In the beginning it was struggle to get the placement of the body parts right. Usually I misjudged the position of the head which led me to reposition it or just start all over again. At the end I managed to position it more correctly at the first attempt.
I hate to do this, but I'm going to have to ask you to post this again on April 1st. You've received 4 critiques from me this month already, and it's getting a bit out of balance with your pledge. I understand that you had that many submissions because you'd already completed a great deal of work before pledging, but I need to place limitations on that kind of thing so I don't have students who attempt to get all of their work reviewed within a month or two.
Here I am again! I have done some extra pages by now. The small break allowed me to experiment a little with other things, so I got the motivation to start hammering away again.
Really, really nice work. Your constructions are fantastic, you do a great job of capturing the solidity of the forms, and the relationship between them. You're also achieving a good deal of fluidity - where sometimes being overly firm on construction can result in some stiffness (especially in the limbs), you've got a nice, relaxed and confident approach that establishes a good balance.
On that note however, I did actually really like how the hedgehogs' spines came out. I suppose it's a matter of communicating just how prickly they are, versus other animals who certainly are quite furry, but shouldn't read as though they're made up of razorblades.
Anyway, keep up the fantastic work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Massive thanks for the critique and notes. I'll will work on my approach for fur in the future. Today I noticed that the lesson in general really worked. I tried to draw a dog irl and immediately knew how to approach it and construct it quickly and properly.
So this was quite a struggle from start to finish. I spent a lot of time on this (perhaps about 40 hours) but one thing I will say about these lessons is they're slowly helping me get over my fear of working directly in ink - which can be read as 'fear of making mistakes'. I still do sit and stare at the reference for a long time and do a lot of ghosting before making a mark on the page - but I suppose speed will come with time and practice.
A couple of observations about this lesson (that you've probably heard before).. I found it challenging to start by drawing in the 3 main unconnected body masses, because if their size, proportion or distance from each other were off - then the whole animal would look off no matter what you do from that point (fox #5, polar bear #2). But I do think I improved at getting those masses right as the lesson went on.
Also, animal faces are hard! If you get that face/snout shape even slightly wrong it completely changes the personality and makes it look like a different animal.
You've got a lot of great overall construction going on here, and that's definitely a huge strength. As a result, the majority of your drawings' bodies look quite believable and solid, and despite having all kinds of complexities they still retain the sort of firm structure that keeps them from flattening out.
I do want to touch on one of the things you mentioned about proportion though. It's true that proportion is quite the struggle, and it takes a lot of time and practice to train one's eye. That said, while proportion that is drastically off target can certainly make things look weird, there's a pretty fair margin of acceptable error. Proportion itself is not what makes a drawing look off or not. The bigger contributing factor would be the solidity of the construction.
One thing I noticed - and it's likely because of that fear of making mistakes - is that you're not drawing through any of your ellipses here. While this has less impact in areas like the torso, it's a pretty big deal for the head. Your cranial masses end up a little bit uneven and misshapen, and this undermines some of that solidity. Overall you're still doing a good job, but it's definitely a significant factor.
One area you definitely do need work on is your head constructions. In case you haven't given it a watch, do check out the animal head construction video. If you have watched it, give it another watch, as there certainly is a lot to absorb.
Most important is to really get your head around the contour lines. That is, how they ought to be flowing over the surfaces of the forms you're drawing. Right now while the forms themselves feel fairly solid on their own, when you add contour lines (especially with the heads) they tend to feel off and rushed.
You also need to ease up on that fur texture. Take a look at some of the demos from the lesson page's other demos section, like this raccoon. Focus on putting a few well designed tufts in key areas along the silhouette, rather than trying to cover whole sections. Less is definitely more in this case.
Here's a couple pages of notes/demos focusing on the head construction issues:
I'd like you to do two more pages of animal drawings. Focus particularly on their heads, and don't delve into any detail. You are definitely allowing yourself to get more than a little distracted by texture, and I think that's contributing to some of the sloppiness we see in some of the smaller (but still important) constructional forms of the heads.
This is definitely a considerable improvement. You're clearly doing a much better job grasping the planar nature of form, and how the various parts of the head fit together like a puzzle. It will certainly take some practice to apply that understanding to the usual detailed drawings (where some of the construction will have to be visualized more than drawn explicitly), but you're definitely going in the right direction.
Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one (where you'll likely find this emphasis on construction quite useful).
There's a mix of things here - some signs of solid constructions, others some issues that undermine the solidify of your forms. Rather than writing it all out, I redlined some of your drawings and wrote out some notes by hand: https://i.imgur.com/gB866ck.png
Overall points to be aware of:
Remember that the initial masses represent actual forms (especially the rib cage). You get it right in some cases, but draw it smaller in others. Pay attention to your reference - it's true that we can't see the bones themselves, but we can see hints and suggestions of how far they extend if we look closely enough. In general though, ribcage is about 1/2 the torso, pelvis is about 1/4. Pretty much the same kind of proportions you see on a human.
When drawing legs, we do go for more 2D, flowing, gestural shapes - but make sure your shapes are closed, and don't draw them loosely. Focus on pushing that sense of flow, and exaggerate your curves to that end.
Your contour curves tend to be kind of wasteful - you're not putting a lot of attention towards each individual one, and compensate by drawing many. They're really not necessary, just focus more on each individual mark you put down.
Mind how your forms connect to one another, especially in terms of head construction. Watch, or rewatch as the case may be, the head construction video from the lesson. There's a lot of information there, so it can take a few watches to absorb it all. Also review the demonstrations in the "other demos" section of the lesson.
Overall, you're making progress, but I think you might be getting a little ahead of yourself and breaking away from the methodology and approaches detailed in the lesson, demonstrations and videos. Since I see you applying certain parts quite well, and other parts less so, it seems to me like it might be more an issue of forgetting parts of the lesson over an extended period of time. It's often quite helpful to review the material several times over.
I'd like you to do another 4 pages of animal drawings. This time, stay away from any detail that goes beyond construction. Focus all your time on establishing forms that feel solid and three dimensional, and most importantly, spend more time observing your reference carefully. Only put down a couple marks at a time before looking back at your reference and refreshing your memory.
You're definitely showing some improvement, and better use of the material in the lessons. Going through it a second time was certainly worthwhile.
I did identify some things worth noting, which you'll find in these notes. I do believe there is plenty of room for growth and improvement, but I think it'll be a good idea for you to move onto the next lesson. Once you've made it through the rest of the material, you may want to see how your understanding of construction as it applies to animals has changed by trying this lesson again. (and of course, up until then it's still worthwhile to practice this stuff now and again - but I mean, upon completing the rest of the curriculum, you may want to try this lesson again and submit it for critique once more).
One other thing worth stressing, which I point out in those redline notes, is that I'm noticing some stiffness to your linework. It looks to me like you may have fallen off the bandwagon of practicing lesson 1/2 stuff as a regular warmup routine, so you should probably get back on that. It'll help loosen you up, and ensure that you're executing your marks with the kind of confidence that keeps them smooth and clean.
You've got some good constructions here, and I can see that you're striving to apply a lot of the principles from the lesson in various places. I also see, however, that you have a tendency to get a little distracted at times. I think that might be part of why you were working on this on and off over four months. This allowed you to forget things here and there, and made some of your work a little more haphazard. You end up skipping steps, or breaking certain cardinal rules (no pencil for the homework you submit!)
I think looking at the gazelle drawings is probably the most productive, as there's a good balance of strong construction, alongside some important issues worth touching upon. Here's some notes I wrote on the page.
The point on the left is important - at every point in a drawing, it's very easy to slip into ignoring the construction you've built up thus far and to draw strictly from observation from there (as though you're simply transferring the 2D information from your photo reference to the 2D drawing). Instead, you absolutely must hold to your understanding of 3D space, and the forms that make up the object you're constructing. Following the surfaces of those forms is very important - you've got to grasp how the lines you're drawing move in 3D space at all times.
Given that your lesson 4 work was submitted back in November, there's a good chance that you may have missed some important new content I added. This includes:
Now, I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings. Doesn't matter what kind of animals, as long as you're following the lesson strictly (no pencils, no drawings focusing on a pretty result, none of that). I only want you to focus on construction with no detail or texture whatsoever. Make sure you're drawing from high resolution photo references, so you don't end up oversimplifying areas where there's not enough information to work from. If necessary, you can draw from multiple reference images to fill in missing detail.
Before you do that however, review the lesson material. Rewatch the videos, and go through the demos again. Try not to spread this out over too long a period, and make sure the material is always fresh in your mind. I think there's a lot of signs that you understand it and apply it well, but you simply got rusty and distracted halfway through.
Thank you for your reply. I will take a closer look again at the lesson and watch the extra stuff you got for this topic. This time i'm going to really focus on the right construction and not rely on guessing.
Do you recommend going back a lesson or just restart the whole lesson 5 because i took such a long time off?
While I do think that it's definitely important that you keep doing exercises from the first two lessons as warmups, but I don't think it's necessary for you to step back a lesson. Just be sure to review all of the material for lesson 5 carefully.
You start off.. pretty terribly. Early on, there's clear issues even in your capacity to wrap contour lines around 3D forms, as well as in your ability to observe your reference carefully enough to make informed decision with each and every form or shape you add.
That said, you progress considerably through the set, and by the end you're considerably further along. Your head constructions especially show a much greater understanding of form and the constructional method, and you seem to have taken demonstrations more to heart.
I ended up redlining two of your drawings - one from early on, which I feel was among your weakest, and one from much later, which I felt was one of your strongest.
Now, there certainly is still room for improvement. A couple areas that need work include the way you draw legs, your general observation (you still need to be looking at your reference more frequently, and tying each mark you draw to a particular feature you're trying to capture - and again, your legs tend to be very simplistic), and of less importance, your approach to drawing fur (I also touch on this a bit in the redline notes).
One other thing I want you to keep in mind is that when we draw, we're drawing complete, closed forms and shapes on the page. That's the big difference between how you're drawing your legs, and how I draw them. You draw a collection of lines that end up sharing edges, so you really end up with some closed shapes, and some open ones that have been attached. When I draw legs, I draw individual overlapping shapes, and then define their joints with a contour line. This results in a much more fluid, flowing leg that also manages to maintain its illusion of 3D by use of the contour line at the end.
Keeping all of this in mind, I'd like you to do four more pages. Two pages of animal drawings, focusing purely on construction with no detail or texture whatsoever, followed by two pages that follow the same process, but where you will be allowed to add further detail (once you feel your construction is solid enough). A common problem in students is that they will look ahead to how they're going to handle the detail, and end up half distracted as they tackle the construction. Removing detail from the equation allows them to refocus their efforts.
Thanks, I knew that was going to be be a bit brutal on those first drawings ha. A few things:
I guess I was a little unsure how exactly to do the legs; I just looked back at the videos, in some areas I see you do the overlapping shapes, but in other places (mainly that first tiger) you seem to do more how I was doing it with the simpler shapes. But anyway, I'll be sure to use overlapping sausages on my additional drawings.
With that horizontal contour line on the hawk I think I wanted to follow that brow ridge (which curves differently than the cranium), but ended up doing something halfway between that and what a normal contour line would be which clearly wasn't successful. That's one thing I've noticed, sometimes I have this conflict about sticking to the forms I've already put down vs. what I'm seeing in the reference, if that makes any sense.
I was trying not to put too much emphasis on fur, but I did notice I get rather impatient with it, like I'll start out being more deliberate with tufts but as I go it gets more random. I'll try to be more cognizant of that in the future.
There's considerable improvement here in your application of the constructional method, with the harpy eagle coming out especially well. The horse's head and torso were also quite successful.
One thing you'll want to continue contending with is the matter of complexity. Remember that while we leverage simplification quite a bit, this is not so our final results are vastly simplified relative to what we're drawing. For example, take a look at your lioness' paws. They are definitely extremely simple, and an actual lion's paw is going to have a lot more to it. Of course, in your reference the paws were not visible, but there's plenty of other reference you could be using to fill in those gaps.
Similarly, while your fox has come along quite well (and is definitely stronger than the lioness), there are still areas where certain strong characteristics of the reference don't come through in your drawing. Take a look at this. As you can see in the comparison, there are combinations flows that tend to be more complex in the reference, which you've oversimplified in your drawing. While we want to simplify the forms we use for construction, we still want to capture the same rhythms and flows that are present.
Anyway, all that is to say that you've got plenty of room for improvement. You have however made considerable strides, and simply need more practice (as one would expect). I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. I think you might find that the next one will force you to think a little differently about these particular topics, as geometric forms make us deal a lot with taking smooth, mechanical curves and breaking them down into boxier approximations before rounding them off at the end.
The time has finally come! After a long month, including a break, I can finally submit lesson 5. My apologies for the lighting, the place I usually use to take photos was occupied. https://imgur.com/a/xh6t49N Let me know if you need to clarify something.
Proportions ended up being key to making a puma distinguishable from a boar. I found skeletons to be quite useful in establishing where the meat sacks go in less well defined reference photos.
Some notes:
Birds: there's an extra page of toucan as I felt like I could have done better with it on a second try.
Puma: turned out to be my weakest point. I couldn't get neither the head nor the body correct. Cats are pretty agile and muscle-y, however all references depicted these stubby legs -_- uh...
Random animals: I feel like that was the point I was able to let loose. Perhaps it's because there were less "rules" to abide by. Either way, it was fun :3
Hybrid: all hail the majestic Giraffoar! Another fun one to make, although I did struggle to pick the more interesting parts of the animals I've studied, since aside from leg length and muzzles, it's the same 3 blobs.
So you've got a variety of levels of success here. Some of your constructions are a bit catastrophic, and some - specifically your honey badgers, squid and frill-necked lizard - are coming along quite well. It shows progress over the whole set, but there are a few issues that I feel need to be addressed.
The biggest thing I want to hammer home is that in your mind, things are very.. curvy. This is pretty normal to see at this point, and it's an issue we usually address more in the next lesson (because we suddenly jump from organic objects to geometric), but I want to try and hammer it home here instead.
The thing about a curving line is that it's vague. An arbitrary curved line can be seen as representing a range of combinations of segmented straight lines. If you were to take a curve, it could be represented in an approximate way by, say, three straight lines - and you could have any number of combinations of three such lines represent it with equal degrees of success.
In that sense, a curved line is like a vague statement when it comes to visual communication.
Instead, we want to be much more firm in our statements - so, we try and regard our rounded forms as being separated into planes, and when we draw lines along those surfaces, we also break them up into straighter segments. Those segments won't always be completely straight, but in breaking them up in this way, we'll be making them less vague.
So, for instance, when you're carving out the eyesocket of an animal's head, you're usually just drawing an ellipse, which is quite vague. Instead, you want to carve it with a series of straighter lines, showing how the different planes of the head that you're cutting into are oriented in space.
In certain places, I also saw cases where your observation wasn't necessarily the best. The concept of being vague applies here as well. When you look at a reference, you want to identify the strongest, most distinct features (that is, lines, or orientations of certain forms, etc.) and then hinge your entire construction on them. It's not just a matter of placing a ball here, and a ball there - you need to think about how you need those masses to be oriented in order to best capture what it is you're trying to construct.
So, I drew a couple demos for you, along with notes and observations of your won work in relationship with the reference images: https://i.imgur.com/8f8BF2O.jpg
I also have this drama puma demo which I did a while back, since you had the a drawing from the same reference included in this set. It's not as clear as I'm doing more of this in my head through visualization than the kind of concrete construction I want to see from my students, but it may still help as I do leverage the idea of "thinking boxy" quite heavily.
