actually define the location where the two forms intersect. This helps immensely with all forms that intersect with one another (including the abdomen and thorax in your drawing), as it makes very clear how those two forms relate to one another in space.
Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, as this spider drawing shows considerable improvement. Make sure you do a lot of refreshing with those lesson 1 and 2 exercises before moving onto lesson 5 however - and of course, keep up with them as a regular warmup. This is something I recommend quite explicitly in that first lesson and intro video for a reason.
[deleted]
2018-05-25 19:31
My submission for lesson 4: https://imgur.com/a/zQH58dP
It took me 7 months, but I finally made it through this one. Once I got the hang of the process though this one was a lot of fun. I've only got 7 insects/arachnids here. However, I did a lot more layin/observation pages ala spelling_expirt's approach. I hope this satisfies the homework requirements.
Uncomfortable
2018-05-26 00:32
In a lot of these drawings, you're demonstrating a good sense of 3D space, and the relationships between objects and forms. You've got a number of strong and interesting constructions, my favourites being the wasp, these black widows, and the ground beetle on the lower right.
That said, I definitely agree with the assessment you had on that first image, about your boxier methods making things come out rather stiff. The grasshoppers are a good example of that. One thing to keep in mind is that when we draw these objects, we're not just drawing what is present - we're drawing how those objects seem to us.
That is to say, you might look at the abdomen of a dragonfly and think that well, it's straight - so I'm going to draw it straight. And as a result it ends up feeling quite stiff. But those fuckers aren't stiff - they're quite flexible, and can have a lot of grace to them. And even when looking at a photo, we can still tell that they don't seem stiff and rigid, despite the fact that they still look straight to us.
That's some of the interpretation we need to factor into our drawings - and we usually do so in exaggerating the imperceptible. Pushing what we know is there, even if we can't see it explicitly. Usually it has to do with taking something that feels straight and geometric, and forcing the fact that it's organic, by exaggerating its curves and flow.
This is where a boxier approach tends to get in the way. Boxes are great for getting your head around the 3D nature of things, but they can be limiting when what you're drawing isn't perfectly geometric. So rather than constructing animals and creatures with explicit boxes, I try and think about what a box is, and apply that. Boxes are planar - they have distinct edges that separate their faces. If you apply this to an organic sausage, you can start distinguishing its sides, and find where the edges come out. This can give your drawings a strong sense of being three dimensional, but since you start out organic, with sausage forms and balls, you maintain the fluidity and flow.
On that topic, the one other thing I want to talk to you about is legs. You're attacking them in a number of ways, from drawing to drawing. My preference goes to how you drew them here, where you drew them with flowing sausage forms linked together - except for one thing. They're not overlapping and intersecting enough.
Instead, try and construct legs like this: https://i.imgur.com/pPyrBgB.png
A sausage form for each segment, intersecting fully and then reinforced with a contour curve at that intersection. Focus on exaggerating how the sausages flow, and try to keep them from being too stiff. Contour curves through the length can definitely add to a sense of stiffness, while keeping them at the joints generally reinforces them enough to hold the illusion of form without becoming too rigid.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
[deleted]
2018-05-26 01:29
Thank you so much for the critique. I definitely get what youre saying about the boxes. Im still a little confused about the legs though, mainly because I had been attempting to do all but the very first ones in that sausage method, as you demonstrate in the scorpion video.
Is there a specific way Im messing it up (ie. not exaggerating enough, not overlapping the ends enough, not contouring them right,etc...)? Or am I just not grasping the concept entirely?
Uncomfortable
2018-05-26 02:08
You were close in most of the drawings, but in some of them they weren't overlapping or interpenetrating enough. I'm not sure how big these drawings are, so another factor could just be that the legs may be getting cramped, due to not being given a whole lot of room for that kind of construction. You're not that far off, really. Just make sure they interpenetrate, and avoid putting contour curves along their lengths (keep them at the joints).
[deleted]
2018-05-26 02:20
Thanks!
Pinocho8
2018-06-08 23:13
Hi again!
here is my homework from lesson 4
https://imgur.com/a/OHgEaGS
Spider and scorpion have way too short legs. I'm not too happy with legs in general
thank you!
