Uncomfortable

2018-09-28 17:49

You show a mix of a developing grasp of construction and a few bad habits or areas of weakness in your approach that are hindering you. None of them are uncommon issues, but they are important to be pointed out.

The first and most significant thing that I'm noticing is that when you lay down your early construction lines - blocking out your masses and so on, you are very clearly doing so with the intent to keep them fainter, to keep them hidden, and while you may not notice, this impacts how they are drawn. There's more hesitation there, and overall less consideration for what they represent in space. It's important that you get used to every act of construction as placing and manipulating forms within space - forms that are solid and concrete, that cannot be ignored or avoided. This means drawing all your lines with the same kind of confidence and not attempting to hide or mask them.

We organize the linework afterwards with line weight and other tricks, but none of that hierarchy is remotely considered until that point. Before then, we weigh every mark we put down - if it contributes to the drawing or its construction, then we put it down. If it is unnecessary to the act of visual communication (be it for detail, for conveying the solidity of our forms or how they relate to each other), or if its purpose is already being performed by another mark, then we don't.

Always remember that each and every drawing here is an exercise - it is not meant to result in a pretty drawing at the end (now you're clearly not aiming for that most of the time, as you do draw through your forms and go through construction, just not as confidently as you could), it is all about training the student in understanding how forms relate to one another in 3D space, how they can be combined to create solid forms, and most importantly, drilling into them the belief that everything they draw is solid and three dimensional. We all start out with the knowledge that we're drawing 2D lines on a flat page, and that what we're doing essentially amounts to trickery and illusion. The goal is to ultimately believe so strongly in the lie we are telling others that it simply becomes our reality. That it becomes impossible to draw a straight mark across a form we know to be a sphere without it curving along its surface, even though it's really just a circle on the page.

That's what all these extra steps we take, and all the exercises themselves, are about. We want to internalize that understanding and belief so that even when we don't go through all the steps directly on the page, we'll still understand what we're drawing in that manner.

That said, as I mentioned early on, there actually is a good deal of impressive stuff here. I loved the way you tackled the furry neck on this elk for example, and if your imgur gallery is in reverse order (which I believe it is, given that the hybrids come at the end), you definitely improve a great deal over the set.

That said, there are a couple pages of direct notes I've written which you'll find here. In addition to this, there are a few demos I want to point you to. You may or may not have seen these previously, but I really want to drill home the process applied in each construction, since you do seem to have a tendency to follow some steps more closely, and others a little more loosely.

• How I would generally approach drawing an elephant. You'll notice that I approach the legs differently from the sausage method I pointed out in my critiques above - I still want you to get used to the sausages moving forward.

• A full step by step how I'd approach drawing a wolf - this is one of the more details demos I've got, and you can see how I'm drawing everything out without skipping steps in order to keep things neat and clean

• How to draw a tiger's head. I noticed that you struggled somewhat with your head constructions. I did see improvement, but there are a few points here (like the eye sockets) that are definitely going to be of value.

I'd like you to do 4 more pages of animals drawings, focusing on applying all of what I've mentioned here.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-18 20:18

All in all you're doing a pretty great job. There's definitely plenty of room for growth, but you're absolutely on the right track and you're showing that your understanding of space and the relationships between these different forms is improving a great deal. Your constructions feel structurally sound and believable, and while some of the proportions will certainly improve with continued honing of your observational skills, it's all certainly getting there.

There are a few points that I want to raise that should help continue to steer you on the right track.

• The most significant point is that I noticed that you did seem somewhat preoccupied with detail. Often when I see this with students, it suggests that they may not be paying as much attention to establishing as solid of a construction as they can, because they're often thinking too far ahead and splitting their focus. Keep this in mind - detail, no matter how attractive and alluring, holds very little value here. Our focus is completely on learning how to construct solid objects, and no amount of detail is going to fix the weaknesses in our underlying structure.

• You have a tendency to oversimplify feet and paws, though to varying degrees. On some of the wolves, they're just nubs (which shows a lack of attempt), whereas in other places you've at least tried to flesh them out, though either way they do tend to fall behind your torsos.

• At times you do draw smaller than you should, and also smaller than you could. No need to squeeze two drawings into a single page - take advantage of the space you have afforded to you. Spatial problems like construction benefit considerably from being given more room for your brain to work.

