phoenixboatshoes

2018-09-14 04:58

thank you!

Uncomfortable

2018-09-20 16:55

Overall, not bad, but there are a couple things I want to suggest or emphasize that will help you in the long run.

1. Whenever you've got two forms that intersect with each other, I want you to draw the line where that intersection actually happens. This will help you reinforce the illusion that these two forms are connecting with one another, and will help really solidify the illusion that they're three dimensional. This line exists on the surfaces of both forms simultaneously, and in the case of two rounded or sausage-like forms, is usually going to be a simple ellipse. I noticed in some places that you leveraged sausages to draw your legs - this is fantastic and is exactly what you should be doing for all your legs (as they convey a strong sense of flow). To add to this, establishing the intersection there really puts the icing on the cake, as demonstrated here: https://i.imgur.com/NQBBjvo.png

2. Later on in the set, you start to leverage a lot more hatching lines - I want to strongly discourage you from this. Hatching is really just a way to shade things without being mindful of the actual textures that are present. Shading isn't necessary to convey solid forms, and if you're not communicating something more (like the surface texture present on that form) then you're not actually adding anything to the image (at least not in terms of visual communication). So if you want to go down that route, take more time to observe more carefully.

3. Make sure you draw each and every form in its entirety. On this tarantula you only drew the portions of the leg segments where they were not overlapped by something else. The reason we want to draw these completely is because it allows us to understand fully how each segment exists in space, and how they all relate to one another. This is a key part to these exercises - after all, these drawings are all exercises, meant to help develop your sense of space and construction.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - feel free to move onto the next one, but be sure to keep these points in mind.

Uncomfortable

2018-09-25 20:25

I'm not going to give this an in-depth review, as I have a bunch of other critiques to get to and this isn't really a full homework submission, but I do have a couple things to point out:

• On your first and last pages, you're really not drawing the forms themselves as confidently as you ought to be, and you're not establishing how those forms actually connect and intersect with one another. As a result, they feel more like a flat, 2D structure that you've laid down without any real understanding of how they're meant to exist in 3D space, before moving forwards. This in turn makes your drawings continue to feel flat throughout. You need to pay more attention to the earlier phases and ensure that at each and every stage you're doing everything you can to reinforce your own grasp of the illusion you're trying to create. The end result is the least important part, so don't hold back in the interest of keeping the final drawing clean.

• In the last page, a couple things - first when you've got that sort of segmented layering on the abdomen, it should be visibly breaking the silhouette of the form. The segmented layers wouldn't lay flush as you've got there. Secondly, for the thorax, you seem to have started out with a sphere, but then drew a differently shaped ball directly on top of it. This kind of replacement of forms gives contradictory information to the viewer, and becomes confusing. The marks you're putting down on the page are not exploratory sketches or anything of that sort. You're placing solid, concrete forms into a 3D space, and once they're there you need to deal with them. You can't simply act like the previous one isn't there anymore.

The spider on the second page however is looking quite well done, both in construction and with the little details you've added. The weaknesses are mostly prevalent in the first and last pieces, where you definitely make it clear that you're focusing too much on the end result. These drawings are exercises in understanding how complex objects can be constructed from simple forms, nothing more. The goal is not to create something pretty, but rather to reinforce and develop your own understanding of 3D space, and your own belief in the illusions you're trying to convey. If you don't believe what you're drawing is 3D, then there's no way you're going to convince others of that.

That belief isn't something that comes easily though, which is why we go through all of these lessons worth of exercises and practice to build it up.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-16 17:30

Really fantastic stuff! You've demonstrated a really clear and strong grasp of 3D space as well as construction, and you've leveraged your understanding of both to create a lot of convincing drawings of a wide variety of insects. It's really quite clear to me that you've analyzed your subject matter a great deal, and while you applied a good deal of detail and texture to a number of these, you were clearly focused on the construction until that was properly established, rather than allowing yourself to get distracted by the little bits and bobs you may have wanted to apply afterwards. A lot of students do that - they get caught up in all the detail they want to add that they approach construction in a thoroughly distracted manner. None of that happened here - you very clearly compartmentalized the various phases of your drawing.

There are only two things that I want to point out - they're less about problems and more about keeping you firmly on the path drawabox is meant to set out. It's not to say that this is the only path one can walk, but rather it is the one you've elected to travel and for the most part you're doing a good job of it.

The first point I want to raise is that you are definitely a little bit looser and sketchier with your linework. It's not to such a great degree, but you're visibly keeping certain marks very light and faint, gently scratching them onto the page in order to keep them from interfering with the final result. Absolutely keep in mind that drawabox is entirely about confidently stepping through all the phases of construction without trying to hide anything. It's not really about producing a pretty end result, it's entirely focused on what you learn from manipulating these three dimensional forms. You'll notice in many of my demos, like this one, I very clearly draw every single line - nothing's faint or hidden. Afterwards I go back to add line weight to specific areas to clarify overlaps and create a sort of hierarchy of form and detail, but that doesn't impact how I work through it earlier on.

I'm actually unsure of whether you're using a fineliner here or a ballpoint pen - it does look more like a ballpoint in that you're able to vary just how faint your marks are, although it could just be that your pen is dying. Either way, it's best to approach this with a pen that makes a rich, dark line, regardless of how much pressure you apply, varying only in the thickness of the stroke.

The other thing I wanted to draw your attention to was the way you draw your legs in certain cases. The spiders are a good example. I find the best way to capture the legs is to construct the segments as sausage forms. In your drawings, you applied a number of different approaches, some of which came quite close to what I'm suggesting, but often times the forms were just barely connected, with minimal overlap, to the point that their connections didn't feel entirely solid.

Here's how I recommend doing it. Build them with sausages, ensure they overlap well, and then reinforce their joints with a single contour curve clearly defining the intersection. With this, you don't need further contour lines through their lengths (which can needlessly add stiffness and reduce their perceived flow), and it'll keep everything both solid while balancing a nice sense of gesture.

Anyway! You're doing really well, so just keep the points I've mentioned here in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-23 21:07

All in all there are a number of major issues that are holding you back, and from the looks of it, these are changes in your approach since your last submission.

The biggest issue that ties everything together is that you are currently very focused on your end result. You're clearly interested in keeping the final drawing as clean as possible, as detailed as possible, and in general terms, as impressive as possible. Unfortunately, that completely veers away from the point of drawabox - we're not here to impress anyone, and we're not here to create pretty drawings to stick on our fridges. We're here to learn from the processes we apply while drawing them. Each one is an exercise in construction, meant to develop our understanding of 3D space, and our overall belief that what we are drawing exists in three dimensions, and is itself a solid object. Not that it represents one - that every form we draw actually exists in a 3D world, to which our page is just a window. We do this - trying to fool ourselves - because the easiest way to convince someone of something is to believe in the lie yourself.

As you push through your homework, you apply fewer and fewer constructional concepts. You do start out with varying degrees of construction in your first few pages, but it's just something that derails. My guess is that you perhaps misunderstood the assignment - the only difference between the lay-ins and the full drawings is that the full drawings start out the same way, but they simply go further.

So I do have a few specific critiques to offer, but overall you are going to have to redo the 8 pages of insect drawings:

• In your lay-ins, you experiment with a few different approaches to drawing legs. Some of them involve the segments as stretched ellipses/balls, others you've got tubes where you've added contour curves to reinforce their form and so on. The approach that generally works best is similar to the first, but in it we use sausage forms as segments that intersect, and then we reinforce each joint/intersection with a single contour curve. The benefit here is that sausages (which are essentially two balls connected by a tube of consistent width) can be much more flexible than a stretched ball (which tends to be very stiff), and as such it can carry the rhythm and flow of the legs to great effect.

• When you've got segmentation on the abdomen (like wasps, grasshoppers, etc), remember that you want to layer that stuff on top of the underlying forms. This is going to result in forms that break the silhouette of the previous one, since they're being stacked on top. I see this here and there, but overall you're not taking as much advantage of the silhouette detail as you ought to be. The silhouette itself, especially when broken, is an extremely effective way to communicate, as this is what the eye picks up first before observing any of the internal detail. Also remember that this should be additive - don't construct the form and then cut into it to create your segmentation - build out from it.

Here are some old demos touching on what I've mentioned here:

• https://i.imgur.com/rQvn6kV.png

• https://i.imgur.com/I6nDc7l.png

• https://i.imgur.com/mDeATkB.png

And lastly, a demo that goes over the whole process of completing one of these constructional drawings as you should be doing them:

• https://i.imgur.com/n7ryMhP.jpg

Remember - don't draw detail that isn't yet supported by the scaffolding and structure already present. Start simple and work your way up. Draw EACH form in its entirety, and draw through everything. We need to understand how each form relates to its neighbours, and how it all sits in 3D space.

Oh, worth mentioning - the spider on page 2 was actually quite well done, and the end result was believably three dimensional.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-24 17:11

You've shown a considerable amount of improvement over this set. You started out with a clear intent to employ and apply constructional techniques, but not necessarily the strongest understanding of how to go about it. You didn't take any shortcuts, you didn't neglect drawing through forms, or skip constructional steps - you just seemed more hesitant about how you were going about it.