I'd like you to do 5 more animal drawings, with the first two being a redo of the two demos I drew there for you (the toucan and roe deer's head). I'm glad that for the most part in this set, you focused on construction over detail - I want you to stick to that with these additional pages as well. Focus entirely on your forms and construction, don't include any detail or texture whatsoever.
Thank you for the feedback. For the 5 animals references, does it matter if the last 3 are full bodies or heads only and whether those are old animals or those I haven't tackled yet?
WAY better. The deer head is fantastic, the toucan is definitely an improvement. The chicken is pretty solid (though you're gonna want to work on how you lump those additional masses on - try and think of it more like you're taking a bunch of putty and like wrapping it around the object. It's gonna need some more wrap-around to feel more stable. Also you made the angle of that leg a little extreme so it feels off-balance.
The kangaroo is superb. Excellent construction, very three dimensional. The quokka's a bit shit though. Head's okay, arms/legs are weird and not particularly well observed.
All in all, you've made considerable progress and I'm really impressed by that kangaroo. You've got a ways to go, but you're on the right track and at this point it's just a matter of practice, and training your eye.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6. I think you'll find that it'll challenge you to go even further with this boxier manner of thinking, and it'll in turn have an impact on how you draw organic objects in the future.
You've done some really phenomenal work here. As I flipped through your pages, I tried to develop a mental list of things I could mention. Being less scribbly/zigzaggy when handling fur, starting with a smaller cranial ball when starting a head construction, and so on. There wasn't a lot, but there were a few things I figured I could scrounge up to make my critique worth a damn.
But as I moved through the set, you knocked down every point I was set to tackle. Further on in the set, you started dealing with smaller craniums and relied more on building forms up on top of that base, and you paid more attention to how you designed each tuft of fur, doing so with clear intent rather than trying to rely on a more subconscious pattern.
So, all in all, you've demonstrated a massive amount of improvement over this set, on top of the already strong grasp of the concept of construction that you started with. There's none of the issues I initially pointed out in regards to the previous lesson - you're focused on the individual forms and how they fit together, only giving texture and detail a thought once all of that is solid.
You're also leaving me with scraps to point out for myself, but I suppose that's a very good thing.
It's clear that you were struggling with that rattlesnake. You were very good to clearly call out the fact that its body has distinct planes to it, but I think it may have been worthwhile to tackle this with the branches approach from lesson 3 first, then impose the separation of planes on top of that.
Also, don't forget about the little feetsies. You clearly know how to construct them, and have done so with great results in plenty of places. But you've also got some cases where you left them somewhat.. nubby. The coatls, for example - the rest of them was really well done, so being left with mittens definitely takes away from it a bit (though you obviously did a close-up study of them, so my point is kind of moot - I'm trying really hard to nitpick!)
Aside from those minor points, you're doing extremely well. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one. I'm actually really interested in seeing how you'll tackle geometric objects. I know you've had prior experience with drawing, drawing portraits and figures and such, so being thrown into the ring with something unorganic may well be a very different experience!
By the way, I loved your hybrids. Those are really the big test for whether or not a student understands construction, as they force you to use everything you know about how the various parts of the animals sit in space.
Thank you for the wonderful critique, as always. I'm going to take a stab at the rattlesnake againtotally see what you're saying about the branch approach. And will do a few more animal heads focusing on the eye sockets.
Aah! I was just drawing, and I remembered something I meant to mention in my critique, but had forgotten to. It has to do with eye sockets. When drawing them, you're generally approaching them as being an ellipse. Instead of that, I want you to try constructing them as a more intentional, carved series of cut-segments. You can see me demonstrating this towards the bottom right of this demo I did for another student.
This forces you to consider how that socket exists as part of the 3D head construction, running those lines along the various planes that exist there. In turn, this helps make your eyes more believable.
There are definitely a number of things that we need to address here. To be completely honest with you, I get the feeling that you may not have given yourself a good enough change to read through all of the material and watch the videos carefully enough. You may have been a little too eager here, to jump in and draw some cool animals and in being so, you slipped up on a number of areas we've covered already in previous lessons.
You need to observe your reference images more, and draw less. That is to say that you're not taking the time you need to really grasp what you're looking at. You spend too much time looking away from your reference, and as a result, you draw from your memory rather than constructing your solid forms based entirely on what is actually present. Human memory is not designed for this. As soon as we look away, our brains try to throw away as much data as possible, simplifying everything as much as it can. What remains is a symbolic representation of what you had seen that just doesn't contain enough information. Over time as you do these kinds of studies, you'll rewire your brain to retain more important and pertinent information, but you are far from that point right now.
I can see that you're pushing yourself to think about construction and 3D forms, and that's great. Half the battle is, however, understanding how each form you add relates to the actual reference you're drawing from. For example, when you're laying in the rib cage mass, you have to of course figure out where the rib cage sits, how it's oriented, and how large it is. Without relating your forms back to the masses they're meant to represent, your constructions will feel stiff and unnatural.
You definitely need to work on your contour curves. Many of yours don't wrap convincingly as though they run along the surface of a rounded form - they tend to come out too shallow. Not all, you've got some that are alright, but this is definitely something that is hitting you hard. I strongly recommend utilizing the 'overshooting' method discussed in these notes
We talked a lot about how to approach the construction of legs in my critiques of your last lesson - you don't seem to be implementing any of that here. I particularly stressed the importance of placing a contour curve right at the joint, where two sausages connect to one another. In many of your constructions you're still putting contour curves on either side of them rather than at the joint. You're also not dealing with flowing sausage forms at all.
It is quite clear that you need to take a lot more time to process the information in the lesson, and to apply it. I'd like you to go back and do 8 more pages of animal drawings, once you've had the chance to go through the material again. Furthermore, I want you to do your drawings with no detail or texture, focusing entirely on construction. You are definitely getting distracted with the prospect of drawing something detailed, and that's at least part of what's causing you trouble.
You are vastly overthinking this, and your solution to dealing with the vast amount of visual information that faces you when looking at your reference image is to panic and draw more. What you should be doing in those situations is drawing less and taking more time to step back and think. This is something I mention in my previous critique, and as a whole, by and large there's no real signs that you're attacking these challenges in any sort of a fundamentally different way. I can see a few changes, but the key points about observation still stand.
So instead of just sending you back to do a bunch of more pages, I'm going to ask you to do one. Draw this goat. As you do so, I want you to take pictures of each individual stage of construction.
This will give me something a little deeper to critique, rather than providing the same comments which don't seem to be helping too much.
The handwriting gets a little cramped at times, so here are the major points (though you should still read through them on the image)
A ribcage is not a sphere - you should be keeping in mind how the masses reflect the parts of the body they're meant to represent. The ribcage of most, if not all mammals is usually around half their torso. I've mentioned this in a previous critique of your work.
Your contour curves do need work - they're not too far off, but there is a general sense that they're a bit sloppy and not quite conveying the impression that they run along the surface of the given form and actually wrap around it. We see this on the torso as well as on the cranial ball.
You're starting the legs quite low and neglecting the shoulder masses
When constructing sausages for the various sections of the legs, you're sometimes flattening the ends out somewhat. Try and picture the sausage forms as having a ball on either end, and try to capture that full curvature.
I can see that you're trying to think constructionally in regards to the head, and you're moving in the right direction but I think you need to review that video again (or maybe a few times, even drawing along with them to give yourself the chance to absorb the material a little better).
While these are the specific issues I'm seeing in your process, there are two overarching themes:
You're still struggling quite a bit with observation, likely spending more time drawing and not enough time looking at your reference. This results in a number of really significant mistakes (like the legs being all set at a strange angle relative to the body - though I'm assuming that once you made this mistake you decided to just stick with it, which I think was the right call).
I don't get the impression that you yet believe in the illusion you're creating. What we're drawing is of course just a series of lines and shapes on a flat page. Using them we're striving to fool our viewers into believing them to be solid, three dimensional forms that exist in a 3D space. Beginners will generally be rather aware of the fact that what they're drawing is all 2D, that they're creating this big lie - but what one needs to do in order to sell the illusion is to buy into it themselves. That's what all these little techniques and tricks are for. Drawing through forms, contour lines, construction, etc. It's all there to fool ourselves, to make it easier for us to buy into this lie. Of course these aren't techniques that we can use so directly in a proper final drawing. The point is that all of these drawings are exercises with the goal of getting you, the artist, to believe that what you're drawing is three dimensional. Once you do that, a lot of the subconscious benefits kick in - when you believe a ball you've drawn is actually a sphere, you'll find it unthinkable to draw a straight line across it - your mark will curve along that perceived 3D surface instead, because anything else would seem silly. You are not yet at this point, and need to keep pushing yourself to try and feel that the simple forms and exercises are solid and three dimensional. As you work through the various constructional stages of a drawing, work towards the impression that what you have on the page feels solid. Solidity and the illusion of form is not something you build up gradually over the course of a drawing as it comes together - it's something that is there throughout, and that has to be maintained (or will ultimately be lost).
One thing I'd like to ask is, how often do you do the exercises from lessons 1 and 2?
I want you to try the same exercise (focusing only on construction, taking photos at the end of each phase of construction) with this tiger.
Here's my critique for that drawing, along with a breakdown of how I would approach drawing that head. At this point between your initial submissions, your goat and your tiger, I think I've covered all of the major issues I've been able to find, and have invested enough time giving you materials to pull from. From here, it's going to be entirely on you to practice applying them, and most importantly reread what you've been given to allow yourself to gradually absorb it.
You are showing progress, but you have a lot of mileage to put in to properly internalize all of the lessons and critiques. With this kind of wealth of information, it's easy and more or less unavoidable that you'd latch onto a few points that were raised, and fail to give others the amount of attention they'd require.
So, I want you to take the next two weeks and do as many animal drawings as you can, using the information you've been given. Keep pushing yourself, especially when it comes to observation of proportions and how things like legs are posed, and give yourself as much time as you require with each individual drawing.
You can spend more than two weeks if you like - that's a minimum, the main focus being that you should only be submitting once through the month of July. This is both to ensure that you give yourself plenty of time, as well as to balance out the amount of time I've put into writing your critiques this past month.
I will be marking this lesson as complete. You are showing improvement in several areas (I especially liked this llama and this booby), but there are still a lot of areas that are going to require you to continue practicing this material. For the most part, it comes down to your proportions and your observational skills.
Moving onto the next lesson for now is probably the best road to take, as it will force you to sink or swim. Where the last three lessons have been a little more relaxed as far as observation and construction goes, the subject matter covered in lessons 6 and 7 really force you to pay careful attention to what you're drawing and punish you if you rely on memory over direct observation.
In addition to this, tackling the issues using a fresh subject matter may help you see the problems you're encountering from a new angle.
As I scrolled through the first half of your drawings up up to the jaguar, I could see signs that you were vaguely applying the principles of construction, but alongside that there was a lot of sketchy, vague behaviour, and generally skipping steps to jump into more complex forms without laying down the appropriate scaffolding and structure to hold them up.
It's a common problem, but in this case it wasn't in the usual way I tend to see from students. You showed a stronger grasp of 3D space, and a greater drive to block everything in with voluminous forms, but it was just that vagueness - where for example the jaguar's cranial ball wasn't fleshed out as a solid form, and where it was left floating within the eventual head (rather than having built up directly on top of the cranium to create something more solid).
I was pretty much ready to start drawing all over those pages, until I came across your camels. That's the point where your intriguing detour, your winding stroll, rejoined the main thoroughfare and perhaps to even better effect. Your wandering may have been worthwhile after all.
Your camels, komodo dragon and the wolf's head came out quite nicely. The other wolf drawing was alright as far as construction goes, though I thought at first that it was meant to be a warthog so your proportions around the head were definitely off.
You're doing quite well at this point, but that vagueness is something you're still going to want to combat. As you construct, it's important that you take the time to ensure that every form you put down feels solid and three dimensional at the end of each phase - don't put down something vague with the expectation that you'll solidify it further later on. Solidity is something that is maintained or lost - not found at a later point. Once lost, it is extremely difficult to reclaim (to the point that it's generally not worth trying).
Also, make sure that all your forms are firmly related to one another in some manner. That is to say, don't leave earlier constructional elements floating arbitrarily within others - for example, the neck on your hybrid, and its head. You risk ending up with areas that feel flatter because they may lack a proper basis in 3D space.
Now, to be 100% honest, while the risk is there to end up with things flattening out, yours aren't, because your sense of 3D space is developed well enough to the point that you believe in the illusion you're crafting. That is ultimately the goal, and what all of these drawings are for. Each drawing is an exercise to help train your belief in the lie you're peddling, and to develop your understanding of 3D space.
When doing these exercises, you must be careful not to skip steps - because then you're not doing an exercise, you're just drawing a pretty thing. The exercises are meant to serve a purpose, so it's a meaningful distinction.
Oh, one last thing - the contour curve directly in the midsection of the torso of your hybrid's got a pretty wide degree. It should probably be much flatter, if you consider the fact that based on the positioning of the rest of the body, that cross-section would be more or less flowing directly perpendicular to the angle of view (whereas that degree suggests it's slightly turned towards the viewer).
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but keep what I've mentioned here in mind. You'll find that lesson 6 and 7 are particularly unforgiving when it comes to skipping steps.
Thanks so much for your feedback. I noticed the sketchiness/ vagueness somewhat while I drew (and even more so the next day when I looked back on them), and the camels definitely felt like a turning point. My initial vagueness may have come from the fact that I have been starting to do digital painting lately (maybe a looser painting mentality is leaking into my line-drawing?), or because I've had less time to sketch and practice and am getting sloppy. I'm not sure, but I will definitely try and move away from that for future lessons. I'll be careful not to skip steps, and be more intentional and neat going forwards. Thanks again!
Here's my Lesson 5 homework, I struggled very hard with this lesson. This was by far the hardest lesson I've done so far but also the most fun! I apologize in advance for the terrible drawings you are about to see lol, I also included all my reference under every different animal.
It's not uncommon for students to struggle with this lesson, and frankly when you warned me about "terrible" drawings I took it at face value. I was pleasantly surprised when your work didn't quite fall to that standard!
While there's certainly room for improvement, you actually did a pretty fantastic job of applying the core principles of the lesson, and demonstrated a good deal of care and patience. What's most important is that these constructions lean towards feeling solid and believable. In some places proportions may be a little off, in others how you've gone about attaching volumes and masses to a body to fill areas out may not have worked out perfectly, but all in all you're making it very clear that you understand what you're aiming for, and you're heading in the right direction at quite a brisk pace.
As we move from your cats, to your foxes and into your deer, I can see a distinct trend towards being more and more mindful of your forms, how they all connect together, and how everything can be broken down. Where your cats' head constructions are a bit more rudimentary with more guesswork involved, your foxes and deer are considerably stronger in this area. You move to shrink your craniums and focus more on how the boxy muzzle connects to it - which is exactly the direction I would have pushed you in, had I only seen the cats.
I think your koala and kangaroo actually look remarkably successful despite both presenting unique challenges of their own. This shows that you're able to pivot on those core fundamentals of construction to approach entirely different kinds of animals. Rather than learning to draw any one thing, you're learning what binds them all together, and practicing the concepts that can be applied to a much broader extent.