Uncomfortable
2018-06-09 17:18
Throughout the set, you show definite progress, but I find that as you push through, your priorities shift from focusing on a solid underlying construction to fussing over texture more and more. If you look closely, you'll see that you spend less time on the earlier steps and more on entirely superfluous details. This results in a drawing that feels less solid, and that overcompensates in areas that don't solve that problem.
For example, if you look at this page, you'll see that there are a few major issues with how the construction has been approached and used:
The construction phase itself feels flat - you need to be taking the time to ensure that by the end of a given phase, what you've drawn feels solid and three dimensional. You need to believe in the idea that what you've drawn is 3D, because you will only be able to convince your audience that it's not just a flat drawing if you yourself believe in the illusion you're creating.
You're not even actually following that underlying construction. You shift the abdomen over and end up ignoring what you drew previously. Construction is all about breaking a drawing up into a series of decisions, and making them one by one. If you then go back in and decide to ignore and remake a decision, you're going to severely undermine the drawing as a whole. One a decision is made, you need to follow it for the sake of keeping your drawing solid and believable.
One last issue that I noticed was that you have a tendency to struggle a little bit with the alignment of your major masses. If you look at your wasp and ladybug, specifically at the thorax and abdomen, the center lines you've drawn along the forms do not actually feel as though they run along the actual centers of those forms. As a result, when you try to align them to one another, something feels distinctly off.
You do have areas where you have much more success with this - for example, this spider (though as a side note, your hair/fur texture is extremely scribbly, a quality that should be avoided in favour of more planned, thought out strokes over randomness and chaos). The major difference here is that when you drew that center line, you were focusing on how that line ran along the surface of the single abdomen form, rather than trying to think of how it'd flow across all of them. You considered how the abdomen existed as a 3D form. In the other ones, you were thinking more of the whole drawing as existing on the flat page. So in the future, focus on each form independently, then align them to each other as they sit in 3D space.
Now, I do believe you're making headway, but you fell off the rails a bit and got distracted. To get you back on track, I'd like you to do four more pages of insect drawings, but this time I want you to focus only on construction, on the use of solid 3D forms with no detail or texture whatsoever. As construction is a process that involves building up your drawing over the course of a number of phases, ensure that every phase is well planned and that each one results in something that feels solid as though it exists in 3D space. Don't make the mistake of intending to solidify things in later phases, as that's not how it works - you start with solidity and carry it through.
Pinocho8
2018-06-09 18:08
Thank you for your thorough critique!
I will make some more as you instructed.
Do you have any advice about keeping good proportion? (body/legs...)
Uncomfortable
2018-06-09 18:17
Honestly, that's really something that comes mostly through practice. There are some little tricks and techniques for gauging proportion, but they relate too much to looking at your reference as just a flat 2D image and comparing the shapes themselves. That's not something I want you to delve into just yet, not until you've got a solid grasp of how everything exists in a 3D world. So for now, just do your best with the proportions, and focus more on the act of constructing things from a series of solid forms.
Pinocho8
2018-06-27 20:07
OK, bugs reloaded!
here they are: https://imgur.com/a/1lnD2UA
Uncomfortable
2018-06-27 20:42
Looking great. Your constructions are looking solid and your observations are spot on. I'm actually on a plane at the moment, so I can't change your flair just yet, but I will as soon as I can. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, and consider this one complete.
Pinocho8
2018-06-27 20:43
Thank you, that makes me very happy. Take your time and enjoy your trip
antisigma
2018-06-20 05:24
https://imgur.com/a/s4wUqAL
Uncomfortable
2018-06-20 21:15
You show a fair bit of progress and growth over the course of this set. There are some recommendations I'm going to make, but where you show most of your improvement is in your ability to observe complex objects and break them down to a finer degree. At the beginning your observational skills weren't terribly keen, and things had a tendency to be quite flat. This is much less so towards the end.
One of the important things I want to outline at this point in the curriculum is the importance of believing in the illusion you are creating. We all understand that what we draw is essentially a series of simple lines and shapes on a flat, 2D page. We leverage various techniques to produce an illusion of depth and form.