As you pushed through however, you noticed a lot of the little mistakes you were making, and you started moving forward with a lot more confidence and boldness in terms of the choices you were making. There's a lot less second guessing and a lot less hesitation through the end of the set, and with that you demonstrate that you yourself seem to believe in the solidity of the forms you're drawing a lot more than you may have previously. Where near the start it was clear that you were drawing lines on a flat page, by the end you're constructing solid objects in a three dimensional world, and it's clear that you believe that. We tend to convince people more easily when we believe in our own lies.

One of the issues I was going to point out based on your earlier work had to do with segmentation. Whenever you had those nice layered chunks along abdomens and such, you had a tendency to avoid having them break the silhouette, and missed out on a major opportunity to convey that addition of form and volume. You seem to have picked up on this yourself however, and there are a number of cases in the last few pages where you're boldly punching through that silhouette to add layers of segmentation, to great effect.

The other thing I wanted to mention was how you're drawing legs. You experiment with a number of different approaches, which is definitely great to see. I generally find that the best way to construct legs - especially in insects, but it's applicable to other animals as well - is to build the individual segments as sausages (that is, balls connected by a tube of consistent width). Where these sausages intersect, there should be a healthy overlap, and the intersection/joint should be defined by a clear, concise contour line. There's no need for contour lines through the length of this sausage however, as reinforcing the joint is generally enough. This approach allows for segments that flow smoothly and convey the gestural rhythm of a limb without it getting overly rigid, and while still maintaining its solidity. I explain this further in this old demo. It also touches on the segmentation issue.

You actually do have some drawings where you use sausages, I just wanted to emphasize this as being the more effective solution in most cases.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're free to play around with a few more, but you're welcome to move onto the next lesson whenever you feel ready.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-29 20:31

Throughout this lesson you're demonstrating an exceptionally well developed understanding of 3D space and construction. Your lesson 3 stuff was pretty well done, but I think you've really hit a strong point of understanding here in how those forms can be manipulated and combined to create solid, convincing, tangible objects.

Not only that - you're also leveraging texture and rendering to great effect. At no point does it undermine or take focus away from the construction - you're very clearly thinking through all of these spatial problems and resolving them before moving onto even thinking about texture. On top of that, your details are understated and subtle - they focus on communicating without being overbearing or distracting, and your results are very strong because of it.

At this point, I have only one recommendation to offer - use sausages. Sausages are great for constructing things like legs, and even scorpion tails, and really anything else that functions like a chain of segments. Right now you're not doing too bad of a job with them (obviously, given that your work is solid), but there still is a lot of benefit to being able to construct things with complete, enclosed forms that are solid both as part of the construction as well as on their own. If you look at the segments used in many of your legs, if you separate a given segment out, it's not going to hold together quite as well.

You can see what I mean by sausages in this demo I did for another student. Basically, a sausage is two balls connected by a tube of consistent width. They can carry a flowing rhythm from sausage to sausage, which allows us to capture a nice sense of gesture. They're also very easy to make solid - all you have to do is reinforce the intersectional joint between sausages with a single contour curve, and you don't really need to add any more through its length. This also allows it to feel fluid and flexible.

That's really all I have to offer! You've done fantastic work here, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson!

Uncomfortable

2018-11-02 21:42

All in all you've done a good job, and have shown a good deal of growth between the first page and the last. You're also demonstrating a really solid understanding of both 3D space as well as the relationships between the forms you're drawing. You're drawing through all of your forms, and aren't skipping any steps, so your constructions generally come out very well.

I do feel that there are places where you're rushing somewhat, but I read the notes you wrote alongside them, where you've pushed yourself beyond the point of being afraid of failure, so all in all that's probably a good thing. If you maintained the really loose, rough approach throughout the rest of the pages, I'd have been concerned but you went back to balancing your control with that same confidence.

I really only have two recommendations:

• When drawing legs, I can see that you've experimented with a number of different techniques, and most of them gave you a varying degree of success on different fronts. Personally, the one that I generally recommend to students is the use of intersecting sausage segments, reinforced with a single contour curve right at the joint. I demonstrate this here. Keep in mind that a sausage is just two balls connected by a tube of consistent width. Keeping that width consistent contributes a great deal to its solidity. There are going to be legs that have strange bulges in places, but I recommend that you add these variations afterwards with additional forms (like drawing a regular sausage form, and then placing a larger ball around one end of it).

• You're doing great with general construction and lay-in, but most of your drawings tend to be quite small, and there's definitely a degree of roughness to them. For most purposes that's great, but since you've got a good grasp of form and space, I'd highly recommend that you do a few larger drawings, taking more time to lay them out and then get into greater detail. Exploring more of the smaller forms that exist on a construction, and more of the specific nuance that exists in a particular subject, will help you develop a better understanding of how to tackle minor textural elements (like the shadows cast by smaller bumps on a surface). That's something here that isn't bad, but in the few places where you have pushed forward with a bit of texture, it is lacking the same kind of conscientious thought and consideration that you demonstrate through your major constructions.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson when you're ready.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-02 22:09

There is definitely a good deal of progress that you're demonstrating over this set, and you do develop your understanding of form and space, but there is a major issue that is making this progress a lot more hard fought than it needs to be. The problem is that when drawing these insects, you are focusing on the end result. You are adjusting your lines and tailoring your approach to ensure that the final drawing at the end of the rainbow bridge is relatively clean. You're sketching your lines in roughly, faintly, exploring the space and form before committing with darker, richer strokes.

That is not what we're doing here. Our focus is not on impressing someone with our results, and we're not looking to pin anything on our fridges. The drawings for this lesson aren't actually any different from those - they're all just exercises, and the focus is on the process rather than the result.

When you go through the process of putting a line down, you shouldn't be factoring in how faint you need it to be, nor should you be sketching or exploring your drawing. Every mark you put down should be preceded both by the planning and preparation of the ghosting method, but you should also think about what your next line is going to contribute to the drawing, its construction, or your understanding of how the forms exist in space.

Every phase of construction is basically the answer to a question, or the solution to a problem. A drawing is really just a series of questions, and you're answering them as you go. For example, how big is a creature's head? If you look at the last page in your submission, you drew a ball for the grasshopper's head - you answered that question. But then you went on to undermine that initial answer and ignored the previous phase of construction in favour of a different answer.

This leads to conflicting answers on the page, and it undermines the overall cohesion of your drawing. You want every mark to work towards the same end, to tell the same story - to tell the same lie (since we're building an illusion here).

As such, the process of sketching lightly and then committing to a stroke doesn't work - the mark you put down in the first place was your commitment, and even if it's wrong, you have to follow through and continue on. Even if the resulting drawing doesn't end up being exactly what you were after, it can still be salvaged if the answer is still cohesive and consistent throughout.

Once you've got that construction down, you can go back to add line weight to emphasize sections of existing lines (note that you are adding line weight to portions of these lines, not replacing them entirely) to clarify how certain forms overlap others.

You can see this overall process illustrated in this demo. See how the pen I use doesn't even allow me to scratch faintly upon the page? Really, that's the reason I insist on the use of fineliners, which leave rich, dark lines no matter how much pressure you apply - at least, when they're not on their last legs.

Also, take a look at this demo. This is how I usually recommend students construct legs, using sausage segments, reinforced with a single contour curve set at the joint.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to do three more pages of insect drawings, this time incorporating everything I've said here.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-05 01:22

By and large this is much, much better. The bee and beetle are a bit of a mess, where you're way too focused on detail and lose track of the forms you're working with so they don't appear remotely solid, but the rest of your drawings are considerably better. In the other pages, you're clearly taking your time and building things up from their solid, simple components.

The only piece of advice I'd like to offer at this point is in regards to how you're approaching your legs. In most cases your attempts are pretty solid, but I do want to share a technique that I recommend to most people for drawing legs that uses sausage forms to create each segment. It was actually demonstrated in one of the demos I left you with, this one, as well as the louse demo, but you may not have paid very close attention to it.

Basically, construct each segment as an individual, complete sausage form (that is, effectively two balls connected with a tube of consistent width). Then reinforce the joint where they intersect with a single contour curve. It doesn't need any more contour lines than that, generally, so keeping the length of the sausage clear of them helps it retain a sort of flow and rhythm.

On the topic of legs, for your beetle (one of the two that didn't go so well), you're jumping into a lot of complexity with those legs. They've got a lot of swoopy, irregular shapes, so they don't maintain their solidity particularly well. It's better to build those out more simply (with the sausages), and then add any additional volume and mass afterwards (like if a segment has a fat end, add a ball to that end of the sausage and then merge them together.

Anyway, by and large you're doing much better, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-07 20:12

By and large you've actually got a great deal of good work here. You're really showing a well developing understanding of how these forms all interact with one another, how they sit in 3D space and so on. Many of your constructions feel very solid and tangible, and they convey the sense that you actually believe that you're creating three dimensional objects, rather than just drawing on a piece of paper. That's a big improvement, and it's one we can see shift over the course of the set, so that's great to see.

There are a couple of areas that I've got suggestions for, but you're doing pretty well as it stands.