There is one area where I feel like I should mention something more direct, as far as things to keep an eye on goes. It's the feet. From what I can see, they tend to receive less of your attention when it comes to analyzing how they break down into simpler forms. More often than not, your toes are more based on guesswork or direct observation, rather than observation followed with construction. As a result they have a tendency to feel like the weakest part of your drawings, and often feel somewhat flat. I know full well that you're able to do better in those areas, but that they simply haven't received enough of your attention.
Aside from that, really great work. Keep it up and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson. I definitely think lesson 6 will pose a new set of challenges for you, and you will definitely struggle somewhat - but I'm confident that you'll overcome them. Just remember that lesson 6 and 7 are considerably less forgiving when you try to eyeball details and features, and issues like what I mentioned in regards to your feet will certainly bite you.
Thank you for the feedback! Ill definitely make sure to give every part of my drawings 100% attention from now on
[deleted]
2018-07-06 17:57
Here's my lesson 5 homework submission. I really liked this one, though some types of animals were definitely much easier to construct than others. And I definitely struggled with hair textures whenever I attempted to apply them.
You've got a lot of fantastic stuff here. I especially love the work you did with your birds - you demonstrated an excellent grasp of construction there, and conveyed a strong sense of form and 3D space. I also noticed that you leveraged an interesting balance of understanding how what you were drawing existed as a series of flatter, more two dimensional (but considerably more gestural and expressive) shapes, while also keeping an eye on that illusion of form, and ensuring that your results did come out feeling solid.
I think the obvious challenge for you arose with head construction, especially when you were trying to draw the various cats. I noticed that things started to get much more cartoony, which usually suggests a shift away from looking continuously at your reference, and more at spending stretches of time largely working through the visual puzzle while relying primarily on your memory.
As I've probably covered in previous critiques and lessons, this tends to be a common weak spot, as our human memories are not designed to retain as much information as we need to do this effectively - at least, not until we've been able to rewire our brains to better sort through that wealth of data.
I noticed that when struggling with these head constructions, you had a tendency to drift away from the approach covered in the head construction video, especially in how you tackled your muzzle. In your ocelot, for example, you built out a basic box (in my demonstrations, I find it easier to start with a boxy form with its top edges more beveled, so as to add a few additional faces to the form). You also went on to draw within that box with curves that did not adhere closely enough to the previous form - meaning you were skipping steps in a way that undermined the solidity of the resulting drawing.
Also when it comes to eyes, you tend to skip on starting with a sphere. Doing so gives you something solid you can start wrapping things around, so it's immensely beneficial.
You may not have seen this, but a couple weeks ago I did a demo of a tiger head construction for a student, which I posted on the subreddit, patreon and discord. It should be helpful in this area.
Admittedly as you push through, I do see improvements with your heads, but it's still very much delving into a sort of cartoony style. The difference here is that where initially it seemed the kind of cartoony that was unintentional from relying too much on one's faulty memory, here it does seem distinctly intentional. That said, I wouldn't recommend applying any kind of stylistic interpretation when doing these lessons. You'll benefit most from figuring out how to accurately represent the objects you're drawing first - then you'll have far more control over how you apply those stylistic choices.
On the subject of fur, there are a couple things I want to suggest. I like that you're largely focusing your fur in key areas rather than covering the whole thing with scribbles. That's definitely a good first step. The second step is to control and design the individual tufts you're drawing, rather than relying on a sort of rhythmic zigzagging. If you look at the tiger head demo I linked above, you'll notice that I deal with the fur tuft by tuft. My goal is not to decide, "okay I want this whole edge to be furry," (which usually would result in going on auto-pilot). Instead, I decide where I want to add individual tufts of fur, and I think about each mark I put down. As soon as you slip into auto-pilot, your fur will start to pick up a rhythmic pattern that becomes very obvious and repetitive to viewers.
Resist the urge to zigzag or to scribble or sketch, and take the time to think through your marks.
The last thing worth mentioning is in regards to your hybrid. I usually don't comment on these - they're an excellent way to show if a student understands how to apply construction, but there's not usually any value in critiquing them (because the issues would be present in the other direct studies anyway). In this case, however, I think it's a strong example of where you get a little sloppy with your observation.
Even though it's meant to be a somewhat imaginative piece, it's supposed to be based on taking pieces of reference and merging them together by leveraging your understanding of form and space. Overall however, I get the impression that a lot more of this was informed more from your imagination, resulting in major components that don't feel plausible. One example of this that stands out most to me is how the torso is extremely rigid. It lacks any real sign of the kind of fluid solidity we see in the bison just a few pages up.
So, long story short, there's a lot of good, but there are a few points that stand out as being issues. I am going to mark this lesson as complete however - the next lesson will really put you through the ringer if you don't make a point of observing more carefully and consistently, or if you skip important constructional steps, so it should help you with some good old fashioned tough love.
So, keep up the good work, and keep these points in mind as you move onto the next lesson.
[deleted]
2018-07-07 22:39
Thank you for the very thorough feedback. Ill do my best to keep all of this in mind.
So it's definitely clear that this lesson was a struggle for you, but I can see some areas where you're demonstrating a grasp of at least some of the lesson material, so that's a good sign.
the first thing I want to say is that you need to put that brush pen away. When it comes to doing these lessons, the only situation where I recommend using a brush pen is when you need to fill in large shadow shapes (which is not an issue here). When it comes to line weight, it's extremely important that you add it using the same pen you've used to draw all the other lines. The reason is that this keeps you from accidentally adding incredibly thick lines that seem entirely out of place. Line weight is meant to be subtle, just enough for your subconscious to pick up on. The incredibly thick lines you've used in a number of these drawings only serves to flatten out your forms.
With that out of the way, some of the biggest issues lie with observation. In a number of these drawings there is the tell-tale sign that you're drawing a lot more from memory than from actually looking continuously at your reference image. A lot of students will make the mistake of mainly focusing their observation at the beginning - studying their reference carefully, then going off to draw what it is that they saw. This doesn't work out well as the moment you look away from your reference, your brain starts throwing away massive amounts of information, distilling it to that which is important to it. Keep in mind that your brain isn't interested in drawing an animal - it's interested in the fact that it saw an animal, that the animal was a predator. None of that has anything to do with proportion, construction, or really anything that is useful when drawing.
Now while drawings like the foxes, hen, goat, etc. demonstrate this to varying degrees (with some of those having fewer major observational errors and others having some more significant ones), the wolves are in another class of their own. It's entirely possible that you included the wrong reference images for those, but the drawings definitely don't match the ones you provided.
There are some features in your drawings that I do like, so it's worth mentioning them. In the eagle, I really appreciate the fact that you defined the contour ellipse where the eagle's neck connects to its body. This goes a long way to make its neck and torso relate to one another in a way that reinforces the solidity and believability of each form.
While you struggle with aspects of constructing heads (most people do, it's quite challenging), it's often very clear in most of your drawings that you understand that the muzzle is a separate and distinct connected form, in relation to the cranial ball.
There are of course a number of issues as well that are holding you back in a big way. A couple of them are as follows:
You often draw ribcages as a ball that don't occupy enough of the torso. Ribcages generally occupy about half the length of an animal's torso - that's pretty consistent, and even applies to humans. When laying in those forms, you need to always think how they relate to the masses they're representing in the reference image. You can't just be making these things up.
You have a tendency to draw legs as a single continuous and complex form. This contradicts the principle of constructional drawing (break things down into simple forms, then build them up step by step rather than jumping into complexity early). At the end of my critique for your lesson 4 work, I gave you a bunch of demos in how you can construct legs from sausage forms. I want you to apply that here.
There are other issues, but it's difficult to point them out directly on final images. What I ask you to do next will allow me to point out issues with greater precision. I will be asking you to redo this lesson, but not just yet. What I want you to do next is a single drawing.
Draw this wolf (I found a more complete, higher resolution version of one you included in your homework set). I want you to take photos at the end of each constructional step, and include them all in your next submission so I can see exactly how you're thinking through this problem.
[deleted]
2018-07-15 22:52
Before I do, I was hoping if you could clarify something with the masses that represent the ribcage and pelvis. Are these suppose to be 3D forms with an existing surface that influence the proceeding organic form, or just flat shapes that exist to help plan out and to be superseded by the organic form drawn ontop of them?
I'm glad you asked. Everything we draw represents a solid 3D form, and it's extremely important that you believe in the illusion you're creating in regards to that. No part of the drawing should ever be a flat approximation or plan of things. We're going full 3D from the very beginning, and trying to maintain that through the entire process.
[deleted]
2018-07-16 16:58
here you go, Don't expect this to be good, a lot of my unseen attempts for Lesson 5 often end up like this and I end up discarding them and trying again. My submission images are simply what I decided looked the best. The result is a storage of a ton of reused scratch paper dating back to lesson 3.
I'd like you to redo the lesson. I'd like you to start by drawing the same wolf again after looking over my demonstration (ideally I want you to follow along with it). Then I want you to do the full set assigned for this lesson, and then lastly I want you to do the wolf again. Both attempts at the wolf should include step-by-step photos as you've done this time.
I also don't want you to submit any sooner than August 1st.
Lastly, pay special attention to how you're drawing those contour curves - you may want to go back and specifically practice the organic forms with contour curves. Your contour lines are very stiff and uneven, and your degrees are off. As explained here, the degree of the ellipse or curve is important to demonstrate how that cross-section is oriented relative to the viewer in space.
[deleted]
2018-07-17 02:23
Thanks a lot for putting in so much time just for one student. I feel iniquitous for how much work you're doing for how little I'm giving.
It was difficult, but you've done a really fantastic job here. At every turn you've demonstrated a strong and continually developing grasp of all the major concepts this lesson touches upon. It's clear that you're able to discern how the various major forms that make up a given object sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another. Your various head studies show that you're able to take particular complex configurations and separate them into planes so as to construct them in as solid a manner as possible.
On top of that, you're also showing an awareness of the flow and gesture of these animals' poses - focusing so heavily on construction can easily result in a great deal of stiffness, and while I often suggest approaches that help with this, it tends to be a lot for students to absorb and apply all at once. You however have been drawing animals that convey a strong sense of life and motion, and are able to capture their weight without the associated stiffness.
Now, that isn't to say you don't have plenty of room for improvement - I think it's mostly a matter of working on your observational skills. You're doing great as is, but where things start to go askew, you're still maintaining a fairly believable construction, so it speaks to the fact that your ability to identify proportion and other matters specific to the reference image you're working from (before you actually move towards constructing what you saw or thought you saw) can certainly be improved. And it will be, with time and with practice.
I found it particularly amusing that the proportions on this big cat suggest that your observation was a little off - but frankly, I can't be sure. It's entirely possible that you were drawing a particularly fat specimen. Perhaps it's chasing a piece of cake.
The only other thing I wanted to mention was in regards to how you draw legs. There are a lot of cases here where you draw a very specific approach to drawing legs based on the reference you're working from. You often seem to be able to pull out which approach will be most effective on a case by case basis - and that's fantastic. There are however situations where the reference doesn't make this entirely clear for you, or where you're doing so a little more from your imagination, and you end up falling back to a less clear, and definitely less confident approach.
It's this "default" approach to legs that I want you to give some thought to. Personally, my default is to construct legs with sausages - that is, forms akin to two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Reason being that this allows me to convey a lot of flow and rhythm in how each segment's sausage curves.
What you don't want to do is try and capture the entire length of a leg (multiple segments) in a single complex form. You also don't want to capture the segments with forms that don't allow for a certain amount of flex. Stretched ovals for instance have a tendency of being in their nature quite stiff.
Looking at the coyote demo (actually, it was a wolf!), you'll see how I generally fall back onto these interpenetrating sausages, before dropping a contour line right at the point where they intersect to reinforce the joint. This tends to work pretty well no matter what kind of animal I'm drawing, so at the same time, if I'm piecing something together more from my imagination, I know I can fall back to that and it'll turn out solid.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You've done some fantastic work here, and should be proud of yourself. Keep it up.
[deleted]
2018-08-13 03:55
Lessson 5 I'd say I progressed in terms of proportions and accuracy of my subject. However I'm still inept at head construction and a lot of the time I feel like my work is just glorified symbol drawing.
I have noticed that some students (discord) tend to make studies of the skulls of their subject before drawing the head, while in contrast you tend to draw what you see on the surface outright. Do you think studying beneath the surface of the subject might help or is it nothing more than excessive overthinking?
Your proportions are getting better, but you're really hitting the nail on the head when you say you're basically doing a lot of glorified symbol drawing. That is, you have this continuous tendency to, when you have to deal with anything smaller than a certain limit, stop paying attention to your reference and start drawing from your imagination. This happens in the heads, where you're struggling, and it also happens on the feet.
In addition to this, I see clear areas where you're forgetting things you've been told previously, failing to apply techniques that have been covered, and so on. A couple examples include:
Drawing leg segments as sausages. You did this when following along with the wolf demo, but otherwise you reverted back to your own way of doing it, which tends to come out stiff.
The deer antlers should have applied some form of the branch exercise from lesson 3. You drew the silhouette of the antlers in one go, approaching an extremely complex shape all in one go rather than applying the basic principles of construction (start simple and build up from there).
You are however handling things like torsos, and the general relationships between these larger forms very well - they're feeling considerably more three dimensional. So, it seems like once things get smaller, you revert to ignoring your reference, ignoring the techniques in your toolbox.
It's not entirely abnormal, but it's something you need to really beat out of yourself. Like, put a rock in a sock and just start beating yourself whenever you do it (don't do that. please, i don't want to get sued). We tend to have this mental block that arises when we try to work really tiny, and it causes us to ignore everything we consciously know. We panic, and this causes us to revert. Every beginner faces it to some extent.
One solution is to draw even bigger, but that depends on whether or not it's sustainable. Or, you could even try doing focused studies on legs alone - I'm not sure how much I recommend this, as having the full context of the body is good, but you definitely have a block against really thinking through the forms involved in feet and toes.
A last point about the heads - as I mention in this tiger head demo, the head is like a puzzle. There's a lot of pieces that all need to fit together. When you construct your heads, you tend to focus only on the specific pieces you're trying to draw, and you ignore the spaces between. Don't leave your eye socket floating separate from your muzzle, cheekbone, etc. Find how they all fit together.
So, to summarize:
Your body/torso constructions are actually quite good.
Your brain shuts down when you deal with small things, like legs, feet especially, and heads.
Heads are puzzles. Don't rush in without all the pieces.
Throughout these lessons, you've been taught a number of techniques for tackling different kinds of problems - don't forget them. They're not specific to any one particular kind of object, but rather are ways one can try and handle certain kinds of constructional problems that can be found in all kinds of places. Keep them in your toolbox, and pull them out wherever appropriate.
As for your question, the problem doesn't have to do with your understanding of the skull, it's about observation. Studying the skull separately isn't necessarily going to help you pay attention to your reference where you aren't currently, so I wouldn't recommend that as a solution to this particular problem. It can be helpful, sure, but tackle one problem at a time.
Taking what I've said here into consideration, try your hand at however many pages you see fit, and try and work in some of those isolated studies of the areas that are giving you the most mental blocks.
[deleted]
2018-08-20 05:09
Lesson 5 I think the ultimate issue I have here when it comes to drawing symbolic heads and feet is not because they are small, but that sometimes I simply cannot simply discern the complexities of the form I'm looking at either because the fur obscures it(bears and canines) or the head itself is a weird topographic-like mass with rarely any clear discernible pieces(giraffes and goats), and as a result I resort to trying to get the shape of it instead, or just draw the forms I can see, this often leads to parts of the head being isolated/floating, or sometimes the sides of the head being blank aside for the base starting sphere.