It's normal to worry about convincing others of the fact that what you've drawn is three dimensional, but it is far more important to focus on convincing yourself. All of these lessons and exercises revolve around this principle - that the techniques of drawing through forms, drawing contour lines and so on allows us to better believe in our own lies. Once we come to believe in what we're peddling, the little subconscious shifts in approach and technique that come with proper belief is what allows us to sell the illusion to our viewers. That comes naturally, once you're able to fool yourself.
This leads me into one thing I feel you were missing in your drawings, even towards the end. You drew your individual components, but I did not get the impression that you believed anything beyond the idea that you were drawing flat shapes on a page.
One important thing you can do to work beyond this is, when you've got two forms that connect to one another, to actually define how they intersect and connect. Actually establish the area of intersection with a contour line, as if you were to draw over the surface with a marker where the two forms touch.
Getting used to doing this is what will reinforce the idea that these are three dimensional forms. It is quite important that whenever you come to the end of a phase or step of construction, that you are fully convinced that what you've drawn thus far represents solid 3D forms. Never expect that solidity will be something you'll build up or imbue as you go - it's something you start with, and something you strive to maintain throughout.
One other thing I'd like to mention pertains to how you approach your insects' legs. Right now you're drawing each as a series of lines. If a leg is made up of several segments, you'll draw each segment only so far as it is visible. Your lines stop when they meet the previous section.
You should be drawing each one as a complete form. I generally construct mine as sausage forms as shown here, which are specifically forms that maintain a consistent width throughout their lengths, rounding off at the ends - different from stretched balls, which will gradually widen towards the center. Sausages convey a much stronger sense of flow and gesture which is great for legs, whereas stretched ellipses/balls will seem quite stiff (I'm mentioning this because it's a common mistake people make). Where I have two of my sausage forms intersect, I'll reinforce the actual joint, keeping the lengths free of contour lines. I've demonstrated this principle here as well, on another student's work.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do just two more pages. Focus on trying to apply what I've said here, though I understand that the first chunk of it was kind of abstract.
antisigma
2018-06-22 06:31
https://imgur.com/a/5dajyXV
It's spread out across three pages - I drew larger. The legs still came out too small to have decent intersection lines. I made the exact mistake you described - stretched balls instead of sausages, but I noticed, and most leg segments I think are OK.
I keep fiddling with the angles of things, trying to get them to point through 3D space - trying to find an angle that points off or into the page. But I can't - the page is flat. So just I sort of have to pretend, like you describe. It's really tricky!
Uncomfortable
2018-06-22 21:28
It certainly is tricky, and it does take a great deal of getting used to. Alongside that, we need to balance observation, making sure that we're not just constructing arbitrary forms without being precisely aware of which features from the actual object we are trying to capture or represent.
I think you might be rushing a little in this regard, perhaps relying too much on memory over direct observation. Make sure you're only putting down a mark or two before looking back at your reference and refreshing your mental model of what you're attempting to draw.
There's also a couple other things I noticed:
With the fly's eyes, and really anything, you need to ignore the local colour. You're not colouring anything else in the drawing, so there's no reason to fill the fly's eyes to be solid black. This actually works against you as you try and convey these forms as being three dimensional, because there's not a whole lot you can do with a solid black ellipse.
When layering the segmentation along the fly's abdomen at the top of page 1, you're again kind of sloppy in how you approach it. You're allowing your segments to cut into the for you've already produced in the previous stage, which undercuts the illusion of form and solidity. You want it to seem like you've taken additional forms and wrapped them around - you don't want to be in a situation where you're subtracting from forms you've actually put in, as that's a lot harder to do convincingly. Take a look at the top right of these notes I've done for another student, as they explain the situation further. I also talk about similar things in these notes.
You are making some definite progress, but I want you to resolve the situations where you draw marks without a proper idea of what you're trying to achieve with a given line. It means getting used to holding yourself back and thinking/observing rather than rushing in and putting down more ink.
Take the weekend and do two more pages of insect drawings.
antisigma
2018-06-25 03:35
I thought that by "take the weekend" you meant "take the weekend to do these drawings", but it just occurred to me that you might have meant "take the weekend off".
https://imgur.com/a/5hRdPim
Uncomfortable
2018-06-25 22:08
Nope, you had me right the first time. I meant take the weekend, as I didn't want you to try and bang them out as quickly as possible.