• The first recommendation has to do with how you're approaching drawing legs. This is an area where you have varying levels of success, but pretty consistently you do tend to jump into them at a slightly further level of complexity, and this results in those particular aspects of some of your drawings feeling a little less solid than they otherwise could. In my view, the best approach for constructing legs (in most cases) is to use very simple sausage forms to construct the segments, and reinforce their intersections with a single contour curve at the joint, leaving the rest of their lengths clear. Contour lines can very easily stiffen up a form, whereas this approach maintains that same solidity while also keeping the flowing, gestural rhythm of the leg. Keep in mind that a sausage form, as demonstrated here, is not just a stretched ellipse or ball, but rather is two balls connected by a tube of consistent width. If the leg you're drawing features additional masses, like those on this page, then you can add them on top of the sausages as their own separate forms.

• I think my favourite construction of yours is this bumble bee, and it also appears to be where your texture was most successful, especially when it comes to tackling fur and hair. It probably could have been even better had you held back on the fur a little more - that is, avoiding situations where you're trying to encircle the entire form - but all in all it came out quite well. Other attempts, like your goliath bird eating spider definitely had hairs that were far too competitive with the rest of the drawing, and drew attention away in a way that was clearly not intended. In your scorpion, there are some signs of observation, but it does seem that you didn't quite push yourself far enough there, and perhaps saw that these little dots were present, and then went to town stippling certain areas. It's important that you look closer into the reference image and identify what each mark you want to transfer over actually is communicating. Are those dots the result of little divots in the scorpion's carapace? In this case, consider how the light is hitting that surface to cause these little shadows - it might be more appropriate to capture them as little crescents (where light would still hit the far end of the dip, creating something other than a perfectly regular circle).

Anyway, all in all you're doing a great job and are showing considerable improvement and growth compared to your last lesson. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-28 22:19

These are looking pretty good! I have a couple additional things to call out, but overall you're doing fairly well so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

I think you start to hit a point of confidence and comfort when you hit your potato bugs - before that your linework is still somewhat clunky. Overall though, I do want to stress the importance of drawing your ellipses and ellipse-like forms with confidence. Drawing through them like we did in lesson 1 and 2 is still critical to keep up that confidence and maintain even shapes, and at times (especially early on) you did suffer from ellipses that were drawn too slowly and too carefully.

On your grasshoppers and your praying mantis, there is a tendency I saw in how you approached the segmentation along their abdomens. I remember pointing this issue out to another studio, and still have the notes I put together. Basically the segmentation doesn't really feel like it's wrapping around the form convincingly. This is especially the case with the praying mantis because you covered most of it up, rather than drawing that segmentation and then drawing on top of it. Drawing through your forms helps a great deal in cases like this, because you still have to be able to grasp how these layers are wrapping around the form underneath.

There is some improvement on that front, but I do generally feel like the contour lines from your segmentation tends to be kind of shallow.

Your scorpions are looking really good - very solid in their construction, despite having a lot going on.

Lastly, one thing I didn't see a whole lot of was constructing legs using sausages for each segment. You still seem to have approached your legs with more complex forms as a basis rather than relying on this fairly simple approach. Simple is always going to lead to a more solid result, even if the legs themselves have a lot going on. You can always build up forms steadily on top of that foundation.

Anyway, like I said. Definitely improving in a lot of areas. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-02 00:35

You're demonstrating a really strong grasp of form and 3D space here, and as far as the core of drawabox goes, you're barreling down the right path at considerable speed. There are still some minor issues here and there that I'm going to point out, but by and large you're really conveying solid constructions that are in most cases quite believable as well as tangible.

I did most of my critiquing through redlining, which you'll find here. Here are a list of the main issues I noticed:

• Center lines. One of the spatial problems I noticed is that in many of your constructions, your center lines seem somewhat misaligned at times, resulting in forms that don't quite fit together properly. Sometimes the abdomen or head will seem off-center due to the center line of the thorax being misplaced. Also, a pretty common issue of having center lines that are sometimes flatter than they ought to be is present sometimes. Always err on the side of being more voluminous and thinking about how this center line, like any other contour line, would run along the surface of the relevant form. In such matters, thinking about how objects can be separated into distinct planes can help, especially with figuring out where your contour line should be making a considerable change in its trajectory (as though jumping from one plane to another).

• Proportion. We're definitely way more interested in construction, and proportion is something that improves with continued practice, studies, observation, etc. That said it is worth pointing out that you have a tendency to draw very, very large thoraxes. They're usually quite a bit smaller than the abdomens, though this will vary depending on the subject matter.

• Legs. You're using a lot of different techniques here for constructing legs, in regards to how you choose to represent the various sections, from stretched ellipses/balls to cylindrical pipes to sausages. I want you to try and stick to the sausages, as the other two are going to lead to a sense of general stiffness that you'll want to avoid. Even if the legs are complex with a larger mass on one end of a segment than the other, start off with the same kind of simple sausage form and then build up around it as needed. Here's an example of what I mean when I say sausages, though you've done it well in a bunch of places yourself.

So! Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete. You may move on and draw da fuzzyfwiends, though I know you've been drawing plenty of them already.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-14 02:41

You've got some good stuff here, but there are a few things I want to draw your attention to throughout your work that are perhaps going down the wrong path in a few ways. I figure this is better done visually however, so I've done some redlining for you: https://i.imgur.com/hce1Qxj.png

So the main things that I noticed were:

• Above all else, you keep jumping between applying construction properly, starting out real simple and working your way up in successive passes to greater complexity. We try to start every construction with forms that will give the impression of being solid without any further development. Balls, simple sausage forms, etc. Then we build on these to reach greater levels of that complexity.

• The degrees on your contour ellipses tend to be off - be more mindful of what the degree implies about the cross-section it represents. A really wide degree implies that the cross-section is facing the viewer. A narrow degree implies that the form is flowing across the viewer's field of view, with the cross-section facing away from them.

• Every form you draw should be complete and enclosed. Don't stop a line where it gets hidden by another form - treat it as though we have xray vision. Drawing through your forms in this manner will help you better grasp how everything sits in 3D space, and how these forms relate to one another.

• Try getting used to drawing your legs with simple sausage forms as segments, as demonstrated here.

I'd like you to do another 4 pages of insect drawings. Draw them big (you can do one drawing per page), and apply what I've mentioned above. This lesson is not about drawing insects, it's about applying the constructional methodology to insects - so focus on construction all over. It's clear that you can do it because you have a few cases here and there that are really well done.

Also, you may have seen this already, but if not - check out this demo. Notice how I block everything out as an individual, complete form, and don't worry about anything that gets overlapped? Try and approach everything in that manner.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-15 19:57

I'll start out by saying that your last couple of pages are in considerable ways, redeeming - the grasshopper especially. It depicts a well developed grasp of how the forms you've used sit in space and relate to one another, and also present an excellent example of how the mentality of construction is meant to be applied - starting from simple, yet entirely solid forms, and building upon them to maintain that solidity throughout while also building up greater and greater complexity.

Additionally, it's very clear that you've done a great deal of observation, studying and note taking on your subject matter throughout this work. You've approached all of your drawing here in a very analytical fashion, and have been mindful of your goals.

There are however a number of issues, especially early on.

• For your first ten pages, and in various places after that, you rely quite heavily on roughing in an underdrawing, then going back over it with a sort of "clean-up" pass (my guess is with a different pen entirely). This is something I talk about back in lesson 2, in the form intersections video. While this is an effective approach in general, it is not something I want you to do in my lessons. I don't want you to sketch, or put any mark down that you are not fully committed to. This builds too much of a dichotomy between the "final drawing" and the construction, and breeds a lack of equal respect for those construction lines, which are at the very least equal to whatever is considered the "final drawing", if not far, FAR more important. Every mark we put down at any point must be weighed - we need to think about whether or not it contributes in a meaningful way to our understanding of the forms we're creating, how they sit in space or how they relate to one another, or whether it communicates some key piece of information to the viewer about the nature of what's being drawn (like texture or detail). If it doesn't, or if another mark would accomplish that specific task better, then we don't draw the mark. On the other hand, if it does, then we draw it with full confidence, not attempting to hide it or keep it faint. Then, when we come back later to decide whether or not we want to add line weight to it, if we do want to add line weight, we do so to specific limited areas - not the whole line. Attempting to do it to the whole mark will result in drawing slowly and stiffly, wobbly all the way. Instead, we draw with the same confident use of the ghosting method.

• In a lot of your drawings, I'm seeing ample use of contour lines in places where frankly I think they play a valuable role. I do think you should definitely be putting more thought and planning into them however - they tend to come out vastly more shallow, undermining the purpose they're meant to serve in the drawing. Your contour curves on your grasshopper, especially along the various parts of the body, were much better.

• When drawing legs, an approach I generally recommend is using simple sausage forms to create the various segments, allowing them to overlap/intersect, and then placing only a single contour curve at each joint with none through the sausage's length. Sausages are great because they allow us to achieve a smooth, gestural rhythm, while maintaining solidity. I demonstrate this further here.