It's true that fur has a tendency to make things more difficult, and this is a challenge we all face when drawing animals. That doesn't entirely account for the issues I was seeing however. As we practice, we learn to hone our observational skills, and we pick up on features that are present, but perhaps harder to notice. Ultimately what you need to understand about the body is present - and you need to trust and accept that it is, so you do not give up on identifying it early, and fall back to loose guesswork. This comes back to what I was suggesting in terms of size being a problem, in that it has a tendency to make students panic and lose focus, relying instead of guessing rather than observing carefully. They are different things that lead to the same kind of reaction in the student.
One valuable piece of advice is to make sure that the reference you use is as high resolution as possible. Less experienced students will struggle more when faced with low-res images, because the obfuscation of detail is even greater.
Also worth mentioning, your head constructions were still small, you just crammed a bunch into the same page. That's worth keeping in mind - with those constructions, you did not benefit from extra space to think through the spatial problems, as you did not give yourself any more.
That said, I think the advice about thinking of these constructions as 3D puzzles did help, as I do see considerable improvement on your heads. Your level of success varies from head to head, but I can see a better grasp of space and form (and how you're dealing with individual solid forms) as you piece them together. I especially liked the middle one on the top row, it felt very solid.
There is also an issue that is pretty consistent across all the heads. You have a tendency to draw the initial starting sphere way too big. As a result, you don't actually really treat it as though it's a part of the head construction, and instead seem to be stamping your heads on top of it and largely ignoring it.
The "cranial ball" as we call it is always the starting point for the head, and you can think of it as constituting a part of the skull. It does not contain the head, or wrap around it in any way. It is a basis on which the rest of the head is attached, as seen in the tiger head demo.
Another way to think about it is that if the neck were a sausage form (where sausages are two balls connected by a tube of consistent width), the cranial ball is the ball that sits at the end of the neck, like a nub. Keeping this in mind should help you really bring down its size relative to the overall head. If however you happen to draw it to be larger (especially when doing these isolated head studies), make sure you scale everything else to it as well. Don't feel like you HAVE to draw your heads small.
One of the things I noticed when it comes to how scale impacted your drawings was that when you work small, you can't really put as much focus or attention into the nature and design of the individual lines you're drawing. For example, take a look at your eye sockets. In the tiger demo, I show how the lines are to be drawn as though you are carving them into the ball with a knife. You think about each segment of this shape. You then go on to pop a nice, solid ball inside of the socket to constitute the eye, and build the lids around it.
Because you've drawn so small, it's orders of magnitude harder to be quite so intentional with such tiny lines. As a result, they end up being less "designed" and more approximate.
This is the same kind of thing that happens when dealing with feet. They're so small, so it's much harder - especially as a beginner - to even draw the forms you see in your reference with any kind of purposefulness or intent. So sure, it may be a little harder to identify which forms are present due to fur and other elements, but once you're able to make out the features that suggest where these forms connect to one another, it is still very difficult to draw them without your lines feeling clunky and unwieldy.
That isn't to say it's impossible - but rather that it's something you first need to get used to doing at a larger scale, and then gradually doing it at smaller sizes will get easier (as your pen control and pressure control also improves).
I did notice that in your legs, you still were hesitant when it comes to applying the segments-as-sausages thing that I've been raising time and time again. I can see what appears to be attempts, but I really want to emphasize that a sausage is just two balls connected by a tube. Your ends tend to round out more shallowly, and end up looking more like regular tubes.
That said, your legs are improving in certain ways, and are becoming more fluid and solid - but your feet are still mostly showing a need to work on your observational skills more than anything else.
Now, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You've been grinding away at this for quite some time, and you have shown improvement, though you have a long way to go. I think that the next lesson will actually help quite a bit, despite being an entirely different subject matter.
It'll help because it is both unforgiving when it comes to construction and drawing each form completely and with intent, and also because the features present in these "everyday objects" are not obscured in the way that animal parts tend to be - but they are as minute and can be just as overwhelming.
I often see students being put through the ringer by lesson 6, but coming out with a much better grasp of form and construction (which you are already working towards with some of those head constructions). It is likely the best decision in the interest of your improvement to have you move forward.
Remember that before tackling lesson 6 however, you should complete the cylinder challenge.
Also worth mentioning is that while I am asking you to move forwards, once you've completed lessons 6 and 7, you will be welcome to submit more animals for us to see how you'll have been able to apply what you'll have learned.
So you definitely start out with some struggles. That pelican looks like it's been addicted to heroin for a decade and doesn't know how it's still alive. You continue to struggle through a number of these, but once you hit your second attempt at the pig, I start to see some real improvement. You're showing a greater awareness of the various sections of the animal's legs (for example you neglected the pelican's thigh altogether), and it overall feels considerably more solid. It's not perfect, but it feels like it's actually three dimensional, and you're no longer getting so caught up in detail and texture, and are instead focusing on your actual forms and construction.
The following horse is... interesting. I'm seriously curious about what the original reference is, and what the hell is going on with that back leg. Overall though, this is the peak of one issue I see also present in the previous pig - how you're approaching drawing the segments of the legs.
Right now you're drawing them each as stretched ovals. This results in them being very bulgy, as well as rather stiff. Instead of stretching ovals or balls, I want you to apply the same methodology we used for insects - constructing the legs using sausage forms. These are basically just two balls connected by a single tube of consistent width. These can be much more flexible and gestural, and show a much greater sense of flow. The segments of animals' legs generally have a rhythm to them - one segment will flow in one direction, and the next segment will double back, and so on. This allows us to capture that in a much smoother manner.
When drawing this oryx, you definitely show a considerable improvement with how you're dealing with legs. You're not quite using sausages, but you are showing a serious decrease in the michelin-man style bulginess, and once again your use of form feels very solid, like it did with that pig.
Now, obviously heads are a weak point - though the oryx isn't too bad. The main issue is that you're meant to connect these forms together. You've got a starting point - the cranial ball, which can also be considered as the "nub" at the end of the neck. And you actually attach forms to it, with an awareness of where they intersect.
The head is a lot like a 3D puzzle - it gets cut up into pieces, but they all fit very snugly together. So rather than thinking of things like eyes as being stickers that just float somewhere on this loosely defined form, you want to make that eye socket "snap" into place, amongst all the other forms around it. For example, the cheek bone, the brow ridge. You want that eye socket to be carved into the skull, not as a random circle, but as a series of lines that each individually cut in one clear direction along the surface of the form.
Looking at your head constructions does suggest that you didn't pay much attention to the head construction video in the lesson (maybe you forgot it was there). It is clear that you were struggling with a lot throughout this lesson though, so I don't mind that so much - because you did improve considerably on how you were approaching the bodies as a whole, and have shown a great deal of growth.
So you're doing a good job, but you're not quite there yet. I'd like you to rewatch that head construction video, and I'd also like you to take a look at these two demonstrations:
Tiger Head Construction - look at how everything fits together, how we start with a ball and attach other forms to it, and how the eye socket is carved before popping an eyeball in there and wrapping eyelids around it.
Wolf Construction - a more general demo that shows how to use sausages for the legs, a bit about head construction, and other useful general information.
I want you to do 4 more animal drawings, and I don't want you to go into any detail or texture whatsoever. One bird and three quadrupeds. Make sure you review any relevant information in the lesson before starting them, and ensure that when you do start, that the information is fresh in your mind.
It's definitely a step in the right direction, and this one is the best of the lot, both in head and body. Overall though your linework is still pretty hesitant and uncertain, especially with the head. When you're not sure of how to approach something, you have a tendency to panic, and that's where your linework gets sketchier and more stiff. You need to get used to thinking through every mark you put down and considering what each one is going to contribute to your drawing, regardless of how sure you are that it's the right mark to put down.
As for heads, watch how big you make that initial cranial ball. On your last two pages, you drew it way too big, and it didn't leave a whole lot of room for the rest of the forms you went on to attach.
While I think you're probably okay to move on, I want you to draw a few heads each day for a few days, and then do two more for me. Don't rush on this - give yourself a chance to learn from each attempt, and don't try and do them all at once. The time in between attempts can be as valuable as the time actually spent drawing them.
Nooooope. You're not following my instructions. The bit about the 3D puzzle is super important - you've got to make the pieces fit together, and think about how the eye socket, which is not just a simple ellipse, fits against the cheek bone and how this all sets against the initial cranial ball.
This one was your best from this set, so I did my redlining on it. Try another three. I ain't lettin' you go til you show an understanding of all the major points of head construction. I don't expect perfect work, but I need to see that you understand the concepts.
Aside from that first one, you're still drawing the initial cranial ball way too big, and it's making your head constructions weirdly bloated, like you're compensating by making everything else relatively small.
The teeth on that first page are completely flat and don't actually take 3D space into consideration, and you haven't even drawn the mouth opening onto the side plane of that boxy muzzle. You can do much better than this, you're just not really thinking about it.
Your puzzle-sections seem to be pretty arbitrary, like you're not really paying attention to where the animal's eye socket would sit.
Your eyelids don't wrap around the eyeballs like they're 3D objects - you're drawing flat lines.
You're letting that belief in the fact that the forms you're drawing are 3D dimensional slip away from you, and so while parts of your constructions do feel 3D, you're still leaving major areas flat and formless.
I know you're going to cry your little chicken tears, but I want you to do 25 head constructions. I want the 1st, 10th and 20th to all be attempts at replicating the tiger head demo I showed you earlier.
Do not submit any sooner than September 8th. I don't want you to rush and try to get this over with, because the more you try and get to lesson 6, the sloppier you get. You can do this, you just need to focus on what you're trying to accomplish, rather than trying to get things done.
Nice work! I think you're demonstrating a well developing grasp of form and construction with these drawings. This is demonstrated best of all by the fact that your last drawing - the hybrid - did not devolve into a horrible mess. It's actually an excellent test for whether or not a student has understood how to use forms as described in the lesson, because you're forced to piece things together from different reference images. It can be quite overwhelming, and it forces one to go beyond just drawing what they see. It requires them to draw what they understand. And while there's plenty of room for growth, you demonstrated that you absolutely understand how to break these different references down into their principle forms, and then rebuild them as you please.
There were issues in the set here and there - largely with proportions, as well as your approach to drawing legs (which I could see you experimenting with, which is always great). Proportions are obviously something that will improve as you continue to train your observational skills, but for the legs I want you to focus on constructing the segments of the legs using simple sausage forms. As shown in this wolf demo, you can see how I use sausages (basically two balls connected by a tube) to construct each segment, reinforcing them with a single contour curve right at the point where they intersect. These kinds of forms are great for showing the back-and-forth rhythm legs often have, and can capture a good sense of gesture and flow. In your experimentation, you were gradually moving towards this, but still had a tendency to flatten out the ends of your segments, or making them more complex in other ways. At their core, they're just sausages. You can then go on to add additional forms on top of this sausage structure afterwards, but that's effectively how you should start.
When it comes to heads, I think you're absolutely moving in the right direction. You're paying attention to how the various parts of the head fit together, and that is definitely paying off. I really try and encourage students to think of the head as a sort of three dimensional puzzle - with many different pieces that all interlock as shown here.
As for your question about feathers, I'd handle it the same way I'd tackle any texture (which I elaborate on in the texture challenge): I'd focus not on outlining the elements of the texture themselves, but rather on the shadows they cast. The beauty of shadows is that they're affected by light - if light shines directly on a shadow, it'll be obliterated. Similarly, if many shadows come together, they will merge into a single continuous shape. This allows us to imply that forms exist without ending up with all of the visual noise that comes from drawing each and every one of them. Here's a quick example of how I would approach feathers.
In addition to the shadow thing, I'd also pay attention to the silhouette of the form on which I'm adding a feathery texture. The silhouette is the first thing the eye registers, so any of the irregular bumpiness that comes from layered feathers will immediately be picked up if it's present there.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto lesson 6.
Uncomfortable
2018-03-18 18:36
Old thread got locked, those of you who are eligible for private critiques can submit your work here.
AAARRN
2018-03-20 20:28
I think I finished it. If i isn't enough to draw more please let me know.
https://imgur.com/gallery/olsA4
In the beginning it was struggle to get the placement of the body parts right. Usually I misjudged the position of the head which led me to reposition it or just start all over again. At the end I managed to position it more correctly at the first attempt.
Uncomfortable
2018-03-20 23:26
I hate to do this, but I'm going to have to ask you to post this again on April 1st. You've received 4 critiques from me this month already, and it's getting a bit out of balance with your pledge. I understand that you had that many submissions because you'd already completed a great deal of work before pledging, but I need to place limitations on that kind of thing so I don't have students who attempt to get all of their work reviewed within a month or two.
AAARRN
2018-03-21 12:37
Ah I see. No problem. I will post it in April then!
AAARRN
2018-04-01 17:11
Here I am again! I have done some extra pages by now. The small break allowed me to experiment a little with other things, so I got the motivation to start hammering away again.
https://imgur.com/gallery/7EFYg
Uncomfortable
2018-04-01 19:08
Really, really nice work. Your constructions are fantastic, you do a great job of capturing the solidity of the forms, and the relationship between them. You're also achieving a good deal of fluidity - where sometimes being overly firm on construction can result in some stiffness (especially in the limbs), you've got a nice, relaxed and confident approach that establishes a good balance.
One area where I do believe you could use some advice is with fur. Here's some notes on how you're approaching it vs how you may want to try changing things. Also, this demo from the lesson page may also help.
On that note however, I did actually really like how the hedgehogs' spines came out. I suppose it's a matter of communicating just how prickly they are, versus other animals who certainly are quite furry, but shouldn't read as though they're made up of razorblades.
Anyway, keep up the fantastic work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
AAARRN
2018-04-08 15:33
Massive thanks for the critique and notes. I'll will work on my approach for fur in the future. Today I noticed that the lesson in general really worked. I tried to draw a dog irl and immediately knew how to approach it and construct it quickly and properly.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-08 15:34
That's great to hear!
MegaMikeNZ
2018-04-05 21:42
So this was quite a struggle from start to finish. I spent a lot of time on this (perhaps about 40 hours) but one thing I will say about these lessons is they're slowly helping me get over my fear of working directly in ink - which can be read as 'fear of making mistakes'. I still do sit and stare at the reference for a long time and do a lot of ghosting before making a mark on the page - but I suppose speed will come with time and practice.
A couple of observations about this lesson (that you've probably heard before).. I found it challenging to start by drawing in the 3 main unconnected body masses, because if their size, proportion or distance from each other were off - then the whole animal would look off no matter what you do from that point (fox #5, polar bear #2). But I do think I improved at getting those masses right as the lesson went on.
Also, animal faces are hard! If you get that face/snout shape even slightly wrong it completely changes the personality and makes it look like a different animal.
OK anyway, here you go. Look forward to your feedback https://imgur.com/a/esqcb
Uncomfortable
2018-04-07 03:49
You've got a lot of great overall construction going on here, and that's definitely a huge strength. As a result, the majority of your drawings' bodies look quite believable and solid, and despite having all kinds of complexities they still retain the sort of firm structure that keeps them from flattening out.
I do want to touch on one of the things you mentioned about proportion though. It's true that proportion is quite the struggle, and it takes a lot of time and practice to train one's eye. That said, while proportion that is drastically off target can certainly make things look weird, there's a pretty fair margin of acceptable error. Proportion itself is not what makes a drawing look off or not. The bigger contributing factor would be the solidity of the construction.