• Your chameleon is adorable, and its head is very well structured. Very strongly three dimensional, great work. You'll also notice that it has minimal texture/detail, you really gave yourself the chance to focus entirely on how it exists in three dimensions.

I'm not sure if you've seen this before, but I have this wolf demo which outlines a lot of the more specific issues I saw in how you approached your construction. Pay special attention to what I say in regards to constructing legs with sausage segments and reinforcing their joints/intersections with a single contour curve. Also, while the head construction stuff there is useful, I've also got this tiger head demo that goes further in depth with that.

While you're doing pretty well already, and show considerable improvement by the end of the set, I'd like you to do three more pages of animal drawings taking into consideration what I've said here and leveraging what I've shown in those two demos. For these three pages, don't include any texture or detail - take construction as far as it will take you, and leave it at that.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-24 18:14

Your cat and kangaroo are very, very well done and show a great use and understanding of construction. Your boar is... kind of an unfortunate stepchild. You built that sausage for the torso, but then wrapped it in a much more arbitrary shell that wasn't really supported by the scaffolding you'd built up at that point. That whole outer shell is just guesswork, which firmly undermines the rest of your construction and makes the drawing fall flat.

BUT 2/3 is still excellent, and we all have drawings that just come out looking wrong now and then. You're clearly understanding what you should be aiming for, and are demonstrating a good grasp of the material. So let's sweep Mr. Piggy under the rug and move onto lesson 6.

Keep up the good work.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-27 19:20

Very well done! By and large you're demonstrating an excellent use of the constructional method throughout this set, as well as a well developing understanding of how everything you're drawing consists of solid, tangible, concrete three dimensional forms. You've very clearly moved past thinking of what you're drawing as being a series of lines on the page, into the realm of actually believing in the illusion you're attempting to create. So fantastic work on that!

Here and there, there are some minor issues in terms of proportion and general observation, but it's nothing I wouldn't expect to see, and they appear more to be remnants as you continue to forge forwards.

I have just a couple of observations to offer in terms of places where your approach is a little askew:

• When drawing quadrupedal legs, you generally approach them quite well, but you have a tendency to draw the foot as one whole continuous segment. This results in the toes (the actual bit on which the animals walk) coming out somewhat flat because you're jumping straight into a more complex combination of toes too early, without having blocked in the additional mass. What you should be doing is separating that length into two segments (heel to ball of foot, ball of foot to end of toes), then splitting the latter into the toes.

• When you tackle fur, right now you're being a little too erratic with it. It tends to come out haphazard, a little poorly planned and thought out, and generally feels spiky. It's really important that with fur you design each individual tuft with care and intent. You can't do this on autopilot, because you'll end up creating a repeating pattern that the viewer will pick up on very quickly. Often times doing fewer tufts, but spending more time designing them will yield a much better result. Also keep in mind that you're just trying to suggest to the viewer what the surface quality of this object is - you don't have to really drill it into their skulls, just suggest it with a few tufts here and there.

• When drawing feathers, always remember that because they're arranged in layers, you're going to end up with a lot of cast-shadows from one layer of feathers onto another. Right now you're defining the edges of the feathers (though I like that you're allowing some of those edges get lost-and-found rather than enclosing each one entirely), but try and vary the thickness of the shadow. Remember that it is a cast shadow and not just a line - because lines don't actually exist in the world. Here's an example.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-11-05 21:38

Your link appears to be pointing to /u/OrdinaryMushroom's work. Did you perhaps accidentally point to the wrong imgur album?

Uncomfortable

2018-11-06 22:23

I actually completely agree - there are definitely some issues, but you do still show progress over the course of the set. Overall your understanding of 3D space does improve, though I think that with some adjustments to your approach, you'll be able to do much better.

The first thing I noticed, and it holds true through the whole submission, is that you're actively trying to hide your construction lines. You're drawing them faintly, keeping them as invisible as possible, so as to maintain a nice, pretty end result. One of the most important things to realize and accept when it comes to drawabox as a whole is that we're not here to draw pretty pictures. Each and every drawing we produce for these lessons - from lesson 1 all the way to lesson 7 - are exercises. It's not about how they look at the end, but rather what we learn from drawing them.

Actively trying to draw lines more faintly or timidly changes how we draw them, changes what they tell us, and changes how we understand what we're constructing. Additionally, thinking that we're going to go into a lot of detail or texture from the get-go also changes our approach. It makes us less willing to really draw through our forms with confidence.