Anyway, across the set you are showing definite improvement, but it's in some places and not in others. For example on the first page, towards the bottom left side, you've got some great segmentation wrapping around. Strong contour lines, that sort of thing. On the last page, bottom right, it's gone back to being quiet weak.
Overall, you're also drawing pretty small, so your constructions are being forced into a fairly cramped space. This results in lines that are a lot heavier relative to your overall drawing, and therefore a lot more stiffness and generally clunky looking construction. You need to be taking far more advantage of the space your pages give you, so you can engage your full arm when drawing, and so you're able to think more about the intricacies and subtleties of your construction as you piece it together.
Lastly, there's varying amounts of sloppiness here and there, especially in regards to observation, which is something I had mentioned before. You need to keep pushing yourself to observe your reference more carefully, and to ensure that every mark or form you put down corresponds with some feature in your reference. These legs with short segments and nubby ends are very clearly an oversimplification of what you're seeing, in a sort of cartoony fashion.
Overall, these are things that fall to you to practice. I've pointed them out, but it's on you to reread the critiques I've offered and to really absorb it all. It does take several passes - the lesson and the critiques are usually fairly dense and it's normal to only absorb select parts at a time, and to have to review it several times before it starts to sink in.
So, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You've got a lot of room for improvement, but you are heading in the right direction. You can start on the next lesson when you feel you're ready, but I do recommend that you take some time to absorb these critiques a little more, and to do more insect studies on your own.
antisigma
2018-06-26 03:47
I think I'm going to take a break and do some work on the 250 cylinder challenge. Then I'll come back and re-read your critiques and look over my drawings for this lesson with fresh eyes and then probably redo the whole lesson. I won't ask you do write another lesson 4 critique though, I expect you're plenty sick of my bugs ;)
[deleted]
2018-07-01 16:00
Lesson 4 Sorry if these look messy. The site that contained the reference images I drew these from would not allow me to download any of their images, which is why I could not include them in the submission.
Uncomfortable
2018-07-02 16:28
It looks like patreon's attempt to charge you for June was declined. Let me know when you've been able to resolve that issue, and I'll add this submission back to my critique backlog.
[deleted]
2018-07-02 17:52
Alright, I think the issue has been solved
Uncomfortable
2018-07-02 18:46
It has indeed! Thanks for looking into that for me.
For the most part, your work here is solid. You're demonstrating a good grasp of many things I tend to focus on for this lesson - you're breaking the complex insect bodies into a number of simpler forms, and are paying attention to how they relate to one another. You make this quite clear with your lay-ins, and it continues on into your more developed drawings.
One thing I'm particularly pleased with is the abdomen of this wasp - it shows perhaps better than anything else your awareness of how these objects exist in 3D space, and how you're building things up from simple to complex. You're wrapping those segments around the core mass, creating a sort of layered appearance that really sells the drawing.
There is an issue I want to bring to your attention though.
Firstly, while you build up your drawings quite well, on an individual shape-by-shape and form-by-form basis, the way you're drawing things feels a little rushed, and it give ways to a degree of sloppiness. What this means is that while your results are coming out well, they can definitely be improved to feel more solid and sturdy.
This is best shown in how your legs are approached. You're actually quite close to doing exactly what I want to see, it's just the sense that you need to stop yourself for a moment, think, and perhaps prepare a little further with the ghosting method before executing your marks. I like that you're moving towards using sausage shapes for the individual segments of the legs, but there's a few points I want you to pay more attention to:
Make sure they're sausage shapes, rather than stretched ellipses. The difference is subtle, but basically you want it to be more like two balls connected by a tube with a consistent width throughout its length. That is, rather than a single ball that has just been stretched (resulting in a width that gets wider towards the center of the form).
Always think more form than shape. It really does come down to how you think influencing what you end up drawing, because you're still drawing the same kind of mark regardless - but if you push yourself to believe that what you're drawing is 3D, the care with which you draw it and how you choose to use it will be different than if you simply felt that it was a flat line on a piece of paper. 3D forms are closed loops, they're solid. 2D shapes don't concern themselves with those kinds of limitations.