One thing I noticed - and it's likely because of that fear of making mistakes - is that you're not drawing through any of your ellipses here. While this has less impact in areas like the torso, it's a pretty big deal for the head. Your cranial masses end up a little bit uneven and misshapen, and this undermines some of that solidity. Overall you're still doing a good job, but it's definitely a significant factor.
One area you definitely do need work on is your head constructions. In case you haven't given it a watch, do check out the animal head construction video. If you have watched it, give it another watch, as there certainly is a lot to absorb.
Most important is to really get your head around the contour lines. That is, how they ought to be flowing over the surfaces of the forms you're drawing. Right now while the forms themselves feel fairly solid on their own, when you add contour lines (especially with the heads) they tend to feel off and rushed.
You also need to ease up on that fur texture. Take a look at some of the demos from the lesson page's other demos section, like this raccoon. Focus on putting a few well designed tufts in key areas along the silhouette, rather than trying to cover whole sections. Less is definitely more in this case.
Here's a couple pages of notes/demos focusing on the head construction issues:
https://i.imgur.com/4VLVTte.png
https://i.imgur.com/kHgVBmJ.png
I'd like you to do two more pages of animal drawings. Focus particularly on their heads, and don't delve into any detail. You are definitely allowing yourself to get more than a little distracted by texture, and I think that's contributing to some of the sloppiness we see in some of the smaller (but still important) constructional forms of the heads.
MegaMikeNZ
2018-04-09 20:42
Thanks for your notes. As prescribed, here are a couple more pages; no detail, with an emphasis on head construction. https://imgur.com/a/mMax8
Uncomfortable
2018-04-09 23:52
This is definitely a considerable improvement. You're clearly doing a much better job grasping the planar nature of form, and how the various parts of the head fit together like a puzzle. It will certainly take some practice to apply that understanding to the usual detailed drawings (where some of the construction will have to be visualized more than drawn explicitly), but you're definitely going in the right direction.
Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one (where you'll likely find this emphasis on construction quite useful).
dda0
2018-04-09 07:48
Hi, here is my submission.
Cheers!
Uncomfortable
2018-04-09 23:37
There's a mix of things here - some signs of solid constructions, others some issues that undermine the solidify of your forms. Rather than writing it all out, I redlined some of your drawings and wrote out some notes by hand: https://i.imgur.com/gB866ck.png
Overall points to be aware of:
Remember that the initial masses represent actual forms (especially the rib cage). You get it right in some cases, but draw it smaller in others. Pay attention to your reference - it's true that we can't see the bones themselves, but we can see hints and suggestions of how far they extend if we look closely enough. In general though, ribcage is about 1/2 the torso, pelvis is about 1/4. Pretty much the same kind of proportions you see on a human.
When drawing legs, we do go for more 2D, flowing, gestural shapes - but make sure your shapes are closed, and don't draw them loosely. Focus on pushing that sense of flow, and exaggerate your curves to that end.
Your contour curves tend to be kind of wasteful - you're not putting a lot of attention towards each individual one, and compensate by drawing many. They're really not necessary, just focus more on each individual mark you put down.
Mind how your forms connect to one another, especially in terms of head construction. Watch, or rewatch as the case may be, the head construction video from the lesson. There's a lot of information there, so it can take a few watches to absorb it all. Also review the demonstrations in the "other demos" section of the lesson.
Overall, you're making progress, but I think you might be getting a little ahead of yourself and breaking away from the methodology and approaches detailed in the lesson, demonstrations and videos. Since I see you applying certain parts quite well, and other parts less so, it seems to me like it might be more an issue of forgetting parts of the lesson over an extended period of time. It's often quite helpful to review the material several times over.
I'd like you to do another 4 pages of animal drawings. This time, stay away from any detail that goes beyond construction. Focus all your time on establishing forms that feel solid and three dimensional, and most importantly, spend more time observing your reference carefully. Only put down a couple marks at a time before looking back at your reference and refreshing your memory.
dda0
2018-04-10 03:44
Thank you!
dda0
2018-04-23 20:59
4 more pages as you instructed.
Going through the lesson again helped a lot.
Uncomfortable
2018-04-24 20:26
You're definitely showing some improvement, and better use of the material in the lessons. Going through it a second time was certainly worthwhile.
I did identify some things worth noting, which you'll find in these notes. I do believe there is plenty of room for growth and improvement, but I think it'll be a good idea for you to move onto the next lesson. Once you've made it through the rest of the material, you may want to see how your understanding of construction as it applies to animals has changed by trying this lesson again. (and of course, up until then it's still worthwhile to practice this stuff now and again - but I mean, upon completing the rest of the curriculum, you may want to try this lesson again and submit it for critique once more).
One other thing worth stressing, which I point out in those redline notes, is that I'm noticing some stiffness to your linework. It looks to me like you may have fallen off the bandwagon of practicing lesson 1/2 stuff as a regular warmup routine, so you should probably get back on that. It'll help loosen you up, and ensure that you're executing your marks with the kind of confidence that keeps them smooth and clean.
Anyway, consider this lesson complete.
Shajitsu
2018-04-15 14:21
Just finished the lesson after on and off for 4 months.
I just pledged again for 10$ but it says it will start on 1st of may so if that is a problem i will post it again then. (My Patreon name is Shajitsu)
Greetings!
https://imgur.com/a/bAomS
Uncomfortable
2018-04-15 19:53
You've got some good constructions here, and I can see that you're striving to apply a lot of the principles from the lesson in various places. I also see, however, that you have a tendency to get a little distracted at times. I think that might be part of why you were working on this on and off over four months. This allowed you to forget things here and there, and made some of your work a little more haphazard. You end up skipping steps, or breaking certain cardinal rules (no pencil for the homework you submit!)
I think looking at the gazelle drawings is probably the most productive, as there's a good balance of strong construction, alongside some important issues worth touching upon. Here's some notes I wrote on the page.
The point on the left is important - at every point in a drawing, it's very easy to slip into ignoring the construction you've built up thus far and to draw strictly from observation from there (as though you're simply transferring the 2D information from your photo reference to the 2D drawing). Instead, you absolutely must hold to your understanding of 3D space, and the forms that make up the object you're constructing. Following the surfaces of those forms is very important - you've got to grasp how the lines you're drawing move in 3D space at all times.
Given that your lesson 4 work was submitted back in November, there's a good chance that you may have missed some important new content I added. This includes:
A detailed demo on how I go about constructing an otter
A video on head construction
Now, I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings. Doesn't matter what kind of animals, as long as you're following the lesson strictly (no pencils, no drawings focusing on a pretty result, none of that). I only want you to focus on construction with no detail or texture whatsoever. Make sure you're drawing from high resolution photo references, so you don't end up oversimplifying areas where there's not enough information to work from. If necessary, you can draw from multiple reference images to fill in missing detail.
Before you do that however, review the lesson material. Rewatch the videos, and go through the demos again. Try not to spread this out over too long a period, and make sure the material is always fresh in your mind. I think there's a lot of signs that you understand it and apply it well, but you simply got rusty and distracted halfway through.
Shajitsu
2018-04-17 19:58
Thank you for your reply. I will take a closer look again at the lesson and watch the extra stuff you got for this topic. This time i'm going to really focus on the right construction and not rely on guessing.
Do you recommend going back a lesson or just restart the whole lesson 5 because i took such a long time off?
Greetings
Uncomfortable
2018-04-17 21:15
While I do think that it's definitely important that you keep doing exercises from the first two lessons as warmups, but I don't think it's necessary for you to step back a lesson. Just be sure to review all of the material for lesson 5 carefully.
Shajitsu
2018-04-18 13:51
Yeah, i always do like 10-15 minutes of the "old" stuff as a warmup!
DynamicRaccoon
2018-04-28 17:58
Well I thought this was a bit rough in places, but here are my animals! References
Uncomfortable
2018-04-29 19:20
You start off.. pretty terribly. Early on, there's clear issues even in your capacity to wrap contour lines around 3D forms, as well as in your ability to observe your reference carefully enough to make informed decision with each and every form or shape you add.
That said, you progress considerably through the set, and by the end you're considerably further along. Your head constructions especially show a much greater understanding of form and the constructional method, and you seem to have taken demonstrations more to heart.
I ended up redlining two of your drawings - one from early on, which I feel was among your weakest, and one from much later, which I felt was one of your strongest.
Hawk
Elk
Now, there certainly is still room for improvement. A couple areas that need work include the way you draw legs, your general observation (you still need to be looking at your reference more frequently, and tying each mark you draw to a particular feature you're trying to capture - and again, your legs tend to be very simplistic), and of less importance, your approach to drawing fur (I also touch on this a bit in the redline notes).
One other thing I want you to keep in mind is that when we draw, we're drawing complete, closed forms and shapes on the page. That's the big difference between how you're drawing your legs, and how I draw them. You draw a collection of lines that end up sharing edges, so you really end up with some closed shapes, and some open ones that have been attached. When I draw legs, I draw individual overlapping shapes, and then define their joints with a contour line. This results in a much more fluid, flowing leg that also manages to maintain its illusion of 3D by use of the contour line at the end.
Keeping all of this in mind, I'd like you to do four more pages. Two pages of animal drawings, focusing purely on construction with no detail or texture whatsoever, followed by two pages that follow the same process, but where you will be allowed to add further detail (once you feel your construction is solid enough). A common problem in students is that they will look ahead to how they're going to handle the detail, and end up half distracted as they tackle the construction. Removing detail from the equation allows them to refocus their efforts.
FatFingerHelperBot
2018-04-29 19:20
It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users.
I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!
Here is link number 1 - Previous text "Elk"
^Please ^PM ^/u/eganwall ^with ^issues ^or ^feedback! ^| ^Delete
DynamicRaccoon
2018-04-29 20:24
Thanks, I knew that was going to be be a bit brutal on those first drawings ha. A few things:
I guess I was a little unsure how exactly to do the legs; I just looked back at the videos, in some areas I see you do the overlapping shapes, but in other places (mainly that first tiger) you seem to do more how I was doing it with the simpler shapes. But anyway, I'll be sure to use overlapping sausages on my additional drawings.
With that horizontal contour line on the hawk I think I wanted to follow that brow ridge (which curves differently than the cranium), but ended up doing something halfway between that and what a normal contour line would be which clearly wasn't successful. That's one thing I've noticed, sometimes I have this conflict about sticking to the forms I've already put down vs. what I'm seeing in the reference, if that makes any sense.
I was trying not to put too much emphasis on fur, but I did notice I get rather impatient with it, like I'll start out being more deliberate with tufts but as I go it gets more random. I'll try to be more cognizant of that in the future.
DynamicRaccoon
2018-05-04 13:12
Here are my additional pages! I added references to the previous album.
Uncomfortable
2018-05-05 00:47
There's considerable improvement here in your application of the constructional method, with the harpy eagle coming out especially well. The horse's head and torso were also quite successful.
One thing you'll want to continue contending with is the matter of complexity. Remember that while we leverage simplification quite a bit, this is not so our final results are vastly simplified relative to what we're drawing. For example, take a look at your lioness' paws. They are definitely extremely simple, and an actual lion's paw is going to have a lot more to it. Of course, in your reference the paws were not visible, but there's plenty of other reference you could be using to fill in those gaps.
Similarly, while your fox has come along quite well (and is definitely stronger than the lioness), there are still areas where certain strong characteristics of the reference don't come through in your drawing. Take a look at this. As you can see in the comparison, there are combinations flows that tend to be more complex in the reference, which you've oversimplified in your drawing. While we want to simplify the forms we use for construction, we still want to capture the same rhythms and flows that are present.
Anyway, all that is to say that you've got plenty of room for improvement. You have however made considerable strides, and simply need more practice (as one would expect). I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. I think you might find that the next one will force you to think a little differently about these particular topics, as geometric forms make us deal a lot with taking smooth, mechanical curves and breaking them down into boxier approximations before rounding them off at the end.
DynamicRaccoon
2018-05-05 13:49
Thank you!
LairaKlock
2018-05-06 20:20
The time has finally come! After a long month, including a break, I can finally submit lesson 5. My apologies for the lighting, the place I usually use to take photos was occupied. https://imgur.com/a/xh6t49N Let me know if you need to clarify something.
Proportions ended up being key to making a puma distinguishable from a boar. I found skeletons to be quite useful in establishing where the meat sacks go in less well defined reference photos.
Some notes:
Birds: there's an extra page of toucan as I felt like I could have done better with it on a second try.
Puma: turned out to be my weakest point. I couldn't get neither the head nor the body correct. Cats are pretty agile and muscle-y, however all references depicted these stubby legs -_- uh...
Random animals: I feel like that was the point I was able to let loose. Perhaps it's because there were less "rules" to abide by. Either way, it was fun :3
Hybrid: all hail the majestic Giraffoar! Another fun one to make, although I did struggle to pick the more interesting parts of the animals I've studied, since aside from leg length and muzzles, it's the same 3 blobs.
LairaKlock
2018-05-06 20:33
Most of the references that I've used for this. https://imgur.com/gallery/oKi8LWH
Well...most that I found.
Uncomfortable
2018-05-06 23:16
So you've got a variety of levels of success here. Some of your constructions are a bit catastrophic, and some - specifically your honey badgers, squid and frill-necked lizard - are coming along quite well. It shows progress over the whole set, but there are a few issues that I feel need to be addressed.
The biggest thing I want to hammer home is that in your mind, things are very.. curvy. This is pretty normal to see at this point, and it's an issue we usually address more in the next lesson (because we suddenly jump from organic objects to geometric), but I want to try and hammer it home here instead.
The thing about a curving line is that it's vague. An arbitrary curved line can be seen as representing a range of combinations of segmented straight lines. If you were to take a curve, it could be represented in an approximate way by, say, three straight lines - and you could have any number of combinations of three such lines represent it with equal degrees of success.
In that sense, a curved line is like a vague statement when it comes to visual communication.
Instead, we want to be much more firm in our statements - so, we try and regard our rounded forms as being separated into planes, and when we draw lines along those surfaces, we also break them up into straighter segments. Those segments won't always be completely straight, but in breaking them up in this way, we'll be making them less vague.
So, for instance, when you're carving out the eyesocket of an animal's head, you're usually just drawing an ellipse, which is quite vague. Instead, you want to carve it with a series of straighter lines, showing how the different planes of the head that you're cutting into are oriented in space.
In certain places, I also saw cases where your observation wasn't necessarily the best. The concept of being vague applies here as well. When you look at a reference, you want to identify the strongest, most distinct features (that is, lines, or orientations of certain forms, etc.) and then hinge your entire construction on them. It's not just a matter of placing a ball here, and a ball there - you need to think about how you need those masses to be oriented in order to best capture what it is you're trying to construct.
So, I drew a couple demos for you, along with notes and observations of your won work in relationship with the reference images: https://i.imgur.com/8f8BF2O.jpg
I also have this drama puma demo which I did a while back, since you had the a drawing from the same reference included in this set. It's not as clear as I'm doing more of this in my head through visualization than the kind of concrete construction I want to see from my students, but it may still help as I do leverage the idea of "thinking boxy" quite heavily.
I'd like you to do 5 more animal drawings, with the first two being a redo of the two demos I drew there for you (the toucan and roe deer's head). I'm glad that for the most part in this set, you focused on construction over detail - I want you to stick to that with these additional pages as well. Focus entirely on your forms and construction, don't include any detail or texture whatsoever.