• Also worth mentioning, your use of hatching. In general I think you're waaay overusing it, and you're kind of sloppy with it as well. In general, just because you may think something should be filled in doesn't mean that there is any actual reason that this is required, or even a good idea. I have a few examples. In this wasp, you made the decision to fill in the shadow. Frankly, not the worst call - a nice black shadow may have made it pop, and you did the right thing in drawing an outline beforehand. Filling it with sloppy crosshatching didn't really do you any favours though - you could have just as well left it empty if you didn't have the tools on hand to fill it in cleanly, but instead the hatching not only reduced the overall presentation of the drawing, but it also created a focal area (through the use of greater contrasting light areas and darker strokes) where you didn't mean for there to be one. In this dragon fly, you added hatching to the abdomen to accentuate its roundedness. What you were doing here was adding form shading - something we don't actually ever do as part of drawabox (I find it serves as a crutch that distracts students from learning how to convey form through constructional techniques instead). The bigger issue though is that every mark you put on the surface of a form is going to serve as a contour line of some sort. It sits on that surface, and therefore it describes it. These little marks are quite straight, and instead flatten that form out. Generally if you're going to apply any kind of form shading to a tube-like form, it's generally better to do it length-wise. Lastly, in all your drawings of this beetle, you always fill in its little beady black eyes. There's no logical reason to do this though, if you think about it. We're treating the rest of the object as though it's a single flat, matte colour - taking into consideration the local colour of this element is entirely out of the ordinary. In general, ignore local colour, and focus on form alone.

Now, I do want you to do 3 more insect drawings - more in the vein of your grasshopper, following the drawabox approach to drawing that I've described here (this demo also helps characterize it). I'm confident you're capable of it, but I do want to see a little more before I mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-02 19:16

Overall you've done a really great job of first taking the concepts, applying them alongside the demonstrations, and then finally applying them to other reference images of your own. You're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space and construction as a whole, and as a result your insects come out feeling solid and three dimensional.

There are just a couple things I want to address:

• When doing the organic forms with contour lines exercise at the beginning there, make sure you focus on simple sausage forms that maintain a consistent width through their length. This will allow you to focus on the core of the exercise without having to worry about any tapering or swelling in the middle (which would generally be additional information added through successive phases of construction, rather than tackled all at the same time).

• In your locust drawing, I noticed a clear shift in your approach - you started drawing the underlying construction lines much more faintly and timidly, and seem to have focused a great deal more on the end result rather than on the construction along the way. Your construction was still alright, but not quite as strong as the other drawings. Remember that the goal here is not to produce a pretty drawing - these are just exercises to build your understanding of 3D space. You're welcome to do drawings like this outside of these lessons to apply what you're learning, but really focus on ensuring that your construction is confident through these lessons (as you have for all the other drawings in this set).

Aside from that, you're doing a great job. I'm especially pleased with how you're handling contour lines in the segmentation of the insects' carapaces. You're doing a good job of wrapping them around underlying forms and breaking the silhouette where appropriate to convey the illusion of layering.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-01-02 19:56

Nice work overall, but there are a couple things I want to address:

• The studies you did in relation to your bonsais are quite intriguing - I do want to mention though that you should not be deciding on your own what to do in lieu of assigned exercises - if something is assigned, it's there for a reason, and should be done as instructed. That said, it was a recent addition and I do leave a bit of time for students to transition to the newly assigned work. I would not have counted it against you had you not done the additional organic form work and stuck to the previous assignment, but still - as a rule, don't intentionally stray from my instructions.

• Initially your constructions tend to be somewhat loose - more focused on the object as a whole and sketching it out as shapes rather than on constructing individual components as solid, three dimensional forms and considering how they relate to one another. This definitely improves a great deal over the set, but if we look at your initial scorpion lay-in, we can see this looseness, and a general focus on 2D shapes over solid forms. That said, the result still comes out well, though if you look closely at its abdomen/thorax, you'll notice that it's been oversimplified quite a bit to the point that there's little distinction between them. I talk more about this in these notes.

• The wasp that follows it is considerably better - there's clearer focus on ensuring that every form you draw is complete and enclosed, rather than simply a collection of loosely associated lines.

• With your weta, you start drifting back to flat shapes, vague lines, over solid, enclosed forms, though you've got a mix of them. One thing that stands out is that your leg segment's shapes are complex right off the bat - you've got swelling to one end, and tapering to the other. Instead, it's better to construct them as simple sausages (as explained here) and then add on additional forms to add further volume where appropriate.

• With this beetle you're definitely delving hard into loose shapes and vague lines once again, much moreso than with the weta. You need to make sure you draw each and every form in its entirety - I'm noticing that you have a tendency to let your legs stop where they'd be overlapped by some other form, and this really serves to flatten them and robs us of a clear opportunity to demonstrate a fuller understanding of how they relate to one another in 3D space.

• For that same beetle, in regards to your question about heavy blacks, the issue is that you're too closely bound to what you're seeing in your photograph. Your personal goal there is obviously to reproduce what you see as closely as you can - this is why you focus on loose shapes to capture what you see in two dimensions, not what you understand in 3D. When you lean so hard to reproducing what you see, you move away from the greater goal of communicating what you understand. That's what we're doing here - through construction, we're communicating the idea of this beetle, not simply setting out to copy the photograph with perfect accuracy. With that freedom, you're able to apply those heavy blacks where it suits this goal of communication best - to convey the surface quality of its chitin, to capture the little bumps and irregularities and to convey its general smoothness. Because you're focusing on reproducing what you see, you're not making any real attempts to convey what it is that the photograph makes you understand. Your choice (or rather, my choice) of media impedes us in what we can convey, and more importantly how we can convey it. You don't have all the colours and gradients of that photograph to work with - you're working in pure blank ink, and as such, need to approach this communication with a different strategy. When it comes to texture and building gradients, the texture challenge goes into this in greater detail.

• The following beetle, the one you almost didn't include, is one of your best drawings here. You've drawn through most of your forms here, and have shown a much more confident approach in establishing each form independently, while also exploring how they relate to one another. This trend continues moreso through the remainder of the drawings, though there are several other places where you're not letting your forms overlap properly.

By and large you've clearly had a bit of a struggle when it comes to dealing with the specific methodologies covered in this lesson. Your end results are all very nice, but my focus is more on how you tackle them. Approaching those drawings with a loose sketch, focusing on 2D shape and all that is perfectly fine, but only outside of the context of these lessons. Here there are specific approaches I want you to employ because the goal here is not to produce a pretty drawing at the end. Each constructional drawing is an exercise in building your grasp of 3D space. You've clearly shown yourself capable of doing this on multiple occasions, but all the same despite the quality of your results I'm not quite comfortable in marking this lesson as complete just yet.

I'd like you to do 3 more insect drawings, following the methodologies covered in the lesson. Focus on form, not shape, on understanding every component you're adding to the drawing as it sits in three dimensions. Don't seek to reproduce what you're looking at, but rather focus on finding the best way to communicate what you understand with the tools you're limited to.

drawABoxStudent

2019-01-10 21:23

Hey Uncomfortable,

Here's my additional drawings, I did a few extra, it felt like it took a bit of time to get my head around what you were requesting and also to wean myself off working so closely to reference photos.

https://imgur.com/a/SoKKFbx

​

Most of the reference for these came from a superb flickr stream I stumbled on here, super hi res stuff and many insects with multiple angles of the same subject:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/131104726@N02/

​

thx!

​

Uncomfortable

2019-01-19 21:26

Honestly I think you're demonstrating a really great use of form and construction throughout this set. There are a few minor issues that I'll mention, but I don't think the concerns you're worried about there - about thinking too geometrically, jumping too complex too soon, etc - are issues I see in your work.

The issues I do see are as follows:

• I notice what appears to be a use of line weight here and there to take lines that you've already drawn and "commit" or "replace" them with a sort of cleaner stroke. You do this often when it comes to ellipses, because I do think you may need to work on drawing them to be a little tighter (remember to ghost them, draw from your shoulder, etc. as both of these can help bring the multiple lines of your ellipses to come closer together). Also, there are places where you're purposely drawing certain lines to be lighter or fainter. I don't want you to approach line weight in this manner. Every mark you put down should be drawn with a confident stroke, not attempting to keep it faint or hidden. When you do add line weight, focus on using it to clarify specific line weights to emphasize lines that exist already, rather than replacing them. The key here is that this allows you to add weight in a more limited fashion, where it can be drawn with a more confident stroke, rather than a slower, more careful one. Line weight isn't about separating the "real lines" with the ones you'd rather have disappear - it's about building an overall hierarchy where all lines are important, but some need to be brought forward in relation to the others.

• While your form construction is coming along great, I do think that when you decide to start approaching detail, you tend to give it a lot less attention than you ought to. There are very few places where you've tried it (which is totally fine - it's not a requirement of these lessons). The tarantula, for instance. It's very important that you take the time to study your reference carefully, and you transfer detail information only one or two lines at a time, looking back at your reference in between to refresh your memory. Your memory will try and oversimplify things, resulting in detail that looks somewhat cartoony and doesn't actually reflect any specific element of your source material. The key is to spend most of your time studying that reference and carrying over only specific bits and pieces, all the while being mindful of how those bits and pieces should be arranged along the surfaces and forms to which they are being applied.