Focus on how those segments flow - this comes back to using sausages over stretched balls, because a sausage can carry a nice smooth sense of flow, whereas a stretched ball tends to feel more stiff and rigid.
Make sure the ends of your sausage segments overlap/intersect - and define/reinforce that intersection joint with a contour curve.
Here are a bunch of notes/demonstrations I've written in the past that cover the use of this technique:
https://i.imgur.com/NQBBjvo.png
https://i.imgur.com/pPyrBgB.png
https://i.imgur.com/rQvn6kV.png
https://i.imgur.com/I6nDc7l.png
https://i.imgur.com/9kAp6JZ.png
Aside from that, just one other thing! I could be wrong, but it does feel like you're drawing a bit small, which could be reducing the amount of control you have when drawing these teeny tiny sausages. Try and take advantage of more of the room you've got on the page - you don't need to cram a bunch of drawings onto the same page, you can give them each their own.
Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
TheDrawingChicken
2018-07-25 04:59
https://imgur.com/a/7RH0UCU
Lesson 4.
Uncomfortable
2018-07-25 20:50
You're actually doing a pretty good job here. There are a number of things that I want to draw your attention to, but as far as construction goes, you're applying the principles quite well and are demonstrating a good eye for how objects are broken down into simpler forms, and how to build them back up.
One issue I noticed that stands out to me quite a bit is how you're applying line weight very much as though it is something that must be applied everywhere. The way you're applying line weight suggests that you're approaching this process as though you're laying down your construction, and then going over it with a "cleanup pass" to replace the drawing with a series of heavier strokes. This is not correct.
In addition to this, your linework when adding weight tends to be much less confident, and shows a far greater degree of wobbling and stiffness than your initial construction lines, which results in the overall drawing losing its sense of confidence.
Line weight should not be applied everywhere. Along with being a subtle addition that speaks more to a viewer's subconscious (rather than grabbing them by the shoulders and shaking them while shouting "I AM A HEAVY LINE" in their face), weight should be applied only to help clarify specific overlaps. That means that while you may have a long stroke, you may only want to apply additional weight to a limited section of it. This also applies to ellipses, where instead of applying weight to the whole ellipse, you may only want to push a small portion of it. I mention and demonstrate this in the form intersections video in lesson 2.
I think that's the biggest issue right now. As for more minor ones, whenever you've got two forms that cut into each other, it really helps a lot to draw a contour line right along where they intersect one another, as demonstrated here.
Also, you're making good moves in how you're approaching drawing legs, but you should try constructing them using simple sausage forms as segments. I've done a bunch of demos for other students showing this, which you can see here:
https://i.imgur.com/rQvn6kV.png
https://i.imgur.com/9kAp6JZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/pPyrBgB.png
https://i.imgur.com/NQBBjvo.png
Sausage forms (basically two balls connected by a flexible tube) are great because they can really capture gesture and flow. In some of these you've used stretched ball-forms, which are going in the right direction, but they end up feeling much more stiff because it's harder to have them bend and flow naturally. That's how you end up with segments that feel rigid and too straight. You can also place a contour curve right where those two sausage forms intersect (like my previous point) and that'll usually be more than enough to nicely reinforce the illusion of 3D form (without having to add additional contour lines along the lengths of the segments).
This concept applies pretty nicely to animal drawing too, as shown here.
Anyway, you're doing a good job. Keep an eye on the points I've mentioned here - especially your use of line weight - and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
graczielle
2018-07-26 03:21
Hello there! Hope you're a having a good week so far. Here's my fourth lesson exercise.
https://www.deviantart.com/graczielle/gallery/66916110/drawabox-Lesson-4
Uncomfortable
2018-07-27 02:24
There are a number of areas where you're doing well, but there are a few issues I need to point out to ensure that you continue heading in the right direction as you practice.
I'm noticing that your use of contour curves is a little hit and miss. That is, when they reach the edge, sometimes it feels as though you may not have put enough thought behind them, as they come out too shallow and don't quite push the illusion that they're hooking around and continuing along the other side. This makes the form, which we know to be rounded, to flatten out and form a sharper edge instead.