LairaKlock
2018-05-06 23:32
Thank you for the feedback. For the 5 animals references, does it matter if the last 3 are full bodies or heads only and whether those are old animals or those I haven't tackled yet?
Uncomfortable
2018-05-06 23:41
The last 3 should be full body. It's up to you if you want them to be old or new, it doesn't matter to me.
LairaKlock
2018-05-09 22:35
And...done! I don't think I have anything to comment on. Will be waiting for your critique :3
https://imgur.com/gallery/1vj56eF
Uncomfortable
2018-05-09 22:44
From Discord:
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6. I think you'll find that it'll challenge you to go even further with this boxier manner of thinking, and it'll in turn have an impact on how you draw organic objects in the future.
BeccaRand
2018-05-31 15:19
Hi! Here are my animal studies:
https://imgur.com/gallery/fjsyPH6
As always, I have plenty of self-critique, but looking forward to your thoughts.
Uncomfortable
2018-05-31 21:14
You've done some really phenomenal work here. As I flipped through your pages, I tried to develop a mental list of things I could mention. Being less scribbly/zigzaggy when handling fur, starting with a smaller cranial ball when starting a head construction, and so on. There wasn't a lot, but there were a few things I figured I could scrounge up to make my critique worth a damn.
But as I moved through the set, you knocked down every point I was set to tackle. Further on in the set, you started dealing with smaller craniums and relied more on building forms up on top of that base, and you paid more attention to how you designed each tuft of fur, doing so with clear intent rather than trying to rely on a more subconscious pattern.
So, all in all, you've demonstrated a massive amount of improvement over this set, on top of the already strong grasp of the concept of construction that you started with. There's none of the issues I initially pointed out in regards to the previous lesson - you're focused on the individual forms and how they fit together, only giving texture and detail a thought once all of that is solid.
You're also leaving me with scraps to point out for myself, but I suppose that's a very good thing.
It's clear that you were struggling with that rattlesnake. You were very good to clearly call out the fact that its body has distinct planes to it, but I think it may have been worthwhile to tackle this with the branches approach from lesson 3 first, then impose the separation of planes on top of that.
Also, don't forget about the little feetsies. You clearly know how to construct them, and have done so with great results in plenty of places. But you've also got some cases where you left them somewhat.. nubby. The coatls, for example - the rest of them was really well done, so being left with mittens definitely takes away from it a bit (though you obviously did a close-up study of them, so my point is kind of moot - I'm trying really hard to nitpick!)
Aside from those minor points, you're doing extremely well. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one. I'm actually really interested in seeing how you'll tackle geometric objects. I know you've had prior experience with drawing, drawing portraits and figures and such, so being thrown into the ring with something unorganic may well be a very different experience!
By the way, I loved your hybrids. Those are really the big test for whether or not a student understands construction, as they force you to use everything you know about how the various parts of the animals sit in space.
BeccaRand
2018-06-06 13:57
Thank you for the wonderful critique, as always. I'm going to take a stab at the rattlesnake againtotally see what you're saying about the branch approach. And will do a few more animal heads focusing on the eye sockets.
Uncomfortable
2018-06-01 01:56
Aah! I was just drawing, and I remembered something I meant to mention in my critique, but had forgotten to. It has to do with eye sockets. When drawing them, you're generally approaching them as being an ellipse. Instead of that, I want you to try constructing them as a more intentional, carved series of cut-segments. You can see me demonstrating this towards the bottom right of this demo I did for another student.
This forces you to consider how that socket exists as part of the 3D head construction, running those lines along the various planes that exist there. In turn, this helps make your eyes more believable.
Leerxyz
2018-06-11 17:56
Hey, here is my lessons' homework: https://imgur.com/a/v7DV8aG
Uncomfortable
2018-06-11 20:27
There are definitely a number of things that we need to address here. To be completely honest with you, I get the feeling that you may not have given yourself a good enough change to read through all of the material and watch the videos carefully enough. You may have been a little too eager here, to jump in and draw some cool animals and in being so, you slipped up on a number of areas we've covered already in previous lessons.
Here are some things I observed in regards to some of your pages, but the the key takeaways are as follows:
You need to observe your reference images more, and draw less. That is to say that you're not taking the time you need to really grasp what you're looking at. You spend too much time looking away from your reference, and as a result, you draw from your memory rather than constructing your solid forms based entirely on what is actually present. Human memory is not designed for this. As soon as we look away, our brains try to throw away as much data as possible, simplifying everything as much as it can. What remains is a symbolic representation of what you had seen that just doesn't contain enough information. Over time as you do these kinds of studies, you'll rewire your brain to retain more important and pertinent information, but you are far from that point right now.
I can see that you're pushing yourself to think about construction and 3D forms, and that's great. Half the battle is, however, understanding how each form you add relates to the actual reference you're drawing from. For example, when you're laying in the rib cage mass, you have to of course figure out where the rib cage sits, how it's oriented, and how large it is. Without relating your forms back to the masses they're meant to represent, your constructions will feel stiff and unnatural.
You definitely need to work on your contour curves. Many of yours don't wrap convincingly as though they run along the surface of a rounded form - they tend to come out too shallow. Not all, you've got some that are alright, but this is definitely something that is hitting you hard. I strongly recommend utilizing the 'overshooting' method discussed in these notes
We talked a lot about how to approach the construction of legs in my critiques of your last lesson - you don't seem to be implementing any of that here. I particularly stressed the importance of placing a contour curve right at the joint, where two sausages connect to one another. In many of your constructions you're still putting contour curves on either side of them rather than at the joint. You're also not dealing with flowing sausage forms at all.
It is quite clear that you need to take a lot more time to process the information in the lesson, and to apply it. I'd like you to go back and do 8 more pages of animal drawings, once you've had the chance to go through the material again. Furthermore, I want you to do your drawings with no detail or texture, focusing entirely on construction. You are definitely getting distracted with the prospect of drawing something detailed, and that's at least part of what's causing you trouble.
Leerxyz
2018-06-17 20:27
Thanks for the feedback.
Here are the requested pages: https://imgur.com/a/F8P5Dxl
I guess I still have issues with drawing the limbs/face in the right proportion to their body.
Uncomfortable
2018-06-19 00:26
You are vastly overthinking this, and your solution to dealing with the vast amount of visual information that faces you when looking at your reference image is to panic and draw more. What you should be doing in those situations is drawing less and taking more time to step back and think. This is something I mention in my previous critique, and as a whole, by and large there's no real signs that you're attacking these challenges in any sort of a fundamentally different way. I can see a few changes, but the key points about observation still stand.
So instead of just sending you back to do a bunch of more pages, I'm going to ask you to do one. Draw this goat. As you do so, I want you to take pictures of each individual stage of construction.
This will give me something a little deeper to critique, rather than providing the same comments which don't seem to be helping too much.
Leerxyz
2018-06-20 19:54
Here are the steps of my drawing of the goat: https://imgur.com/a/sN1aY9b
Uncomfortable
2018-06-22 00:19
Here's my critique.
The handwriting gets a little cramped at times, so here are the major points (though you should still read through them on the image)
A ribcage is not a sphere - you should be keeping in mind how the masses reflect the parts of the body they're meant to represent. The ribcage of most, if not all mammals is usually around half their torso. I've mentioned this in a previous critique of your work.
Your contour curves do need work - they're not too far off, but there is a general sense that they're a bit sloppy and not quite conveying the impression that they run along the surface of the given form and actually wrap around it. We see this on the torso as well as on the cranial ball.
You're starting the legs quite low and neglecting the shoulder masses
When constructing sausages for the various sections of the legs, you're sometimes flattening the ends out somewhat. Try and picture the sausage forms as having a ball on either end, and try to capture that full curvature.
I can see that you're trying to think constructionally in regards to the head, and you're moving in the right direction but I think you need to review that video again (or maybe a few times, even drawing along with them to give yourself the chance to absorb the material a little better).
While these are the specific issues I'm seeing in your process, there are two overarching themes:
You're still struggling quite a bit with observation, likely spending more time drawing and not enough time looking at your reference. This results in a number of really significant mistakes (like the legs being all set at a strange angle relative to the body - though I'm assuming that once you made this mistake you decided to just stick with it, which I think was the right call).
I don't get the impression that you yet believe in the illusion you're creating. What we're drawing is of course just a series of lines and shapes on a flat page. Using them we're striving to fool our viewers into believing them to be solid, three dimensional forms that exist in a 3D space. Beginners will generally be rather aware of the fact that what they're drawing is all 2D, that they're creating this big lie - but what one needs to do in order to sell the illusion is to buy into it themselves. That's what all these little techniques and tricks are for. Drawing through forms, contour lines, construction, etc. It's all there to fool ourselves, to make it easier for us to buy into this lie. Of course these aren't techniques that we can use so directly in a proper final drawing. The point is that all of these drawings are exercises with the goal of getting you, the artist, to believe that what you're drawing is three dimensional. Once you do that, a lot of the subconscious benefits kick in - when you believe a ball you've drawn is actually a sphere, you'll find it unthinkable to draw a straight line across it - your mark will curve along that perceived 3D surface instead, because anything else would seem silly. You are not yet at this point, and need to keep pushing yourself to try and feel that the simple forms and exercises are solid and three dimensional. As you work through the various constructional stages of a drawing, work towards the impression that what you have on the page feels solid. Solidity and the illusion of form is not something you build up gradually over the course of a drawing as it comes together - it's something that is there throughout, and that has to be maintained (or will ultimately be lost).
One thing I'd like to ask is, how often do you do the exercises from lessons 1 and 2?
I want you to try the same exercise (focusing only on construction, taking photos at the end of each phase of construction) with this tiger.
Leerxyz
2018-06-24 17:34
This is my drawing of the tiger: https://imgur.com/a/HBGep03
I usually draw around 1 1/2 hours every day and do an exercise from lesson 1 or 2 for the first 20-30 minutes as a warm-up.
Uncomfortable
2018-06-24 20:31
Here's my critique for that drawing, along with a breakdown of how I would approach drawing that head. At this point between your initial submissions, your goat and your tiger, I think I've covered all of the major issues I've been able to find, and have invested enough time giving you materials to pull from. From here, it's going to be entirely on you to practice applying them, and most importantly reread what you've been given to allow yourself to gradually absorb it.
You are showing progress, but you have a lot of mileage to put in to properly internalize all of the lessons and critiques. With this kind of wealth of information, it's easy and more or less unavoidable that you'd latch onto a few points that were raised, and fail to give others the amount of attention they'd require.
So, I want you to take the next two weeks and do as many animal drawings as you can, using the information you've been given. Keep pushing yourself, especially when it comes to observation of proportions and how things like legs are posed, and give yourself as much time as you require with each individual drawing.
You can spend more than two weeks if you like - that's a minimum, the main focus being that you should only be submitting once through the month of July. This is both to ensure that you give yourself plenty of time, as well as to balance out the amount of time I've put into writing your critiques this past month.
Leerxyz
2018-06-25 16:28
Alright, will do so. Thanks for the critiques :)
Leerxyz
2018-07-11 18:34
Here are my workings over the last two weeks: https://imgur.com/a/JskoHhY
It was quite some effort but way more fun than the 250 box challenge!
I think I improved quite a bit but I still make a lot of errors.
I don't want to keep only drawing animals though.
Thanks for being so patient with me :)
Uncomfortable
2018-07-11 23:27
I will be marking this lesson as complete. You are showing improvement in several areas (I especially liked this llama and this booby), but there are still a lot of areas that are going to require you to continue practicing this material. For the most part, it comes down to your proportions and your observational skills.
Moving onto the next lesson for now is probably the best road to take, as it will force you to sink or swim. Where the last three lessons have been a little more relaxed as far as observation and construction goes, the subject matter covered in lessons 6 and 7 really force you to pay careful attention to what you're drawing and punish you if you rely on memory over direct observation.
In addition to this, tackling the issues using a fresh subject matter may help you see the problems you're encountering from a new angle.
jordan_dean
2018-06-13 04:53
It's been a while, got caught up in school! Lesson 5: https://imgur.com/a/rLC8fQd
Thanks!
Uncomfortable
2018-06-13 22:18
As I scrolled through the first half of your drawings up up to the jaguar, I could see signs that you were vaguely applying the principles of construction, but alongside that there was a lot of sketchy, vague behaviour, and generally skipping steps to jump into more complex forms without laying down the appropriate scaffolding and structure to hold them up.
It's a common problem, but in this case it wasn't in the usual way I tend to see from students. You showed a stronger grasp of 3D space, and a greater drive to block everything in with voluminous forms, but it was just that vagueness - where for example the jaguar's cranial ball wasn't fleshed out as a solid form, and where it was left floating within the eventual head (rather than having built up directly on top of the cranium to create something more solid).
I was pretty much ready to start drawing all over those pages, until I came across your camels. That's the point where your intriguing detour, your winding stroll, rejoined the main thoroughfare and perhaps to even better effect. Your wandering may have been worthwhile after all.
Your camels, komodo dragon and the wolf's head came out quite nicely. The other wolf drawing was alright as far as construction goes, though I thought at first that it was meant to be a warthog so your proportions around the head were definitely off.
You're doing quite well at this point, but that vagueness is something you're still going to want to combat. As you construct, it's important that you take the time to ensure that every form you put down feels solid and three dimensional at the end of each phase - don't put down something vague with the expectation that you'll solidify it further later on. Solidity is something that is maintained or lost - not found at a later point. Once lost, it is extremely difficult to reclaim (to the point that it's generally not worth trying).
Also, make sure that all your forms are firmly related to one another in some manner. That is to say, don't leave earlier constructional elements floating arbitrarily within others - for example, the neck on your hybrid, and its head. You risk ending up with areas that feel flatter because they may lack a proper basis in 3D space.
Now, to be 100% honest, while the risk is there to end up with things flattening out, yours aren't, because your sense of 3D space is developed well enough to the point that you believe in the illusion you're crafting. That is ultimately the goal, and what all of these drawings are for. Each drawing is an exercise to help train your belief in the lie you're peddling, and to develop your understanding of 3D space.
When doing these exercises, you must be careful not to skip steps - because then you're not doing an exercise, you're just drawing a pretty thing. The exercises are meant to serve a purpose, so it's a meaningful distinction.
Oh, one last thing - the contour curve directly in the midsection of the torso of your hybrid's got a pretty wide degree. It should probably be much flatter, if you consider the fact that based on the positioning of the rest of the body, that cross-section would be more or less flowing directly perpendicular to the angle of view (whereas that degree suggests it's slightly turned towards the viewer).
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but keep what I've mentioned here in mind. You'll find that lesson 6 and 7 are particularly unforgiving when it comes to skipping steps.
jordan_dean
2018-06-14 00:45
Thanks so much for your feedback. I noticed the sketchiness/ vagueness somewhat while I drew (and even more so the next day when I looked back on them), and the camels definitely felt like a turning point. My initial vagueness may have come from the fact that I have been starting to do digital painting lately (maybe a looser painting mentality is leaking into my line-drawing?), or because I've had less time to sketch and practice and am getting sloppy. I'm not sure, but I will definitely try and move away from that for future lessons. I'll be careful not to skip steps, and be more intentional and neat going forwards. Thanks again!
Zeon1xx
2018-06-15 00:02
Here's my Lesson 5 homework, I struggled very hard with this lesson. This was by far the hardest lesson I've done so far but also the most fun! I apologize in advance for the terrible drawings you are about to see lol, I also included all my reference under every different animal.
https://imgur.com/a/gYjzWTB
Uncomfortable
2018-06-15 18:43
It's not uncommon for students to struggle with this lesson, and frankly when you warned me about "terrible" drawings I took it at face value. I was pleasantly surprised when your work didn't quite fall to that standard!