• Proportion is another area that you do need to work on, though this is pretty normal and will improve with time. For instance, on your wasp, I definitely noticed that the legs came out very small in relation to the rest of the body. One trick that can help is to pay attention to the negative shapes - that is, the shapes on the image itself that are created in between forms. Studying these can help us understand the positional relationships between different forms. Proportion is all about relationships between forms, and further work on observing and studying your reference will also help you become more aware of this.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. As far as construction goes, you are doing very well - just make sure to implement what I've mentioned above as you continue to move forwards through the lessons.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-20 18:48

Honestly this is a considerable improvement. Your understanding of form and construction has definitely come a long way, especially in the last two drawings. There are a couple things I want to address however:

• You're right, constructing the sausages and then drawing the "actual shape" on top is not ideal, and it's not an approach I want you to employ because it waffles between thinking in terms of form and construction (the sausages) and thinking about the 2D shapes you want to put on the page. Forget about the 2D shapes for now, and forget about the fact that you're actually drawing on a piece of paper. The entirety of your construction should always consist of form. Your later two drawings were okay because your brain seemed to be leaning more towards understanding what you were putting down as solid forms even when you were thinking about the "actual shape" of things. That said, there are still areas - like where the mantis' thorax comes reaches the abdomen where you have some little bumps that stray from the underlying form. Whenever you create additional bumps like this, don't just make them up - you need to add the solid forms that create them and work through the three dimensional puzzle that is their interaction/connection to the other forms they're built off of.

• Don't draw your construction lightly and then "commit" with darker, cleaner marks. That's not what line weight is for. Line weight generally shouldn't be applied to the entire length of an existing line, especially not to replace it. Instead, it should be applied only to certain local areas of a mark to emphasize rather than replace it, and to clarify where certain forms overlap each other. Aside from that, make sure that every mark you put down is done so with confidence - don't go out of your way to hide lines by drawing them more faintly, and don't switch to a thicker or thinner pen. These drawings should be done with the same pen weight.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Your last two drawings really are remarkably better than what you'd drawn previously, and they definitely demonstrate a developing understanding of form and space. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-21 22:37

Admittedly your photographs aren't the clearest but your work is generally quite well done. The drawings you did from the demos - that is, the louse, the scorpion, and to varying degrees the wasp at the beginning (the one at the end was much better), as well as this horrifying thing did a great job of conveying strong constructional skills and a general awareness of 3D space and how your forms interact with one another within it.

That said, I am looking at the dates and I can see that this page is more recent than those other drawings, and they are vastly different. There's one issue (with the legs, which I'll get into in a second) that stands out above all else, but in general your approach here seems to be much more simplistic. I can clearly see that with the ladybug along the bottom, you were going to great lengths to draw the underlying masses faintly, and you then engulfed those forms with darker lines in a way that did not necessarily suggest a clear relationship between the underlying form and what you were adding on top. As a result, this kind of breaks the constructional connection and gives the object less solidity.

Also, as far as my lessons go, stay away from drawing things lightly and then going back over the drawing with a darker, richer line. The marks you put down at any given point should always be drawn confidently. Consider what that mark is going to contribute to the drawing, whether it fleshes the construction out so you can understand the illusion you can create and the relationships between the forms, or if it communicates a specific feature or detail to the viewer. If it does any of these things, and if no other mark does so more effectively, then draw that mark without trying to keep it hidden. You can come back after the fact to add line weight to specific sections of existing lines (NOT to go back over the entirety of a line and replace it with a darker one, as this results in stiffer linework), but this is only to clarify the way different forms overlap, not to create a separate "finished" drawing on top of your more approximate sketch.

Take these notes to heart. The forms you construct must be solid and confidently drawn, and you really want to understand at every phase of your construction that they feel solid and represent real, three dimensional forms - not just loose shapes on the page. I strongly recommend that you give the updated lesson content of lesson 2 a read. The changes I've made there really hammer this concept home and should help put things in perspective, especially on that first page about "thinking in 3D".

Now, about the legs. You have a tendency in many of these drawings to construct the legs that segments that are essentially stretched spheres or stretched ellipses. As covered in this demonstration, your leg segments must be constructed with sausage forms. It may feel like they're the same, but there is a core difference. With the stretched ellipses, through the first half of its length it is steadily expanding along either side, and then through the second half, it steadily contracts. This makes it quite stiff - you can't easily bend such a form. A sausage on the other hand, is really just two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Because of this tube, it can bend and flex as needed, giving it a greater sense of gesture and flow. This is why the legs on your scorpion and louse were much better, because they could bend and flow as needed. The first attempt at the wasp however had leg segments that were very stiff and unwieldy.

Now, I am really happy with those first several pages, but since most of those are demos and they were followed by more questionable drawings, I want you to read through the various notes I linked to, then try another 3 insect drawings. I'm confident that you are capable of reproducing the quality of those few successful drawings, but I need to be sure before we move on.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-30 00:29

Joke's on you! I haven't grown in more than a decade, I'll be five feet tall forever! ...until I start shrinking with old age, if I make it that far.

Anyway! You've shown considerable growth over this set, so congratulations on that. All the same, I'm going to point out a few of the issues I noticed, even though many of them were improved upon in later drawings. I figure this way you'll explicitly know what was wrong previously, just in case you weren't sure of the difference.

• On your scorpion, one thing that stood out was the fact that with the large claws, you blocked them in with a very large ellipse, and treated that ellipse as though it was just a mark on the flat page. That is to say, you drew on top of it without any concern for the fact that it represented a solid, three dimensional form within the space. It was ignored, and you used it simply to determine where you wanted to place that claw. The reason I generally advise against this is because, as I explain in the new first page of lesson 2, our drawings are elaborate stories that we are telling. They're lies. And every little mark we put down is a statement we're making about this story. All of these statements must line up, everything must be consistent in this description of form and 3D space - if we start contradicting ourselves, the lie we're telling becomes harder and harder to believe. A little slip up here or there is not a big deal (which is why this drawing was still fairly successful), but as they accumulate, the story starts to fall apart. In this case, those initial ellipses tell us of a much larger claw, whereas the later lines tell us of claws of a slightly different form and size. In order to keep your story straight, make sure that you stick to the forms you lay down, even if they're not exactly what you intended to draw. Keep moving forward and keep building on top of every form you add to your world. Don't replace them or ignore them, and if you MUST cut into one or carve it in some fashion, make sure you do so in a way that clearly defines an understanding of how both that form and the piece you've cut away from it exist in 3D space. This means using contour lines that respect its 3D nature to cut slices away as needed.

• Also in the scorpion, and to a degree in the spider that follows it, your legs are constructed with stretched ellipses. These stretched ellipses tend to feel quite stiff, because of how through half of their length they're growing wider and wider, and through the other half they're growing narrower and narrower. This doesn't lend itself very well to bending or flowing in a gestural manner, and limbs benefit greatly from this sense of gesture. As explained here, make sure you use sausages instead, which are essentially two spheres connected with a tube of consistent width, which is more prone to being flexible.

• The legs on the common wasp were somewhat more sausage like, but they weren't entirely consistent in their widths. Sometimes they'd swell considerably towards one end, and others got a little narrow through their midsection. It's absolutely true that these are qualities that you'll see in the segments of legs you're drawing, but remember that in construction, we're breaking these elements down into steps. First put down a simple, consistent, flowing, solid sausage, and then add additional forms to it to flesh out those volumes as needed.

• Not a mistake, just an observation - I really liked this guy's head. It felt over solid, and while the little protrusion on the front was off-center, you clearly demonstrated a good grasp of how these forms connected with each other.

• Your fly demonstrated far better grasp of this sausage business, though remember that you should define the intersection between two sausages with a single contour line right at the joint. This will help reinforce those forms.

• Fantastic work on the carpenter wasp demo, you're demonstrating vastly better use of the sausage method here, both in maintaining simple sausages, reinforcing the joints and adding additional forms to flesh masses out. One last thing though - when adding those additional forms, remember that they too are intersecting with the sausages, so an additional contour line to denote that specific intersection will help as well.

• Your later drawings are all demonstrating both exceptionally strong construction and form, but also very smooth, confident linework. You're much more willing to play with line weight, and to draw through all of your forms. All in all, you're demonstrating a much stronger understanding of 3D space.

• I did want to mention that on the hercules beetle at the end, you've got some scribbly lines just under its shell along the front of its thorax.. or possibly along one of its legs. I just wanted to mention that while the drawing is quite nice, those kinds of scribbly, erratic lines definitely detract from it.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-01-31 01:02

You show considerable improvement over this set.

Admittedly the organic forms with contour curves you start out with are okay, if a bit sloppy. The contour lines wrap around the forms well, but they have a tendency to fall outside of the silhouette of the form, and the forms themselves aren't often drawn with the kind of conviction that suggests solidity and weight. You're applying the technique correctly, but the execution comes off as somewhat unconvinced of the illusion you're meant to be creating.

Your first scorpion is alright - you're clearly thinking in form and construction, though certain areas do feel a little flat (like the pincers. Also, I do see one major issue here that isn't quite as present in the rest of your drawings, but is important enough to point out anyway:

You started out with a box for the thorax/abdomen, and a large ball for the head. As you progressed through the drawing however, you went on to either ignore these forms, or use them as a sort of "suggestion". So what we end up with are forms, or shapes, that are present there in the world, but that the rest of the drawing fails to acknowledge.

I'm not sure if you've had the chance to read this page on thinking in 3D from the newly revised lesson 2 - if you haven't, you should. It talks about the act of drawing as though we are telling a lie, and explains how a lie will fall apart if our facts don't line up. Any contradictions, any parts of the story that fail to corroborate one another, will whittle away the audience's willingness to believe us.

That is ultimately what these orphan forms are doing - they exist there, but the rest of the drawing suggests that they are not present. Once you've put such forms down, it's important that you incorporate them into your drawing fully, sticking to the same story all the way through - even if it's not the same story you meant to tell from the beginning.