So that's number one - when drawing anything as a part of these exercises, before every mark you draw, think about what that line is going to contribute overall. If it's going to contribute to your understanding of the forms you're constructing and how they relate to one another, or if it's going to help communicate some key element of the object you're drawing, then draw it with a confident, persistent pace. Don't worry about keeping it faint or hidden or anything. The same confident, persistent pace. If however it does not contribute anything of value to any of those areas, or if its purpose is already being served by another line that is already present, then don't draw it at all. Afterwards, you can always go back in to add line weight to key local areas - not replacing whole lines with a fresh new "clean" stroke, but just emphasizing things that already exist to clarify how different forms and elements overlap one another, and to help build a more organized visual hierarchy of line.

What I mentioned just now about line weight being about small, local additions of weight rather than outright replacing linework or doing a clean-up pass is important, so i'm going to repeat it. Don't go back over a drawing to replace its linework - any and every line you add to a drawing is going to be a part of that drawing (for these exercises). There's no such thing here as a rough sketch and a "clean" drawing. It's all just one thing. It also helps that since we're not trying to replace entire lines, because it allows us to maintain that same confidence we have when we're drawing the initial lines, rather than having the strokes stiffen up because we're too focused on matching an existing line too closely.

The rest of the advice I'm going to offer is going to be in the form of a couple demo's I've got:

• Drawing a Wolf. Focus especially on what I say about how the legs are drawn - generally utilizing sausage forms, that are reinforced with a single contour curve at the joint where the sausages meet. It's a particularly effective approach that combines the flowing rhythm and gestural quality of these forms (note that a sausage is not just a stretched ellipse - it's two balls connected by a tube of consistent width), as well as their solidity.

• Drawing a Tiger's Head. Here, pay special attention to how the eye socket is not just a continuous, round.. thing. It's made up of several independent edges with their own directional, carved quality. Think of it as though you're actually carving into a ball - you're not just sticking an ellipse on there, you're actually cutting pieces of it away.

For now, I'd like you to do 4 more animal drawings, taking into consideration what I've said here. Focus entirely on construction - don't worry about texture, fur, or any of that stuff for now. With your next submission, you can add a little reminder for me to get into texture at that point, if I feel you've developed your construction further, as I do have a few points to share on that matter. I just don't want to distract you with it now.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-16 23:49

The good:

• You're demonstrating a well developing grasp of 3D space. You clearly have a sense of how the objects you're constructing sit in space, and this definitely improves over the course of the set. You're able to manipulate forms and masses quite well.

• You're showing reasonably strong observational skills - you're not getting stuck drawing symbols or working from memory - the marks you put down do reflect believable features and elements to each construction.

The bad:

• You're getting a little ahead of yourself, and are forgetting that this is a drawabox lesson. The short of it is: you're rushing, your drawings are sketchy and messy, and you're not employing any restraint. There's no line economy here, and many of your drawings end up being quite messy. That's not inherently bad, but it isn't the approach we're using here. You need to be applying the ghosting method to each and every mark you put down. You have to think, before you move to place a mark on the page, whether or not this mark is going to contribute to what you're trying to communicate to the viewer, or if it's going to help you understand your construction better. If it does, then you go through the ghosting process to put the mark down. If it doesn't, or if what you want your mark to accomplish is already being done by another mark - or if there's another mark that could do it better - you simply don't draw it.

• Connected to the previous point, your use of construction is generally pretty loose. One of the core aspects of the construction we're covering here is that every form we add to our construction exists as a solid mass in a 3D world. We then build onto them - we don't use them as loose suggestions, elements that float around in relation to one another. We fit everything together snugly, so every form or mass is grounded on something else, and we can gradually build up complexity without losing the illusion of solidity. Though it's the first page, this one demonstrates this problem very well. See how the ribcage is floating arbitrarily inside of the body?

Ultimately every mark, shape or form we put down on the page is an answer to a question. Once that question is answered, we must adhere to it - even if that answer is wrong. For example, how big is the ribcage mass on an animal? Once you've drawn in that solid form, you can't go back to change your answer by simply drawing a larger torso around it, encompassing the original one. The reason is that now you'll have multiple visual elements on the page that now point to different, contradictory answers. These contradictions undermine the overall cohesiveness of the construction, and make it all less believable. Think of it as though your construction is like a group of people who are all trying to tell the same lie. If their lies don't match up, then they're not going to be very convincing.