While there's certainly room for improvement, you actually did a pretty fantastic job of applying the core principles of the lesson, and demonstrated a good deal of care and patience. What's most important is that these constructions lean towards feeling solid and believable. In some places proportions may be a little off, in others how you've gone about attaching volumes and masses to a body to fill areas out may not have worked out perfectly, but all in all you're making it very clear that you understand what you're aiming for, and you're heading in the right direction at quite a brisk pace.
As we move from your cats, to your foxes and into your deer, I can see a distinct trend towards being more and more mindful of your forms, how they all connect together, and how everything can be broken down. Where your cats' head constructions are a bit more rudimentary with more guesswork involved, your foxes and deer are considerably stronger in this area. You move to shrink your craniums and focus more on how the boxy muzzle connects to it - which is exactly the direction I would have pushed you in, had I only seen the cats.
I think your koala and kangaroo actually look remarkably successful despite both presenting unique challenges of their own. This shows that you're able to pivot on those core fundamentals of construction to approach entirely different kinds of animals. Rather than learning to draw any one thing, you're learning what binds them all together, and practicing the concepts that can be applied to a much broader extent.
There is one area where I feel like I should mention something more direct, as far as things to keep an eye on goes. It's the feet. From what I can see, they tend to receive less of your attention when it comes to analyzing how they break down into simpler forms. More often than not, your toes are more based on guesswork or direct observation, rather than observation followed with construction. As a result they have a tendency to feel like the weakest part of your drawings, and often feel somewhat flat. I know full well that you're able to do better in those areas, but that they simply haven't received enough of your attention.
Aside from that, really great work. Keep it up and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson. I definitely think lesson 6 will pose a new set of challenges for you, and you will definitely struggle somewhat - but I'm confident that you'll overcome them. Just remember that lesson 6 and 7 are considerably less forgiving when you try to eyeball details and features, and issues like what I mentioned in regards to your feet will certainly bite you.
Zeon1xx
2018-06-15 19:08
Thank you for the feedback! Ill definitely make sure to give every part of my drawings 100% attention from now on
[deleted]
2018-07-06 17:57
Here's my lesson 5 homework submission. I really liked this one, though some types of animals were definitely much easier to construct than others. And I definitely struggled with hair textures whenever I attempted to apply them.
Uncomfortable
2018-07-07 22:03
You've got a lot of fantastic stuff here. I especially love the work you did with your birds - you demonstrated an excellent grasp of construction there, and conveyed a strong sense of form and 3D space. I also noticed that you leveraged an interesting balance of understanding how what you were drawing existed as a series of flatter, more two dimensional (but considerably more gestural and expressive) shapes, while also keeping an eye on that illusion of form, and ensuring that your results did come out feeling solid.
I think the obvious challenge for you arose with head construction, especially when you were trying to draw the various cats. I noticed that things started to get much more cartoony, which usually suggests a shift away from looking continuously at your reference, and more at spending stretches of time largely working through the visual puzzle while relying primarily on your memory.
As I've probably covered in previous critiques and lessons, this tends to be a common weak spot, as our human memories are not designed to retain as much information as we need to do this effectively - at least, not until we've been able to rewire our brains to better sort through that wealth of data.
I noticed that when struggling with these head constructions, you had a tendency to drift away from the approach covered in the head construction video, especially in how you tackled your muzzle. In your ocelot, for example, you built out a basic box (in my demonstrations, I find it easier to start with a boxy form with its top edges more beveled, so as to add a few additional faces to the form). You also went on to draw within that box with curves that did not adhere closely enough to the previous form - meaning you were skipping steps in a way that undermined the solidity of the resulting drawing.
Also when it comes to eyes, you tend to skip on starting with a sphere. Doing so gives you something solid you can start wrapping things around, so it's immensely beneficial.
You may not have seen this, but a couple weeks ago I did a demo of a tiger head construction for a student, which I posted on the subreddit, patreon and discord. It should be helpful in this area.
Admittedly as you push through, I do see improvements with your heads, but it's still very much delving into a sort of cartoony style. The difference here is that where initially it seemed the kind of cartoony that was unintentional from relying too much on one's faulty memory, here it does seem distinctly intentional. That said, I wouldn't recommend applying any kind of stylistic interpretation when doing these lessons. You'll benefit most from figuring out how to accurately represent the objects you're drawing first - then you'll have far more control over how you apply those stylistic choices.
On the subject of fur, there are a couple things I want to suggest. I like that you're largely focusing your fur in key areas rather than covering the whole thing with scribbles. That's definitely a good first step. The second step is to control and design the individual tufts you're drawing, rather than relying on a sort of rhythmic zigzagging. If you look at the tiger head demo I linked above, you'll notice that I deal with the fur tuft by tuft. My goal is not to decide, "okay I want this whole edge to be furry," (which usually would result in going on auto-pilot). Instead, I decide where I want to add individual tufts of fur, and I think about each mark I put down. As soon as you slip into auto-pilot, your fur will start to pick up a rhythmic pattern that becomes very obvious and repetitive to viewers.
Resist the urge to zigzag or to scribble or sketch, and take the time to think through your marks.
The last thing worth mentioning is in regards to your hybrid. I usually don't comment on these - they're an excellent way to show if a student understands how to apply construction, but there's not usually any value in critiquing them (because the issues would be present in the other direct studies anyway). In this case, however, I think it's a strong example of where you get a little sloppy with your observation.
Even though it's meant to be a somewhat imaginative piece, it's supposed to be based on taking pieces of reference and merging them together by leveraging your understanding of form and space. Overall however, I get the impression that a lot more of this was informed more from your imagination, resulting in major components that don't feel plausible. One example of this that stands out most to me is how the torso is extremely rigid. It lacks any real sign of the kind of fluid solidity we see in the bison just a few pages up.
So, long story short, there's a lot of good, but there are a few points that stand out as being issues. I am going to mark this lesson as complete however - the next lesson will really put you through the ringer if you don't make a point of observing more carefully and consistently, or if you skip important constructional steps, so it should help you with some good old fashioned tough love.
So, keep up the good work, and keep these points in mind as you move onto the next lesson.
[deleted]
2018-07-07 22:39
Thank you for the very thorough feedback. Ill do my best to keep all of this in mind.
[deleted]
2018-07-15 15:48
Lesson 5.
Uncomfortable
2018-07-15 22:13
So it's definitely clear that this lesson was a struggle for you, but I can see some areas where you're demonstrating a grasp of at least some of the lesson material, so that's a good sign.
the first thing I want to say is that you need to put that brush pen away. When it comes to doing these lessons, the only situation where I recommend using a brush pen is when you need to fill in large shadow shapes (which is not an issue here). When it comes to line weight, it's extremely important that you add it using the same pen you've used to draw all the other lines. The reason is that this keeps you from accidentally adding incredibly thick lines that seem entirely out of place. Line weight is meant to be subtle, just enough for your subconscious to pick up on. The incredibly thick lines you've used in a number of these drawings only serves to flatten out your forms.
With that out of the way, some of the biggest issues lie with observation. In a number of these drawings there is the tell-tale sign that you're drawing a lot more from memory than from actually looking continuously at your reference image. A lot of students will make the mistake of mainly focusing their observation at the beginning - studying their reference carefully, then going off to draw what it is that they saw. This doesn't work out well as the moment you look away from your reference, your brain starts throwing away massive amounts of information, distilling it to that which is important to it. Keep in mind that your brain isn't interested in drawing an animal - it's interested in the fact that it saw an animal, that the animal was a predator. None of that has anything to do with proportion, construction, or really anything that is useful when drawing.
Now while drawings like the foxes, hen, goat, etc. demonstrate this to varying degrees (with some of those having fewer major observational errors and others having some more significant ones), the wolves are in another class of their own. It's entirely possible that you included the wrong reference images for those, but the drawings definitely don't match the ones you provided.
There are some features in your drawings that I do like, so it's worth mentioning them. In the eagle, I really appreciate the fact that you defined the contour ellipse where the eagle's neck connects to its body. This goes a long way to make its neck and torso relate to one another in a way that reinforces the solidity and believability of each form.
While you struggle with aspects of constructing heads (most people do, it's quite challenging), it's often very clear in most of your drawings that you understand that the muzzle is a separate and distinct connected form, in relation to the cranial ball.
There are of course a number of issues as well that are holding you back in a big way. A couple of them are as follows:
You often draw ribcages as a ball that don't occupy enough of the torso. Ribcages generally occupy about half the length of an animal's torso - that's pretty consistent, and even applies to humans. When laying in those forms, you need to always think how they relate to the masses they're representing in the reference image. You can't just be making these things up.
You have a tendency to draw legs as a single continuous and complex form. This contradicts the principle of constructional drawing (break things down into simple forms, then build them up step by step rather than jumping into complexity early). At the end of my critique for your lesson 4 work, I gave you a bunch of demos in how you can construct legs from sausage forms. I want you to apply that here.
There are other issues, but it's difficult to point them out directly on final images. What I ask you to do next will allow me to point out issues with greater precision. I will be asking you to redo this lesson, but not just yet. What I want you to do next is a single drawing.
Draw this wolf (I found a more complete, higher resolution version of one you included in your homework set). I want you to take photos at the end of each constructional step, and include them all in your next submission so I can see exactly how you're thinking through this problem.
[deleted]
2018-07-15 22:52
Before I do, I was hoping if you could clarify something with the masses that represent the ribcage and pelvis. Are these suppose to be 3D forms with an existing surface that influence the proceeding organic form, or just flat shapes that exist to help plan out and to be superseded by the organic form drawn ontop of them?
Uncomfortable
2018-07-15 23:34
I'm glad you asked. Everything we draw represents a solid 3D form, and it's extremely important that you believe in the illusion you're creating in regards to that. No part of the drawing should ever be a flat approximation or plan of things. We're going full 3D from the very beginning, and trying to maintain that through the entire process.
[deleted]
2018-07-16 16:58
here you go, Don't expect this to be good, a lot of my unseen attempts for Lesson 5 often end up like this and I end up discarding them and trying again. My submission images are simply what I decided looked the best. The result is a storage of a ton of reused scratch paper dating back to lesson 3.
Uncomfortable
2018-07-17 01:34
I spent about 2 hours on this critique, so there won't be much of a written component.
Here's the critique and here's how I would have tackled the wolf.
I'd like you to redo the lesson. I'd like you to start by drawing the same wolf again after looking over my demonstration (ideally I want you to follow along with it). Then I want you to do the full set assigned for this lesson, and then lastly I want you to do the wolf again. Both attempts at the wolf should include step-by-step photos as you've done this time.
I also don't want you to submit any sooner than August 1st.
Lastly, pay special attention to how you're drawing those contour curves - you may want to go back and specifically practice the organic forms with contour curves. Your contour lines are very stiff and uneven, and your degrees are off. As explained here, the degree of the ellipse or curve is important to demonstrate how that cross-section is oriented relative to the viewer in space.
[deleted]
2018-07-17 02:23
Thanks a lot for putting in so much time just for one student. I feel iniquitous for how much work you're doing for how little I'm giving.
Uncomfortable
2018-07-17 04:23
Oh! One last thing. I had posted this demo a while back. In case you didn't see it, it details the head construction process in greater detail.
spelling_expirt
2018-07-20 03:59
Here we go! This lesson was very hard on multiple levels.
https://imgur.com/a/pOvfBLY
I did most of these before your coyote demo--and I had put myself in the "stop here" camp, so I mostly focused on construction.
I wanted to say thanks once more for making this resource and pouring your energy into it. The community around DaB has been a great boon.
Uncomfortable
2018-07-20 22:44
It was difficult, but you've done a really fantastic job here. At every turn you've demonstrated a strong and continually developing grasp of all the major concepts this lesson touches upon. It's clear that you're able to discern how the various major forms that make up a given object sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another. Your various head studies show that you're able to take particular complex configurations and separate them into planes so as to construct them in as solid a manner as possible.
On top of that, you're also showing an awareness of the flow and gesture of these animals' poses - focusing so heavily on construction can easily result in a great deal of stiffness, and while I often suggest approaches that help with this, it tends to be a lot for students to absorb and apply all at once. You however have been drawing animals that convey a strong sense of life and motion, and are able to capture their weight without the associated stiffness.
Now, that isn't to say you don't have plenty of room for improvement - I think it's mostly a matter of working on your observational skills. You're doing great as is, but where things start to go askew, you're still maintaining a fairly believable construction, so it speaks to the fact that your ability to identify proportion and other matters specific to the reference image you're working from (before you actually move towards constructing what you saw or thought you saw) can certainly be improved. And it will be, with time and with practice.
I found it particularly amusing that the proportions on this big cat suggest that your observation was a little off - but frankly, I can't be sure. It's entirely possible that you were drawing a particularly fat specimen. Perhaps it's chasing a piece of cake.
The only other thing I wanted to mention was in regards to how you draw legs. There are a lot of cases here where you draw a very specific approach to drawing legs based on the reference you're working from. You often seem to be able to pull out which approach will be most effective on a case by case basis - and that's fantastic. There are however situations where the reference doesn't make this entirely clear for you, or where you're doing so a little more from your imagination, and you end up falling back to a less clear, and definitely less confident approach.
It's this "default" approach to legs that I want you to give some thought to. Personally, my default is to construct legs with sausages - that is, forms akin to two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Reason being that this allows me to convey a lot of flow and rhythm in how each segment's sausage curves.
What you don't want to do is try and capture the entire length of a leg (multiple segments) in a single complex form. You also don't want to capture the segments with forms that don't allow for a certain amount of flex. Stretched ovals for instance have a tendency of being in their nature quite stiff.
Looking at the coyote demo (actually, it was a wolf!), you'll see how I generally fall back onto these interpenetrating sausages, before dropping a contour line right at the point where they intersect to reinforce the joint. This tends to work pretty well no matter what kind of animal I'm drawing, so at the same time, if I'm piecing something together more from my imagination, I know I can fall back to that and it'll turn out solid.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You've done some fantastic work here, and should be proud of yourself. Keep it up.
[deleted]
2018-08-13 03:55
Lessson 5 I'd say I progressed in terms of proportions and accuracy of my subject. However I'm still inept at head construction and a lot of the time I feel like my work is just glorified symbol drawing.
I have noticed that some students (discord) tend to make studies of the skulls of their subject before drawing the head, while in contrast you tend to draw what you see on the surface outright. Do you think studying beneath the surface of the subject might help or is it nothing more than excessive overthinking?
Uncomfortable
2018-08-13 22:30
Your proportions are getting better, but you're really hitting the nail on the head when you say you're basically doing a lot of glorified symbol drawing. That is, you have this continuous tendency to, when you have to deal with anything smaller than a certain limit, stop paying attention to your reference and start drawing from your imagination. This happens in the heads, where you're struggling, and it also happens on the feet.
In addition to this, I see clear areas where you're forgetting things you've been told previously, failing to apply techniques that have been covered, and so on. A couple examples include:
Drawing leg segments as sausages. You did this when following along with the wolf demo, but otherwise you reverted back to your own way of doing it, which tends to come out stiff.
The deer antlers should have applied some form of the branch exercise from lesson 3. You drew the silhouette of the antlers in one go, approaching an extremely complex shape all in one go rather than applying the basic principles of construction (start simple and build up from there).