At the same time as the previous point, I see you drawing a great many contour lines on the same form. I often see these two points together - a student will lean towards quantity over quality, thinking less about the execution of each contour line but compensate by adding more. This doesn't really work - overdoing the contour lines tends to stiffen an object, while also not quite creating the illusion of rounded form you're after. Conversely, one or two very well executed contour curves can make an entire form feel solid and rounded, conveying a strong sense of volume without contributing much stiffness.
It's not as obvious initially, but once I noticed it and went back to your other drawings, I started to see it everywhere - you're not drawing each form to completion. You're stopping your lines where a form is overlapped and hidden by another. It's really important that you draw each form completely, focusing on making each individual one feel solid and believable. Drawing the entire form also helps us to understand how they exist in relation to their neighbours. Keep in mind that these drawings are not intended to result in something pretty - they will if done well, but that's not really our goal. Each drawing is just an exercise in learning to understand 3D space, and form, and how it can all come together to create complex objects that feel tangible and believable. Yes, neglecting to draw certain lines will make them look cleaner, but it will also take away from the core of the lesson. Long-term, the expectation is that by doing these exercises, you will come to believe completely in the illusion you are creating with these drawings, as the first step of being able to convince someone else that what you've drawn is 3D, is to believe in that lie yourself. Once you reach that point, you'll understand the forms as they exist in space at a level that you won't need to draw the additional lines, because you'll already know that they're there. But that is a long ways off.
While your approach to legs has yielded some decent results, it's quite inconsistent across the various drawings, leading to it being a little bit hit-and-miss. Try constructing the legs using simple sausage forms - that is, basically two balls connected by a flexible tube. These can convey a strong sense of flow and rhythm while maintaining a solid form. You can also draw a contour line right where the sausage forms intersect with one another, which is usually more than enough to convey the solidity of the whole form (saving you from having to draw a bunch of contour lines along their lengths). Here are a few places where I've demonstrated this approach to other students: https://i.imgur.com/rQvn6kV.png, https://i.imgur.com/9kAp6JZ.png, https://i.imgur.com/pPyrBgB.png, https://i.imgur.com/NQBBjvo.png
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do another four insect drawings, taking what I've said here into consideration. Also, something I should have mentioned a while ago - deviantART is a rather inconvenient platform when it comes to being able to move through a gallery for the purposes of a critique. It'd be a huge help to me if you could upload your images to imgur, as it allows me to scroll through the whole set at full size very easily, and to jump back and forth between images as I formulate my response. Imgur doesn't require you to make an account, so it's the image host most students use.
graczielle
2018-08-03 02:50
Hi! Thanks for the critique. I didn't realize I did what I'd done until you pointed them out. Here are the four insect drawings. https://imgur.com/a/ruS6aZh
Uncomfortable
2018-08-03 23:25
Definitely better, though in the future I do not want you to draw your construction in a different colour and then attempt to do a "clean-up" pass. I actually talk about this back in the video for form intersections in lesson 2 at around 16 minutes in. We're not ever replacing the lines from our construction - we are emphasizing how certain forms overlap, but that is all. There should be no mental separation between the construction lines and your final result - they are one and the same, and this way of looking at them forces you to show a lot more respect to your underlying construction, and to plan and prepare each mark with consideration for what it contributes to the overall exercise.
At the end of the day, as I mentioned in my previous critique, each drawing is just an exercise to better develop your understanding of space and how these forms relate to one another to create more complex objects. What you've accomplished in with your black lines ends up being largely irrelevant (being that it's more focused on creating a pretty final result), and also causes you to treat the construction in a way that is going to benefit you less in the long run.
The end goal is to have such a deeply ingrained grasp of construction, such a thorough understanding of form and space that you'll see each form you draw - partial or complete - as being something that exists beyond just the lines you've drawn on the page. This will allow you to eventually bypass most of your construction because that understanding will be internalized - but that is a long ways away.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the next lesson, but be sure to keep in mind what I've mentioned here.
waveclaw
2018-08-21 15:29
Time is \~41 hours and duration was over 3 months: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qC8lchCuvL1sirYdxQm4xL_FltOcTm16
As usual the resources folder contains all source images.
There is a demos folder. This contains my versions of the lesson, demos and old demo work. Included there are some of the homework critiques for other users that I redid on my own.