Now, if you need to make the ribcage bigger, there are ways of doing that - by simply finding new questions to answer. We can add masses (similar to how we pile organic forms on top of each other in the lesson 2 organic intersections exercise) to the existing form to further build it out - the difference here is that this process requires us to treat both the original form and the addition as being solid forms that exist in 3D space. At no point are we trying to ignore the original form - we're working with it and building on top of it.

• Lastly, your rushed, sloppy, sketchy approach results in a lot of texture and details that have little to no effort behind them. Every mark you put down should be designed and considered carefully - fur isn't just a mess of random lines, it's a purposeful arrangement of tufts, each designed individually and laid out to communicate an idea without becoming distracting as demonstrated here. If you're not going to put thought and planning into something, simply don't draw it. It's not a required part of each drawing, focusing entirely on construction is entirely fine too.

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do at least 6 more pages of animal drawings. Take your time, don't rush. Also worth mentioning, you've effectively torn through lessons 1-4 and the box/cylinder challenges pretty quickly, and have submitted quite a few times relative to the pledges you've maintained. As such, I want you to hold off on your resubmission until December.

Edit: I forgot to mention, take a look at these two demos in regards to how I apply the constructional methodology:

• Wolf Demo. Notice how each line is executed with intent and care. If I'm drawing a ball form, then I'm focusing only on drawing that - I'll figure out where I want it, ghost through it, and make sure that it feels solid and three dimensional before moving onto a different task.

• Tiger Head Demo. Look specifically at how I'm tackling eye sockets. They're not just ellipses I've drawn on the cranium - I carve them in with separate lines for each edge, cutting along the surface of the form.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-29 21:41

I can definitely see that this lesson was a challenge for you, and I think a great deal of it was psychological. Drawing animals can be a very daunting task, and sometimes when we embark on something overwhelming, we can find ourselves forgetting things we've learned or simply failing to apply them correctly out of panic - even though we've demonstrated our ability to do so previously. I think that's what's happened here.

Looking back on your insect work, you ended up demonstrating a well developing grasp of construction and form (especially with the first page of your redo), but here there's a lot that falls short. While there are a lot of specific issues that I could point out, I've decided to do that through redlining a few pages. Ultimately you can take a look at them, but don't worry too much about those specifics.

The problem is more likely a matter of some panic (as mentioned above), as well as a matter of forgetting the lesson material before having the chance to apply it and not rereading it or rewatching the demos. As a result, you worked with what little you remembered and guessed the rest.

So instead of tackling each mistake I see directly, we're going to start with a bit of a clean slate and a few extra demos:

• Wolf demo. This is one of the most detailed demos I've got, and generally tends to be the most helpful. I'm going to be incorporating it into the lesson itself once I'm done with the website rebuild I'm currently working through.

• Tiger head demo. A detailed demo on head construction.

• Antelope head demo. Another one, though less detailed.

I want you to do 6 more pages of animal drawings. All of these should include no detail or texture (you generally didn't bother with that before which is fine, but I did see a bit of fur here and there, don't worry about that this time around).

The first page should be you drawing along with the wolf demo. Follow it to the letter, each step, but skip step 9.

Based on your previous work, I really do think you're capable of much better than this, and that you just let things get a little ahead of you.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-06 00:55

Alright! So you show a good deal of progress over the set, especially towards the end, but there are a number of things that we need to address. There were a few of these though that I really liked - for example, the ass on this page, and towards the end you definitely did rein in your overal.. scratchiness. I know that I addressed this on the chat, but you have to remember that this is drawabox - we're applying specific principles and encouraging certain habits. That means that you've got to keep applying the ghosting method, drawing through your ellipses, etc. Every single mark you put down needs to be planned and thought out. No wastage. You've clearly demonstrated yourself capable of that by the end, so earlier on it was simply a matter of not trying in that regard.

When we addressed that issue on discord, I did mention that you should try to follow along with the wolf demo at least once. You didn't include it here, though I won't assume you didn't do it at all - but there are a few important things that the demo would have touched on that you seem to have missed here.

• Your ribcages are all too small. As shown here, they're usually about half the length of the torso, as they are on humans.