You are however handling things like torsos, and the general relationships between these larger forms very well - they're feeling considerably more three dimensional. So, it seems like once things get smaller, you revert to ignoring your reference, ignoring the techniques in your toolbox.
It's not entirely abnormal, but it's something you need to really beat out of yourself. Like, put a rock in a sock and just start beating yourself whenever you do it (don't do that. please, i don't want to get sued). We tend to have this mental block that arises when we try to work really tiny, and it causes us to ignore everything we consciously know. We panic, and this causes us to revert. Every beginner faces it to some extent.
One solution is to draw even bigger, but that depends on whether or not it's sustainable. Or, you could even try doing focused studies on legs alone - I'm not sure how much I recommend this, as having the full context of the body is good, but you definitely have a block against really thinking through the forms involved in feet and toes.
A last point about the heads - as I mention in this tiger head demo, the head is like a puzzle. There's a lot of pieces that all need to fit together. When you construct your heads, you tend to focus only on the specific pieces you're trying to draw, and you ignore the spaces between. Don't leave your eye socket floating separate from your muzzle, cheekbone, etc. Find how they all fit together.
So, to summarize:
Your body/torso constructions are actually quite good.
Your brain shuts down when you deal with small things, like legs, feet especially, and heads.
Heads are puzzles. Don't rush in without all the pieces.
Throughout these lessons, you've been taught a number of techniques for tackling different kinds of problems - don't forget them. They're not specific to any one particular kind of object, but rather are ways one can try and handle certain kinds of constructional problems that can be found in all kinds of places. Keep them in your toolbox, and pull them out wherever appropriate.
As for your question, the problem doesn't have to do with your understanding of the skull, it's about observation. Studying the skull separately isn't necessarily going to help you pay attention to your reference where you aren't currently, so I wouldn't recommend that as a solution to this particular problem. It can be helpful, sure, but tackle one problem at a time.
Taking what I've said here into consideration, try your hand at however many pages you see fit, and try and work in some of those isolated studies of the areas that are giving you the most mental blocks.
[deleted]
2018-08-20 05:09
Lesson 5 I think the ultimate issue I have here when it comes to drawing symbolic heads and feet is not because they are small, but that sometimes I simply cannot simply discern the complexities of the form I'm looking at either because the fur obscures it(bears and canines) or the head itself is a weird topographic-like mass with rarely any clear discernible pieces(giraffes and goats), and as a result I resort to trying to get the shape of it instead, or just draw the forms I can see, this often leads to parts of the head being isolated/floating, or sometimes the sides of the head being blank aside for the base starting sphere.
Uncomfortable
2018-08-20 16:38
It's true that fur has a tendency to make things more difficult, and this is a challenge we all face when drawing animals. That doesn't entirely account for the issues I was seeing however. As we practice, we learn to hone our observational skills, and we pick up on features that are present, but perhaps harder to notice. Ultimately what you need to understand about the body is present - and you need to trust and accept that it is, so you do not give up on identifying it early, and fall back to loose guesswork. This comes back to what I was suggesting in terms of size being a problem, in that it has a tendency to make students panic and lose focus, relying instead of guessing rather than observing carefully. They are different things that lead to the same kind of reaction in the student.
One valuable piece of advice is to make sure that the reference you use is as high resolution as possible. Less experienced students will struggle more when faced with low-res images, because the obfuscation of detail is even greater.
Also worth mentioning, your head constructions were still small, you just crammed a bunch into the same page. That's worth keeping in mind - with those constructions, you did not benefit from extra space to think through the spatial problems, as you did not give yourself any more.
That said, I think the advice about thinking of these constructions as 3D puzzles did help, as I do see considerable improvement on your heads. Your level of success varies from head to head, but I can see a better grasp of space and form (and how you're dealing with individual solid forms) as you piece them together. I especially liked the middle one on the top row, it felt very solid.
There is also an issue that is pretty consistent across all the heads. You have a tendency to draw the initial starting sphere way too big. As a result, you don't actually really treat it as though it's a part of the head construction, and instead seem to be stamping your heads on top of it and largely ignoring it.
The "cranial ball" as we call it is always the starting point for the head, and you can think of it as constituting a part of the skull. It does not contain the head, or wrap around it in any way. It is a basis on which the rest of the head is attached, as seen in the tiger head demo.
Another way to think about it is that if the neck were a sausage form (where sausages are two balls connected by a tube of consistent width), the cranial ball is the ball that sits at the end of the neck, like a nub. Keeping this in mind should help you really bring down its size relative to the overall head. If however you happen to draw it to be larger (especially when doing these isolated head studies), make sure you scale everything else to it as well. Don't feel like you HAVE to draw your heads small.
One of the things I noticed when it comes to how scale impacted your drawings was that when you work small, you can't really put as much focus or attention into the nature and design of the individual lines you're drawing. For example, take a look at your eye sockets. In the tiger demo, I show how the lines are to be drawn as though you are carving them into the ball with a knife. You think about each segment of this shape. You then go on to pop a nice, solid ball inside of the socket to constitute the eye, and build the lids around it.
Because you've drawn so small, it's orders of magnitude harder to be quite so intentional with such tiny lines. As a result, they end up being less "designed" and more approximate.
This is the same kind of thing that happens when dealing with feet. They're so small, so it's much harder - especially as a beginner - to even draw the forms you see in your reference with any kind of purposefulness or intent. So sure, it may be a little harder to identify which forms are present due to fur and other elements, but once you're able to make out the features that suggest where these forms connect to one another, it is still very difficult to draw them without your lines feeling clunky and unwieldy.
That isn't to say it's impossible - but rather that it's something you first need to get used to doing at a larger scale, and then gradually doing it at smaller sizes will get easier (as your pen control and pressure control also improves).
I did notice that in your legs, you still were hesitant when it comes to applying the segments-as-sausages thing that I've been raising time and time again. I can see what appears to be attempts, but I really want to emphasize that a sausage is just two balls connected by a tube. Your ends tend to round out more shallowly, and end up looking more like regular tubes.
That said, your legs are improving in certain ways, and are becoming more fluid and solid - but your feet are still mostly showing a need to work on your observational skills more than anything else.
Now, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You've been grinding away at this for quite some time, and you have shown improvement, though you have a long way to go. I think that the next lesson will actually help quite a bit, despite being an entirely different subject matter.
It'll help because it is both unforgiving when it comes to construction and drawing each form completely and with intent, and also because the features present in these "everyday objects" are not obscured in the way that animal parts tend to be - but they are as minute and can be just as overwhelming.
I often see students being put through the ringer by lesson 6, but coming out with a much better grasp of form and construction (which you are already working towards with some of those head constructions). It is likely the best decision in the interest of your improvement to have you move forward.
Remember that before tackling lesson 6 however, you should complete the cylinder challenge.
Also worth mentioning is that while I am asking you to move forwards, once you've completed lessons 6 and 7, you will be welcome to submit more animals for us to see how you'll have been able to apply what you'll have learned.
TheDrawingChicken
2018-08-20 09:12
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Drawing faces are hard.
https://imgur.com/a/xWZlA90
Uncomfortable
2018-08-20 17:00
So you definitely start out with some struggles. That pelican looks like it's been addicted to heroin for a decade and doesn't know how it's still alive. You continue to struggle through a number of these, but once you hit your second attempt at the pig, I start to see some real improvement. You're showing a greater awareness of the various sections of the animal's legs (for example you neglected the pelican's thigh altogether), and it overall feels considerably more solid. It's not perfect, but it feels like it's actually three dimensional, and you're no longer getting so caught up in detail and texture, and are instead focusing on your actual forms and construction.
The following horse is... interesting. I'm seriously curious about what the original reference is, and what the hell is going on with that back leg. Overall though, this is the peak of one issue I see also present in the previous pig - how you're approaching drawing the segments of the legs.
Right now you're drawing them each as stretched ovals. This results in them being very bulgy, as well as rather stiff. Instead of stretching ovals or balls, I want you to apply the same methodology we used for insects - constructing the legs using sausage forms. These are basically just two balls connected by a single tube of consistent width. These can be much more flexible and gestural, and show a much greater sense of flow. The segments of animals' legs generally have a rhythm to them - one segment will flow in one direction, and the next segment will double back, and so on. This allows us to capture that in a much smoother manner.
When drawing this oryx, you definitely show a considerable improvement with how you're dealing with legs. You're not quite using sausages, but you are showing a serious decrease in the michelin-man style bulginess, and once again your use of form feels very solid, like it did with that pig.
Now, obviously heads are a weak point - though the oryx isn't too bad. The main issue is that you're meant to connect these forms together. You've got a starting point - the cranial ball, which can also be considered as the "nub" at the end of the neck. And you actually attach forms to it, with an awareness of where they intersect.
The head is a lot like a 3D puzzle - it gets cut up into pieces, but they all fit very snugly together. So rather than thinking of things like eyes as being stickers that just float somewhere on this loosely defined form, you want to make that eye socket "snap" into place, amongst all the other forms around it. For example, the cheek bone, the brow ridge. You want that eye socket to be carved into the skull, not as a random circle, but as a series of lines that each individually cut in one clear direction along the surface of the form.
Looking at your head constructions does suggest that you didn't pay much attention to the head construction video in the lesson (maybe you forgot it was there). It is clear that you were struggling with a lot throughout this lesson though, so I don't mind that so much - because you did improve considerably on how you were approaching the bodies as a whole, and have shown a great deal of growth.
So you're doing a good job, but you're not quite there yet. I'd like you to rewatch that head construction video, and I'd also like you to take a look at these two demonstrations:
Tiger Head Construction - look at how everything fits together, how we start with a ball and attach other forms to it, and how the eye socket is carved before popping an eyeball in there and wrapping eyelids around it.
Wolf Construction - a more general demo that shows how to use sausages for the legs, a bit about head construction, and other useful general information.
I want you to do 4 more animal drawings, and I don't want you to go into any detail or texture whatsoever. One bird and three quadrupeds. Make sure you review any relevant information in the lesson before starting them, and ensure that when you do start, that the information is fresh in your mind.
TheDrawingChicken
2018-08-23 08:44
https://imgur.com/a/V3aLtA3
Faces are really a struggle sweats
Uncomfortable
2018-08-23 23:20
It's definitely a step in the right direction, and this one is the best of the lot, both in head and body. Overall though your linework is still pretty hesitant and uncertain, especially with the head. When you're not sure of how to approach something, you have a tendency to panic, and that's where your linework gets sketchier and more stiff. You need to get used to thinking through every mark you put down and considering what each one is going to contribute to your drawing, regardless of how sure you are that it's the right mark to put down.
As for heads, watch how big you make that initial cranial ball. On your last two pages, you drew it way too big, and it didn't leave a whole lot of room for the rest of the forms you went on to attach.
While I think you're probably okay to move on, I want you to draw a few heads each day for a few days, and then do two more for me. Don't rush on this - give yourself a chance to learn from each attempt, and don't try and do them all at once. The time in between attempts can be as valuable as the time actually spent drawing them.
TheDrawingChicken
2018-08-26 09:21
https://imgur.com/a/tpb77S3
Uncomfortable
2018-08-26 21:39
Nooooope. You're not following my instructions. The bit about the 3D puzzle is super important - you've got to make the pieces fit together, and think about how the eye socket, which is not just a simple ellipse, fits against the cheek bone and how this all sets against the initial cranial ball.
This one was your best from this set, so I did my redlining on it. Try another three. I ain't lettin' you go til you show an understanding of all the major points of head construction. I don't expect perfect work, but I need to see that you understand the concepts.
TheDrawingChicken
2018-08-29 06:40
https://imgur.com/a/eyXeMSN
I tried again by using more stuff(?)
Sheeps are weird so I was just testing.
Uncomfortable
2018-08-30 00:04
There's a couple things to mention here:
Aside from that first one, you're still drawing the initial cranial ball way too big, and it's making your head constructions weirdly bloated, like you're compensating by making everything else relatively small.
The teeth on that first page are completely flat and don't actually take 3D space into consideration, and you haven't even drawn the mouth opening onto the side plane of that boxy muzzle. You can do much better than this, you're just not really thinking about it.
Your puzzle-sections seem to be pretty arbitrary, like you're not really paying attention to where the animal's eye socket would sit.
Your eyelids don't wrap around the eyeballs like they're 3D objects - you're drawing flat lines.
You're letting that belief in the fact that the forms you're drawing are 3D dimensional slip away from you, and so while parts of your constructions do feel 3D, you're still leaving major areas flat and formless.
I know you're going to cry your little chicken tears, but I want you to do 25 head constructions. I want the 1st, 10th and 20th to all be attempts at replicating the tiger head demo I showed you earlier.
Do not submit any sooner than September 8th. I don't want you to rush and try to get this over with, because the more you try and get to lesson 6, the sloppier you get. You can do this, you just need to focus on what you're trying to accomplish, rather than trying to get things done.
James_Rautha
2018-08-23 11:03
https://imgur.com/a/wcfnPqy
Here's my attempt at lesson 5. I attempted some animals hundreds of time and found this really difficult.
As always thanks in advance for your feedback - I know you're a busy man.
EDIT:
Also I was hoping you could advise me how to draw feathers as a texture with ink? Couldn't figure it out for the life of me. Thanks!
Uncomfortable
2018-08-24 00:04
Nice work! I think you're demonstrating a well developing grasp of form and construction with these drawings. This is demonstrated best of all by the fact that your last drawing - the hybrid - did not devolve into a horrible mess. It's actually an excellent test for whether or not a student has understood how to use forms as described in the lesson, because you're forced to piece things together from different reference images. It can be quite overwhelming, and it forces one to go beyond just drawing what they see. It requires them to draw what they understand. And while there's plenty of room for growth, you demonstrated that you absolutely understand how to break these different references down into their principle forms, and then rebuild them as you please.
There were issues in the set here and there - largely with proportions, as well as your approach to drawing legs (which I could see you experimenting with, which is always great). Proportions are obviously something that will improve as you continue to train your observational skills, but for the legs I want you to focus on constructing the segments of the legs using simple sausage forms. As shown in this wolf demo, you can see how I use sausages (basically two balls connected by a tube) to construct each segment, reinforcing them with a single contour curve right at the point where they intersect. These kinds of forms are great for showing the back-and-forth rhythm legs often have, and can capture a good sense of gesture and flow. In your experimentation, you were gradually moving towards this, but still had a tendency to flatten out the ends of your segments, or making them more complex in other ways. At their core, they're just sausages. You can then go on to add additional forms on top of this sausage structure afterwards, but that's effectively how you should start.
When it comes to heads, I think you're absolutely moving in the right direction. You're paying attention to how the various parts of the head fit together, and that is definitely paying off. I really try and encourage students to think of the head as a sort of three dimensional puzzle - with many different pieces that all interlock as shown here.
As for your question about feathers, I'd handle it the same way I'd tackle any texture (which I elaborate on in the texture challenge): I'd focus not on outlining the elements of the texture themselves, but rather on the shadows they cast. The beauty of shadows is that they're affected by light - if light shines directly on a shadow, it'll be obliterated. Similarly, if many shadows come together, they will merge into a single continuous shape. This allows us to imply that forms exist without ending up with all of the visual noise that comes from drawing each and every one of them. Here's a quick example of how I would approach feathers.
In addition to the shadow thing, I'd also pay attention to the silhouette of the form on which I'm adding a feathery texture. The silhouette is the first thing the eye registers, so any of the irregular bumpiness that comes from layered feathers will immediately be picked up if it's present there.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto lesson 6.