Now, as I said, you improve by leaps and bounds over this set, and this issue doesn't come up quite as egregiously elsewhere, but I figured it was still worth calling out. I can see it a little bit as the initial block-in of the thorax on the bottom of this page, but it's not as noticeable. In general, we want to work additively, putting down a form that feels solid and believable, and then adding more forms on top of it, building our way to greater levels of complexity. If you simply cannot achieve what you're after without cutting into a form you've put in, then it's important that you actually cut into it. This means using contour lines to define the piece being cut away, and demonstrating an understanding of how it exists in space. This will make the cut more believable - unlike before where you had a box, and then simply drew directly on top of it without regard for how it occupied space in that world.

As you push through the homework, I can see your use of layered segmentation, building up form, breaking up silhouettes, using sausages to construct segments of legs, and so on. You're demonstrating a growing understanding of how these forms all fit together.

I have just one more minor point to raise. On this spider (which is actually one of my favourite drawings from this set), the segments of the legs feel a little bit stiff. You are using sausages here (in that they're like balls connected by a tube of consistent width rather than a stretched ellipse), but they're almost all very rigid. In general, even if your reference does appear to be very straight and stiff, I strongly recommend that you work in some kind of subtle flow to them, a rhythm gently bending a segment one way, then the next the other, and so on. This will help you make your subject matter feel more alive.

Anyway, keep up the fantastic work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-31 23:17

This is a good start, but there are definitely some issues we'll have to address.

To start with, your organic forms with contour curves are a bit weak, for a few reasons:

• When drawing your sausage forms, think of them as two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (as shown here). Keep the form fairly short (which you mostly have, aside from that long one on the first page), and mind the roundedness of the ends. You have a lot that have one end getting a little stretched.

• You are doing a good job of hooking your contour lines around properly, but at times the degree of the curve itself (imagining that it was a full ellipse that continued along to the other side) often comes off as inconsistent. Remember that such degrees shift over the length of the form, as explained here.

• Make sure you're keeping the contour curves snugly against the edges of the form, as explained here.

Your first spider isn't bad, though I do see you switching between the use of sausages and the use of stretched ellipses (again, explained here). I do also feel that you may not be drawing quite as large as you could - it feels rather cramped and small relative to the lines themselves.

Another major issue I want to mention is that you have a tendency to put down your construction lines, and then replace that linework with a darker, heavier stroke as a sort of "clean-up" pass. I've mentioned this previously (like in the form intersection video for lesson 2, as well as here though this was added as part of the overhaul) that you should not be applying line weight in such a way that you're trying to distinguish "real lines" from your "under drawing". ALL your lines contribute to the drawing, and you're to use line weight subtly to organize those lines, pulling some forward and pushing others back. Line weight should generally not be applied to the entirety of a line, and should instead be applied to limited sections of an existing line, usually to clarify overlapping forms or a silhouette.

One of the biggest risks with applying line weight as you have done is that it results in the whole drawing getting very stiff - because in trying to cover whole lines, you end up drawing slowly and carefully. Any line weight that is added must be drawn with the ghosting method, just as when you put down the original stroke.

Lastly, try to let your forms (like the abdomen and thorax) overlap more, so you can get the real sense that they're intersecting. As shown here you want to give yourself a spot to add a contour line to define the intersection itself, as this helps to give a sense of solidity to the construction.

Aside from the same line weight issues that are prevalent throughout this set, this beetle's forms are actually managed quite well. You may be overdoing the contour lines a bit, but the thorax feels very solid, and its relationship with the abdomen feels believable.

This one on the other hand suffers from an underdrawing that was drawn without a particularly clear belief that the forms you were drawing are actually three dimensional - and the clean-up pass exacerbated this issue. Looking at this drawing, I can tell that you're still thinking of all of this as though you're drawing lines on a flat page, rather than constructing real masses in a three dimensional world. It comes down to you not being convinced of the lie you're telling, and so your drawing tends to contradict itself (as we might contradict ourselves when telling a story that we do not truly believe). I talk about this more on the first page of lesson 2.

The last thing I wanted to point out was that in this ant, you seem to have avoided drawing those two bulbous masses of the thorax as being fully independent forms. You jumped into drawing two overly complex forms where you would have been far more successful had you simply drawn two solid balls, then figured out their intersections with a contour line.

I'd like you to do three pages of organic intersections from lesson 2, followed by four pages of insect drawings. Draw bigger, don't do clean-up passes, and draw your forms more confidently. Often times you stiffen up, causing your masses to have wobbly or stiff lines, which immediately makes them feel less solid.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-04 21:29

You've got a mixture of results here - there are some areas where your approach isn't quite following the way things have been instructed, as well as some areas that demonstrate really nice construction and a well developing grasp of the concepts.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that your organic forms with contour lines at the beginning are... okay. You've got simple sausage forms, and your contour curves are generally wrapping properly along the forms, but your linework is visibly stiff. You're drawing with a slow, steady stroke, which causes the lines to wobble a little. There's a lot of hesitation there, and not much confidence, so the strokes don't come out smoothly and consistently. I can also see that you're not drawing through your ellipses here, or throughout the lesson - that's something you should be doing for each and every ellipse through all of my lessons, in order to keep up that confident stroke and maintain the evenness of their shapes.

Also take greater care when adding that contour ellipse at the end of your forms here - the positioning and degree is important, and I think yours tend to be positioned a little off, in a way that suggests you may not be thinking enough about what you're trying to achieve when putting these marks down.

Through the earlier drawings in your set, I get the impression that you're definitely trying to build things up constructively, but what's missing is that you're building up flat, 2D shapes that exist on the page, rather than solid, three dimensional forms that exist in a 3D world. Remember that, as explained in the first page of lesson 2 (which has been updated since you completed it), we want to strive to get used to the idea that we're drawing a world to which the page itself is just a window.

With every component that you draw, you want to make sure that you're convinced that it's a solid, 3D form. This means adding contour lines as needed (just make sure you're thinking about what you're trying to achieve with each one, as it's easily overdone when students don't think about what they're actually doing). Then when you attach another form, make sure you define the intersection between them with yet another contour line right at the joint between them, as this really helps to reinforce the illusion of solidity for both. On top of that, the joint is also usually a more "realistic" place to put such contour lines, which always helps.

For the spider on this page, watch how you're drawing those legs. Rather than the recommended sausages (which you've used to varying degrees of success elsewhere), here you're drawing stretched ellipses. The difference is that through half of each segment, it's gradually getting wider and wider, and through the other half it gradually tapers. Sausages are two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, so the tapering happens only right at the ends, which allows it to be much more flexible and carry a gestural rhythm that stretched ellipses simply can't due to their inherent stiffness.

As you push through, I start to see you incorporating more form than shape, and being more mindful of how they intersect with one another, and as a result, your constructions grow more solid and believable. By and large I feel the drawings on this page are by far your most successful - you're demonstrating excellent use of form, you're using the sausage technique to construct legs that carry a strong gestural flow, and the constructions generally feel believable and tangible - especially the prawn.

The pages that follow actually do fall back to some of the previous issues (being flat, using more shape, etc.) so I'm not sure if these were done earlier, or if it's a matter of simple inconsistency, which isn't that abnormal. Just keep in mind what I've said here in terms of your weaknesses and strengths.

There is only last issue that I want to point out - many of your less successful drawings tend to be drawn smaller on the page, not quite occupying the room you have access to. Drawing smaller - which is something students will often do when they feel less confident in what they're about to do - robs you of the space your brain needs to work through these kinds of spatial problems. As a result, drawings become more cramped and stiffen up. In general, avoid this, and try and give yourself more room rather than less, especially when you're not feeling confident.

Now I've raised a lot of issues here, but the progress (aside from those last two pages) is definitely significant, so I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You can continue practicing what I've mentioned here in the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-08 22:42

Before I mark this as complete, I do want to point out that your last submission was about a week ago. There's been a number of changes to help manage the considerable amount of homework submissions (including teaching assistants being brought on and some tier changes) - one of them was a limit of 2 weeks between submissions (though this doesn't apply to cases where I ask for extra pages for a given lesson). I am still going to critique this, but from now on keep that in mind. This is actually my seventh critique of the day...

You've got a good mix of work here, and a good deal of it does demonstrate a well developing grasp of 3D space and construction. There are certainly issues, and I'll point them out, but you're generally doing pretty well.

I think what stands out most to me is that there is disjointedness in your use of line weight. If we look at this drawing for instance, which actually has some pretty good forms. If you look at the abdomen, where you've got some contour lines wrapping around the form, those contour lines are considerably heavier than the silhouette of that form. This case where the lines inside of the silhouette are much heavier than the outside causes the overall construction to feel weaker. The same concept is explained in these notes from the box challenge.

Line weight can be a tricky balance to nail, but there are a few fundamental rules to keep in mind:

• Line weight is relative - you don't need some lines to be a LOT thicker than those around them - a little bit of extra weight can go a long way. Really big jumps in weight can start to flatten things out and make them appear more 'graphic', especially when you have really thick lines along the silhouettes. (I'm not seeing too much of this in your work).

• As the lines on the inside of the silhouette (internal lines) start to get noticeably thicker than those defining the silhouette itself, the drawing will start to feel more like a loose collection of lines, than solid forms.