• You do play around with a lot of different approaches for drawing legs - the sausage technique is generally the best approach (at least that I've seen), for a few reasons. Firstly, sausages flow really nicely - where stretched oval segments tend to be very stiff, a sausage (two balls connected by a tube of consistent width) is free to flex in any direction. Secondly, they maintain solidity without getting stiff - contour lines are great but they can really easily add a sense of stiffness depending on where and how they're added. The sausage techniques places them at the joints, leaving the lengths of the segments free and unhindered, while still being reinforced. We can achieve this pretty nicely because of the balls on either end, something we can't do with regular cylinders.

• You're still kind of willy-nilly with your head construction, skipping steps as you see fit. Here, I show how the head is a sort of puzzle with a bunch of pieces that fit together. Also, your eyesockets are often kind of a mess because you're drawing so small that they end up being so cramped you have virtually no control over those lines. I mentioned this when we talked, you need to draw bigger to give yourself more room to think through spatial problems. There's no need to cram numerous animals into one page.

• When you do draw your eyes, draw a ball and then construct the eyelids around it. This again comes down in a big way to the scale of your drawings, though from what I could see there wasn't much going into this.

Now, I want from you three more animal drawings. One of them should be a 1-to-1 follow-along with the wolf demo. Don't try and interpret things yourself, just follow the instructions and draw big. Give yourself enough room to implement everything demonstrated there, including the head construction and the eyelids. Don't sketch, don't be scratchy, ghost and plan every single mark you put down.

The other two can be drawings of whatever kind of animal you want, but I want to see you using the techniques and concepts covered in the wolf demo.

While you are certainly showing progress, you're capable of much better. It's just a matter of following these demos better.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-09 00:47

Definitely a big improvement. There are still areas to work on, but by and large you've definitely grown so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're free to move onto lesson 6.

Here are the things you still need to work on: https://i.ibb.co/0cx1rFK/witchoftherock.jpg (for some reason imgur wasn't working...)

In addition:

• Your bear's back legs have no knees.

• When you add the additional masses, think more like you're doing the organic intersection exercise from lesson 2 - don't just shape out an arbitrary blob and give it contour lines. Try and imagine as though you're layering an actual (simple) mass on top and build up that way. I demonstrate what I mean here, towards the bottom.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-11 20:56

You're certainly showing some growth here, but there are still a few things I want to point out and clarify.

• On the wolf, you did a pretty great job applying the demonstration. Just a couple little hitches here - the ribcage could have stood to be a bit larger, and the head ended up being a bit too small. Proportional issues like this are pretty normal, but it is something to keep in mind. Always remember that the ribcage is generally going to be half the torso length, and the pelvis is usually about a quarter, leaving another quarter of a gap between them. I really did like the contour ellipses you used to establish the intersection between the neck and torso though, and for the most part you applied the sausage leg segment technique quite well.

• For the head studies on the next page, there are a couple issues. First off, watch the curvature of the 'center line' you're drawing on your initial cranial ball. If we were to extend it to a full contour ellipse, its degree would suggest that it was turned away from the viewer, and we'd be seeing too much of its edge and not enough of its face to really make sense in this configuration. This results in the muzzle of both heads being a little off the "true" center. Also, when you get into details like the horns and teeth, you start to flatten out and don't put enough time/focus into understanding how these forms are actually meant to connect to the rest of the construction - this stands more for the horns. You can't draw them as flat shapes, as this will undermine the rest of your construction's dimensionality. Lastly, watch those eye sockets - take a look at some animal and human skulls and study their shapes, and also look more closely at those in the demos I provided. You've often got yours peaking somewhere along the middle of the top edge, and that's not generally something that is present.

• There are two major issues that stand out with your second wolf drawing. Firstly, it definitely appears to me that it is way too small. As such, you're really making this way more difficult than it needs to be by robbing yourself of the room to really work through these spatial problems effectively. Secondly, you've gone back to using stretched ellipses rather than sausages for your leg segments. These may feel like they're the same, but they're not - being ellipses, they'll gradually get wider to their middle and then get more slender again, on both sides. This makes them tend to appear quite stiff as they are expanding/shrinking equally on either side. Sausages instead maintain a consistent width through their lengths, giving them the flexibility of a tube, and make them a better choice for something as gestural as a limb.

• On your ferret, I like the way you're approaching the limbs, it generally provides a good sense of solidity while maintaining a bit of flexibility to it. My biggest concern here is how you've added the extra mass on the back. As I show another student here, you need to think about that more like the organic intersections from lesson 2. You're dropping an independent mass and moulding it to the surface of your existing torso. You need to think about how it sags around it and hugs that other surface. You can't simply drop it in like a sticker and throw in a couple vague contour lines and call it done. There's a lot more spatial problem solving involved.