Due to moving back to the continent in 8 days this will be the last of the items I have to use google drive to share. Also due to moving I will not have access to do any remedial work, challenges or lessons for about a month.
I had to compromise on which images to include in the homework. I note major problems like proportion control, confusing textures, bad shading or the 'general outlines' you hated so much from the prior lesson 3.
There was no consistency in my results throughout this homework. This required rework or two to three attempts at each image. This involves a large amount of time,, frustration and anxiety. I really would have preferred a small smaller set of lessons here with more feedback in between. I feel that even with community support I went off the rails a lot.
On a positive note, lesson 4 filled out my current Draw-a-box sketchbook (plus one page.) Lesson 1 through 4 fits in a single Arteza 8.5x10 drawing pad at 50 sheets, both sides. This does not include the practice sheets, remedial or practice homework. Those ate most of a different 50 sheet Meede 9in x 12in tablet and two Staedler 0.5mm fine liner pens.
Uncomfortable
2018-08-22 01:37
You've actually done a pretty good job here, especially as far as construction goes. I can see a variety of signs that you're demonstrating a much better grasp of 3D space than you had previously, as well as a keener eye when it comes to observation of specific features and details that you may not have picked up on previously. There is also considerable growth over the set (assuming the pages are in chronological order) - even when you drew smaller, you showed a much better ability to manipulate your forms in your later pages.
There are a few things that I want to point out that are areas where you can improve on things the most.
Your linework at times still retains a certain stiffness to it, where your lines feel hesitant. This results in a bit of wavering here and there, as well as a tendency to get a little scratchy with your lines. For example, looking at the ladybug page, on the bottom right you've got a nice construction of the adult, though the lines do detract from it due to how the lines feel like they're hairy. In the central in-flight drawing, the open shell is drawn more cleanly, though the hesitation results in a little but of wobbling. It's still much better there, but can definitely be improved as you focus on executing your marks with more confidence.
When it comes to filling in areas with solid black, a brush pen can be an invaluable tool - but no matter what you use, it's important that those spaces be filled in completely (rather than leaving little slivers of white, which tend to diminish the overall drawing. Also on the same topic, even if something has the colour black in your drawing, that doesn't necessarily mean you should be filling it in - solid blacks are best saved for the areas where cast shadows are added strategically to help separate your forms. It's also used in more advanced approaches to texture, as explored in the texture challenge notes. Different areas on an object will have a "local colour" - this is best ignored, and treated as though the whole object is a single flat colour. That way we can focus more on bringing out the major forms, as well as the subtler textural forms.
Proportion in places is a little weak, but you noticed that yourself (especially on that wasp).
Speaking of the wasp, when it comes to texture and detail, you've got a great combination here of taking your time with the abdomen, and rushing way too much on the thorax. Don't scribble, don't let the urge to let your hand "figure things out" take over (because it won't - our muscle memory is great for executing simple commands like drawing smooth, confident lines, but detail and texture requires careful observation and forethought). Texture is really about spending 90% of your time observing, and 10% actually drawing. I think in the majority of these drawings, your detail work comes mostly from what you remember after either giving cursory glances at your reference image, or what's more likely - studying them closely all at once, then settling in to draw for an extended period of time. Our memories are pretty bad, so we need to get used to making only a couple marks before looking back. You've improved, as I mentioned before, on this note when it comes to your overall construction - but there's a ways to go on the more minute details.
I definitely do get the desire for smaller chunks of homework with more feedback, but there's really no way around that. This is the only way I can balance this many students, and keep the pay wall low enough to be accessible to most. What you save in terms of the cost of a structured lesson plan with feedback, you pay with your own fortitude - which itself isn't a bad thing, as I've found those who push on through find themselves in a much better place relative to their drawing-related anxieties.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congrats on heading back to North America!
waveclaw
2018-08-22 07:17
Thank you. And as always, thank you for the feedback.
I hope to get at least some practice in on 'confident line work' during the move.
A piece of paper and a pen. A few minutes at at time.
phoenixboatshoes
2018-09-08 04:42
In retrospect, I think I was heavy handed with line weight because initially I was heavy handed and rigid in general: https://imgur.com/a/ibOkwby
I won't subject you to my wild study diagrams/ notes! Thanks very much for your feedback as always :)