• Line weight should always be drawn with a confident stroke, using the ghosting method, so as to avoid situations where the line weight pass causes things to stiffen up (you've mostly done a good job of this here).

Basically, when you add line weight to one place, you do need to make sure that it stays balanced across the board.

For the abdomen on this drawing, you probably did jump into a more complex form too early, giving us a result that was flatter than it could have been. It'd be better to have dropped in a solid ball first, and then added more forms on top of it. Also, worth noting is that the legs on this drawing tend to pinch and taper through their midsection. Remember that sausage forms should maintain a consistent width through their length.

I'm quite fond of how you handled the segmentation on this wasp's abdomen. The silhouette line weight was still a bit light, but the layering of forms and use of contour lines was quite nice. I do want to mention though that you're definitely using the "under-drawing/clean-up-pass" approach here that I am strongly against. Don't draw your construction lines faintly and then go back over them to pick which lines you want to be part of your final drawing. Line weight builds a hierarchy of elements, but you don't have this kind of split dichotomy of "real lines" and ones you'd rather throw away. You'll notice that in all of my demos, I only add line weight to key places as needed, not to distinguish them from those that are not important - all the lines I put down are important and treated as such. Whenever I put a mark down, I think about whether or not it's going to contribute to this drawing or its construction in a meaningful way.

The core forms in this drawing were well done, but you definitely have a visible point where you go from paying a lot of attention to the solidity of your forms and construction, to just kind of rushing through the rest. I wonder if this is how you contend with points where you feel a drawing has gone wrong, and in order to follow my insistence that you finish you drawings, you rush through the rest. That's not really useful to anyone.

I think this drawing was my favourite of the set, in that it was quite solid and well constructed, and didn't suffer form the sort of underdrawing/clean up pass issue. Some of your leg segments were stretched ellipses rather than sausages but your main body was well put together.

When it comes to that whole thorax/abdomen thing, you're thinking about it a little backwards. It's not that the part of the body to which the legs connect is automatically the thorax - it's that the thorax exists as we've been drawing them (with beetles for instance, you've got those three major masses, the middle one is the thorax), and that is generally where the legs connect. There are a lot of cases where it's not clear how the back legs connect to the thorax (they seem to tuck into the abdomen instead) but there's more going on underneath the beetle than you're aware of. You may want to google "beetle upside down" but I warn you.. it's not pretty.

There are definitely cases where some beetles have a fused thorax/abdomen, but the drawing I linked last isn't such a case. It has a distinct thorax and abdomen, and the back legs do connect to the thorax, the last segment of that leg simply isn't visible from that angle.

Anyway, I've given a good bit for you to think about. You are generally doing pretty well, but there are a few little things with the silhouette line weight and the solidity of your sausage forms that lead me to ask for a few more drawings. I'd like you to do the following:

• One drawing following the wasp demo.

• One drawing following the louse demo.

• Two drawings of your own, demonstrating more solid, consistent sausage segments, better use of line weight and generally try not to let those non-core elements of your construction get sloppy. Try drawing bigger, engaging your shoulder more.

By and large you are doing a pretty good job but there still these issues that undermine a lot of your drawings' overall strengths.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-12 22:53

Looks like you timed your submission just right, falling exactly two weeks since your last one. Your work here is quite well done - you're demonstrating an understanding of the use of form and construction that steadily improves over the set, and a bold willingness to push your line weight and shadow shapes.

You've definitely got some timidity towards the beginning - I can see where you've drawn underlying constructional lines with a faint, more hidden stroke, obviously not quite willing to commit properly to the marks you put down on the page. You then follow up with a significantly darker stroke as a "clean-up" pass. In general, this is not how I want you to approach your drawings - we're not separating our construction lines from our final drawing. Each stroke plays a role, and line weight serves primarily to help organize and build a hierarchy. Whenever you find yourself wanting to add weight to the entirety of a line

This is an issue you demonstrate less and less as you push through, and your last drawing - the louse demo one - shows a much greater regard for every single mark you put down, which is great to see.

When it comes to your contour lines, you've got a balance of both excellent use of them in some places, and a slightly shakier grasp of those rounded forms - sometimes in the same stroke. Looking at this ant's abdomen, I'm really loving the way you're pushing your segments past the silhouette. Your use of contour lines here is also quite well done, except for how it meets the top edge. It doesn't quite hook around properly, and fails to really sell the illusion fully. It's almost there, but it falls just a little bit short. I think the waviness of the line may have made it a little more challenging at this point.

Your forms and construction as a whole are coming along great - I'm especially loving your scorpion for that reason. The segmentation of the body, the forms of the tail, and the claws feel very solid. The far claw (its left) is especially nice, as the way the form itself turns suggests a clear distinction between the top plane of the claw and its side. The legs were left a bit wanting though - they were drawn a bit stiffly, and perhaps didn't involve as much observation as they could have. For that reason they came out more simplistically than the rest of the body. Rather than the detail of the forms or anything like that, it was likely that the way they were posed and arranged felt off. We can compare them to the legs on your crab, for instance, where they're still quite simple, but the way they're arranged feels much more believable.

Anyway - you're doing great when it comes to your use of form and construction, and show a lot of progress over the set. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There is definitely room for growth, but they're the sort of things you'll chisel away at through further practice - both on this subject matter, and the things you'll encounter as you move forwards.

Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-19 03:57

Nice work overall, though there are a few points I'd like to raise.

To start with, your organic forms with contour curves - many of these are pretty well done, but they're a little hit and miss. Most on the first page are pretty weak, aside from the bottom left corner which is well done. There's a couple main problems:

• The sausage shapes themselves are irregular. You want to keep in mind that these sausage forms are essentially two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This means all the roundedness is on either end (rather than stretched along the length of the form) and the width remains constant along the length of the sausage.

• Your contour curves often fall out of alignment with that central minor axis line, and as a result end up being drawn a little stiffly or unevenly.

Keep these points in mind when doing this exercise. You've got more successes on the second page, but there are still some weak ones mixed in there.

Your work applying the carpenter wasp demo was well done. The texture you attempted to add to its wing was definitely a bit of a misadventure, but by and large you focused on the use of solid forms and construction and executed them effectively. Your layering of segmentation over simple forms came out pretty well, though I do still want you to focus on how these forms wrap around the underling rounded form, as where the lines get smaller, you get a little sloppier in keeping them from flattening out.

Also, remember that the sausage method of constructing legs involves a fair bit of emphasis being placed on the single contour line placed at the joint between two sausages. It's critical to help reinforce the illusion of form without having to rely on contour curves placed along the length of the form (which tends to stiffen things up). Take a look at these notes again to see what I mean.

Your first ant there is coming along decently, though I do see certain places where you're not quite employing the sausage leg construction. You do a much better job of this on the second drawing, which is actually extremely successful. The forms feel quite solid, your segments are voluminous and believable, and the whole thing feels real. The center line you've drawn along the abdomen was definitely somewhat off, but the rest is quite well done.

You carry this through the rest of the drawings. In some places you slide back a little, then regain ground in other drawings, so it's clear that you still are coming to grips with the concepts and letting them solidify. This will continue to happen through practice, but by and large you're demonstrating growth in the right direction. What is shared across most of these drawings is that you're clearly thinking in 3D space - you're showing awareness of how the forms intersect and relate with one another, and you definitely grasp how these drawings exist in 3D space, not just as a collection of lines on the page.

The last thing I want to point out is that you do definitely still struggle in the few areas you try to add texture, especially along the wings - for example, on the dragon fly. The most important thing to keep in mind is that texture is not a flat pattern that sits on the surface of an object like wallpaper. It is made up of a series of solid three dimensional forms. Rather than drawing the lines that enclose or define these objects, as there are so many of them and they are so very small, we instead draw the impact that they have on their surroundings.

As described in the updated lesson 2 material, we capture this impact by drawing the shadows they cast. Instead of thinking of the marks we put down as being uniform lines separating space into sections, we use shadows to suggest where forms exist, and how far off they rise off the surface (with objects rising higher casting larger shadows). We can also have the freedom to manipulate the nature of the light source that might cast these shadows in order to make texture more apparent in some areas, and less in others.

I also recommend you read through the new notes on the texture analysis exercise, as they explain how to control texture in this manner.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-26 00:46

You've got some good stuff here, and a number of important signs that you're absorbing the material. There are also some issues in your approach that I will identify so you can work on them as you move forwards.

To start with, your organic forms with contour curves were fairly well done, but there were a couple there that stood out. Now, I think it's fair to assume that these were just slip-ups, but I want to point them out just in case.

We're looking at the bottom left corner of the first page, and the top left corner of the second page. The issue is with the little contour ellipse you added at the end. Based on the contour curves, those ellipses are on a surface that is facing away from us, though the way it's been drawn suggests that you intended for that end to be facing towards us. This kind of conflict causes visual confusion that undermines the overall illusion we're trying to create.

Now, as I said, these were anomalies - the rest of yours were quite well done, so I'm guessing these were just little mistakes.

Moving onto your insect drawings, I'm very pleased with your general use of construction, and especially with how you wrapped segmentation around underlying forms to create that sort of layered look, along with having those pieces break past the silhouette. I was especially pleased with your fly scorpion - every part of that felt very solid (though the markings along the wings weren't particularly great, but they didn't take away from the drawing too much).

You're also, for the most part, doing a good job of being mindful of how different forms connect to one another, defining their intersections to help reinforce the illusion of form.