• I'm going to largely skip over the rhino, because it is basically a misfire, including a lot of the issues I've pointed out for the rest (not using sausages, the point about your extra masses, etc.) - though I will point out that you seem to have decided not to start from a cranial ball this time and didn't really apply any construction there whatsoever.

• For the camel, you've got stretched ellipses again rather than sausages. I can understand why it may seem more appropriate here due to how long and slender their legs tend to be, but it does make the result feel awkwardly stiff. I do like how you approached the neck, though perhaps fewer contour lines are in order - you don't generally need so many, as achieving the illusion of solidity is going to be as effectively captured with just one or two. Lastly, that mass for its hump - well, given that the demo I linked on the ferret actually involves a camel, that should speak for itself. I do want to mention though that the torso should always be handled as a sausage constructed between the ribcage and pelvis, with a slight sag to, and a dip on its back. We sometimes counteract this with extra masses, but we still want that bit of a sag anyway to keep things looking natural.

• Your lizard was actually quite nice. Way too many contour lines in the tail, but the general construction felt solid and three dimensional throughout. Don't skip steps like blocking out the rib cage though, it's a bad habit!

I'd like you to do another six drawings. Same deal as before, no detail. You're making progress, but I want to see you apply what I've mentioned here before I let you move forward.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-26 03:45

These are definitely looking much, MUCH better! I'm not sure what was happening before, but it seems to be over now. There are still some minor issues in terms of identifying your proportions, but that's not entirely abnormal and will lessen as you continue to practice drawing from observation.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was that your use of the sausage method for legs, while definitely much further along than before, needs a bit of tweaking.

Your sausages tend to end off a little shallower than they should, they don't quite have the full bump that they ought to. You can think of a sausage as being the combination of two spheres connected by a tube. By this analogy, your spheres seem a bit flatter. Because of this you're not getting the full overlap between the segments. This is especially prominent later in the set, like in the hyena.

Also worth mentioning, I think your camel came out really well. The hump can still use a little work in terms of getting it to feel like a separate 3D mass that is being added to this construction (like the organic intersections, as described here) but it's coming along nicely.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-01-15 21:30

You've definitely got a wide variety of work here with varying results - there are definitely some issues I'd like to address, but you've also got a few drawings that come out quite well. One that stands out to me most is this one. Overall, it demonstrates a really excellent understanding of 3D space and how the various forms connect together and how they relate to one another.

Across your work, you do demonstrate this kind of understanding of how the 3D forms fit together to varying degrees, but often times you have a tendency to skip over steps and avoid drawing certain lines in ways that severely undermine your understanding of what you're drawing, or the illusion you're trying to create.

One thing that stands out to me is that when you're drawing ellipses or ellipsoid shapes - like the initial masses we draw for our constructions - you have a tendency, especially later in the set, to draw them in a single pass (rather than drawing through them so as to achieve a more confident, smooth, and evenly shaped ellipse), or you draw them to be quite faint. Our goal with these is not to hide them or keep them clean about all else, it is to establish in our scene forms that feel solid and convey that solidity both to us as we work with them, and to the viewer. As such, drawing them with confidence, drawing through them so as to keep them evenly shaped and further doing whatever is necessary in order to make them feel solid is key to a successful construction.

Let's look at one of the sections from the newly revised lesson 4 (I know you started this work not long before I released the rebuild website/lessons): Working with solid forms. Each form is drawn confidently, and I draw contour lines/ellipses wherever necessary in order to really solidify my belief that they exist in three dimensions. I'm not drawing flat shapes on a page - I am creating solid forms in a 3D world.

When you take one of those simple masses and attach another form to it, make sure to draw the line that defines their intersection. You do this sometimes, but as frequently you tend to leave it out. Take a look at this page, for example. Along the bottom, the dog's muzzle has no clear distinction between the cranial ball (the basic, preliminary mass) and its muzzle. Along the top of the page however, you have attempted to draw a clear intersection between them. This intersection helps you to better understand how they relate to one another in 3D space, further reinforcing your understanding of 3D space.

This understanding is important for the reasons I outline in this part of lesson 2 about "thinking in 3D".

Now, I don't see you doing this too often, but it is worth mentioning as it falls under the same vein. On the bottom of this page, we can see very clearly how the mass drawn for the tiger's ribcage falls entirely out of the animal's body. This essentially tells us that the forms you'd drawn previously were in fact not solid, that they were simply marks on a flat page, and that you're free to rearrange them as needed. This ultimately undermines the illusion you're trying to create - it tells the viewer that none of what they see is real. For this reason, it is critical that once you put a form down on the page, that you treat it as though it is a solid form existing in a 3D world, and if you need to build on top of it, you do so in a way that clearly demonstrates that you understand how those two forms relate to each other in space. And if you need to cut away from it - something that is quite difficult to do successfully - you need to demonstrate that you understand how the resulting pieces - the piece you're cutting from, and the piece that is cut away - both exist in 3D space and how they relate to each other. Here you can see that you've cut across this ribcage form.

Relating to how you've drawn the torsos on that page, I also recommend that you give the notes on the torso sausage a read. Specifically, we talk about how torsos should generally be drawn with this sort of a slightly sagging sausage. This doesn't necessarily always fit our reference images, but usually when it doesn't, it's because there are additional forms or features present that obscure this underlying form - additional muscle mass, or skin that is being stretched across different solid forms, etc. I expand on that here.

On this page you're showing the beginnings of a good use of the sausage method for the tiger's legs - something I talk about here in lesson 4 and here in lesson 5. The one thing you're missing here is that you weren't reinforcing the intersections at the overlaps/joints with contour lines, something that helps continue to establish the illusion of 3D form.

Now, that should be quite a bit to go through, so I'll stop my critique here. I want you to do the following:

• Take some time to read through what I've written here - it's a lot to absorb, so step through it slowly and take a look at the links provided carefully.

• Go back and read lesson 5 in its entirety - given that you started the work prior to the release of the rebuilt website, and based on your work here, I'm going to assume that you didn't read through the new material. Make sure you do.

• Do 5 pages of animal drawings, focusing only on construction - no texture, no stripes, none of that. Focus entirely on constructing solid forms and on understanding how they sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-16 21:55

By and large you've demonstrated an excellent understanding of 3D space, construction and form, and have employed many of the concepts covered in the lesson to great effect. There are however a couple things that you've missed that are pretty important, so I'm going to outline them here.

There are two major issues. The first of them is how you draw the limbs of your animals. As covered fairly extensively through lesson 4, we talk about the "sausage" technique for constructing limbs (you can review it here). Sausages are great because they carry the flow and rhythm of that gestural quality you find in the limbs of living creatures, while still maintaining a strong sense of solidity.

In many of your constructions here, you've instead constructed many of your limbs using a series of ellipses that are stretched and squashed as needed. There is a key difference between an ellipse that has been stretched and a sausage - the ellipse spends half of its length getting wider, and the other half getting narrower. The sausage takes care of this early on, with a nice round sphere on either end, and spends the majority of its length at a consistent width. This consistent width is what allows us to give it a sense of flow and direction, whereas the stretched ball/ellipse will feel very stiff, unable to flex or bend.

Additionally, your components have no clearly defined intersections - that is, the contour lines that define the area where those two forms actually connect to one another. In this manner, you're skipping out on an important step that helps to reinforce the illusion of form, that you're dealing with solid, three dimensional components rather than just flat shapes.

And that leads is smoothly into the next major problem - while you do demonstrate a really fantastic grasp and understanding of 3D space in a number of areas of your drawings, the building blocks you use all tend to look quite flat. They're shapes, rather than forms.

The result is that certain parts of your drawing look really 3D and believable, while others fall short of this. It's important that you not move on from a given step of construction until you feel fully convinced of the solidity and three dimensional nature of all the components you've constructed. For example, the initial masses you construct must feel three dimensional, as depicted here.

This relates back to something relatively new that I've made a point of explaining at the beginning of lesson 2, on thinking in 3D - how we go through these additional steps in order to convince ourselves of the 3D nature of our constructions, as the most convincing lie is the one told by someone who believes it.

I have noticed that you have a tendency in certain cases, to construct parts of the body with flat shapes, and then draw more complex shapes around them with a darker line - as though you're creating a scaffolding and then wrapping it in cloth. Sometimes this "cloth" layer bridges certain gaps (like this elk's back knees) in a way that once again flattens things out, because it doesn't take into consideration the forms that would lay underneath it. In reality, those shapes are so complex because they're indicative of a lot of complexity occurring beneath them - the result of a myriad of forms that cannot simply be smoothed over in this manner. When doing your constructional drawings for these lessons, I'd like you to avoid this kind of approach - if you want to add an additional bridging of forms, do so with yet another form.