One of the biggest issues I noticed was simply that you have a tendency of drawing rather small. You've got a lot of space on the page at your disposal, but you tend to take up only a fraction of it. As a result, your forms feel a bit cramped and stiff, and this gets in the way of the illusion we're trying to create.

One of the casualties of this size issue is that your leg segments' sausages don't really have enough of an overlap to be able to really define how they connect to one another properly. As you can see in this demo, drawing the segments large allows us to get a nice view of how they're interpenetrating each other. Defining the clear contour line at the joint in turn helps imbue both segments with a strong sense of solidity and form. You are doing this in yours, but because everything's so smushed together, the effect is negligible.

I'm also seeing a few places where you're attempting to apply some sort of shading through hatching to your drawings. As explained here, we don't bother with shading for shading's sake in these lessons. Now, this usually happens because a student is trying to figure out how to approach adding texture and detail. Hatching lines, as you've used them there, tend to be the first technique they think to use. It often serves as a sort of generic stand-in for the actual texture that is present in the reference image, and for that very reason, you should stay away from it. Instead, if you want to apply texture, it's important to take the time to really study what is present in your reference image and carry over very specific pieces of information, only looking away from that reference for a moment or two before refreshing your memory once again.

Of course, the scale of the drawings also plays a role in making it quite difficult for you to add detail. There's just not a lot of room to play with, and all the marks end up feeling very thick in comparison to the drawing as a whole.

Now, by and large you are doing a pretty great job as far as the construction goes, so I am going to mark this lesson as complete. As you move into the next one, be sure to draw everything bigger. Take full advantage of the entire page you have before you, don't limit yourself to a limited portion of it. When you do decide to tackle detail, I recommend that you take a look at the texture analysis exercise notes from lesson 2 (this was updated since you last attempted it), as well as the rest of the notes from that lesson. Detail is all about studying your reference closely, and refraining from relying on your memory.

Uncomfortable

2019-03-01 20:47

Nice work! Overall you've done a pretty great job and demonstrate considerable improvement over the course of this set, especially when it comes to your ability to manipulate and resolve form and construction in 3D space. There are some issues that came up here and there - some of which you seem to have fixed on your own and others that still linger, and I'll try to touch on each one.

The first thing that jumps out is that while your organic forms with contour ellipses are very well done, the ones on the third page with contour curves are often times drawn with a curvature that is too shallow as it reaches the edge of the form. The issue you're encountering is explained in these notes. Now, I can see your use of similar techniques in your insect constructions, and there they're done much better.

Jumping into the wolf spider you've got at the beginning there, you're handling the overall forms quite well. One thing that jumps out at me has to do with the sausage method you're applying to the legs. You are indeed constructing the sausages well, but you're missing the (surprisingly important) step of drawing a contour line right at the joint between the sausages, defining their intersection. You'll notice it in this diagram - along with the sausages being layered on top of one another, there's an additional curve added at the joint. This serves to reinforce both the understanding of how these two forms interact in 3D space, and also furthers the illusion that both forms are three dimensional without having to add additional contour lines along its length (something you did on the forelimbs of the weevil you drew later on). Adding contour lines along the length of a similar sausage form can often serve to stiffen it up, so reserving them for the joints can help us maintain their fluidity and solidity simultaneously.

On the same page as the wolf spider, you've done a great job with the ribbing/contour curves along the insect on the lower half of the page's abdomen. You're also layering forms quite well, though the head there can serve to be divided up into more individual forms and built up more gradually. You can think of these heads as more of a 3 dimensional puzzle with many interlocking components - this is something we'll expand on when we get into lesson 5.

On the ant drawing, I did notice that the legs certainly started to stray from the sausage method, and as such they end up feeling a lot less sturdy. Remember that the sausage method calls for a form of consistent width being used for each segment - additional masses (like how the ant's leg segments are much larger towards one end) can be added after the fact with the addition of a ball towards that end which can then be merged into the larger sausage. It comes back to the overall principle of construction working from simple to complex through the continuous addition of more simple forms.

Also, on the ant's abdomen, I noticed that while your segmentation was fairly well done, it didn't push past the silhouette there, which definitely weakened the resulting impact.

I quite like how the head and thorax of the insect beneath the weevil was constructed - we get a pretty nice sense here of the top and side planes of the form, which helps push the illusion that it's all 3D.

For the dragonfly, watch the curvature of your contour lines along its abdomen - the top edge is okay, but if the curves were extended past the bottom edge, they'd fly right off the form. This kind of shallowness of curvature breaks the illusion that the line is wrapping around the underlying form.

Nice work breaking into detail/texture on the flying ant. I do want to address one thing though - don't rely on hatching lines as you have here. It's often used when we don't really want to think about texture and instead are focusing on shading for shading's sake, which as explained back in lesson 2 (though all of that material was updated since you last went through it) is not what we're looking to do in these lessons. Using hatching allows us to ignore the texture that is actually present - instead, take care to study that reference image carefully to find any textural information present. The fact that much of this flying ant's abdominal exoskeleton is quite shiny is in itself texture, and the hatching lines suggest a different kind of surface quality than what is there. Instead, when things are shiny, we tend to have very distinct blocks of black/white, rather than alternating gradients. Along the thorax and head, we can see some wrinkles and little pockmarks, which can also be leveraged.

Additionally, on the abdomen you noticed some of the little droplets of water, and seem to have tried to capture them as little circles. As explained here, instead of trying to enclose things like this fully, any forms that make up our textures and tend to wrap around other larger forms are better implied by drawing the shadows they cast, rather than attempting to enclose their silhouettes.

I can certainly see your strategies in regards to texture evolving and developing as you push through, and there are definite improvements on this front. Notice that this idea of focusing on the shadows cast by the forms present on a surface can be applied in most cases when it comes to texture - even on the dragonfly's wings, where you've drawn something of a grid (which becomes quite visually noisy and distracting). Since shadows are subject to how much light is being shined on the object, we can control the detail density as needed, as long as we focus on putting down the cast shadows rather than thinking of our marks as being enclosing linework. The texture analysis exercise from lesson 2 (a new addition that came with the recent update to the website) discusses controlling detail density further.

Anyway, throughout the homework set you demonstrate an increasing grasp of how these forms can be combined to create solid and believable objects, and are continually pushing your understanding of 3D space. Keep up the great work, consider this lesson complete, and feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-03-04 01:08

I don't think you've gotten rusty at all! For the most part, you're actually doing a fantastic job in demonstrating an understanding of how your forms fit together in 3D space. You're also focusing on building up from simple, easily-constructed forms, never jumping into anything too complex too early. There are a couple issues that I'd like to draw to your attention, but by and large you're doing great.

The first thing I noticed was really minor - in your organic forms with contour curves, remember that the sausage forms are basically two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You're pretty close to this, but there are a couple places where you're either stretching out the curvature of the sphere portions at the ends, or where one of the ends is larger than the other. It doesn't sound like anything that important, but it can make it a little trickier to apply the contour curves, and may take your focus off their alignment.

The next thing I noticed was pretty consistent through most of your drawings, and that's how you're approaching this as though you're putting down an underlying construction, and then coming back over it to replace lines with a cleaner, darker stroke. There is a visible distinction between your fainter construction lines and those that might be considered "final", and this is not an approach I want you to be applying. For the most part, it tends to imbue the drawings with a sense of stiffness (usually coming from attempting to match the underlying lines as closely as possible, and therefore slowing down out of a fear of making mistakes, rather than executing those marks with the same kind of confidence we use everywhere else). It also has a few other negative effects, like encouraging us to ignore the underlying basic forms (for example, adding features that aren't actually there when going over with the "final lines" rather than adhering to the construction itself). It also encourages us to try and hide those construction lines by drawing them more faintly and again, less confidently.

It's important to treat everything as being a part of the final drawing. Line weight serves only to build a visible hierarchy between those lines, and to clarify places where forms are overlapping. Line weight should be applied to limited sections of lines where this is needed, and should always be blended back, so a single line may vary in weight throughout its length.

It's worth mentioning that this drawing was generally drawn quite a bit more confidently, and so the visible spectrum of weights made the drawing quite a bit nicer, and the forms more believable. You clearly never threw that information aside and put lines down thinking only in terms of how they sit in 2D space here - each line flows in and out of the canvas.

The last point I wanted to raise was that when constructing legs, you vary in where you apply the sausage method. Sometimes you skip it outright (like the centipede's legs), sometimes you apply it correctly, and sometimes you're close but tend to make the ends of the segments shallow, more like the edge of a cylinder (like on this spider).

The sausage technique follows a few simple tenets:

1. The segments are constructed with sausages, meaning two equal spheres connected by a simple tube (though we don't draw all these forms since it's a fairly simple one to knock out).

2. We ensure that two segments intersect visibly - they don't barely touch, they plunge right into one another's ends. You can think of it as though they share, or come close to sharing, the the spheres on their ends.

3. The joint/intersection of those two sausages is defined clearly with a contour curve. This reinforces the illusion that they're 3D forms, and frees us from having to apply any other contour lines through their lengths where they risk stiffening the construction.

This process forces you to understand how they exist as 3D forms, how those forms relate to one another, and so on.

Anyway, overall you're doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to apply these principles in the next lesson, as the same sorts of challenges will indeed come up.