Now, it's worth mentioning that you are definitely fully capable of doing this - I can see throughout this set that you have an excellent mastery of the use of form to build up constructions, but you are getting ahead of yourself and perhaps letting that lead to an overconfidence.

As such, I want you to do three more pages of animal drawings. No detail, no texture, only pure form and construction for each of these. Focus on the use of the sausage technique for your limbs, as well as the establishing of solid, three dimensional forms at every stage of construction rather than simple 2D shapes.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-09 01:20

Your head constructions have improved considerably, and I very much like that goose. You're also demonstrating a much greater grasp of how each form is a solid object that cannot be ignored, once placed within the scene.

That said, there is still a great deal of room for improvement, and a lot of mileage that will be necessary, specifically in working on your observational skills. Things like judging proportions will continue to improve as you practice.

There is one thing from my previous critique that you didn't adhere to entirely which I do feel I should reiterate: There are quite a number of ellipses here that you didn't draw-through. This results in those ellipses coming out rather stiffly. You are drawing through some of them, and they tend to be the more confidently drawn ones - remember that when you focus so much on accuracy and keeping things clean, you do so at the expense of the smooth flow of your lines, and in turn, the solidity of the forms you draw. When you stiffen up (which is still an issue in a number of places, for example the elephant's legs) your forms appear to be flat, and register more as shapes on a page rather than as solid, three dimensional forms in a 3D world.

There are also a few additional points that I'd like to raise, I'm not sure if I mentioned these before:

• In that same elephant drawing, and in a few others, I notice where you construct the legs with sausage forms, but then go on to draw lines bridging the gap from one segment to another, as shown here (it's taken from the far right of the drawing). The additional lines, like a "sleeve" aren't grounded in any sort of form, it's a 2D shape you've added to the drawing. This kind of thing undermines the illusion we're trying to create, and flattens the drawing out. Stick only to what you can achieve by adding and manipulating the three dimensional forms present in your construction.

• When adding additional forms, it's integral that you understand how these forms interact with one another in space. Often times when you add the additional masses, you clearly show that you're trying to figure out how these forms interact with one another, but you're falling somewhat short. For example, when we look at this drawing, specifically at the mass you've added to its back, it doesn't actually convincingly wrap around the form of the torso. The curvature of the additional mass is too shallow, and as a result, it flattens things out. If you look at this, you'll see how the top mass visibly wraps around this underlying torso sausage. As you are struggling with this in a number of other places, I recommend that you incorporate the organic intersections exercise from lesson 2 more strongly into your warmup routine. If you aren't already, you should be doing 10-15 minutes of warmups before each sitting, picking two or three exercises from the many we've covered through the earlier lessons.

• A minor point, I'd recommend making the initial cranial balls of your animals a little smaller. As I mentioned before, your head constructions are actually quite good and demonstrate a great grasp of how the forms fit together in that context, but they tend to feel a little off due to their internal proportions.

Now while I believe you have plenty of room for improvement here, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. I believe getting into some of the less forgiving material from lesson 6 will help you continue to develop your understanding of space. Of course, before that, you will have to complete the cylinder challenge, so that'll be your next step.

Uncomfortable

2019-03-01 00:29

Your work is coming along quite well. There are a few things I do want to bring to your attention though, but by and large you're demonstrating a good grasp of the material that will continue to develop with time and practice.

The first thing that jumped out at me was that in your organic intersections there, your linework, while not altogether stiff or wobbly, definitely felt a little hesitant at times. I think part of this had to do with how you drew the initial lines, and perhaps more of it had to do with how you attempted to add line weight to them after the fact. Remember that no matter what manner of mark you're putting down - be it an initial construction line or a stroke to reinforce an existing mark, you want to put it down with the ghosting method, concluding with a confident execution drawn from the shoulder in order to ensure that it carries a strong sense of flow and a consistent trajectory. The cast shadows were definitely a nice touch, but I do feel like they may have somewhat served to cover up the underlying problem of the linework being just a little uncertain.

Now, I really liked the bird on the right side of your first page of animal drawings (#2). The core of its body, head, and its legs were very well constructed and demonstrated a solid understanding of how these forms all connected to one another. The branch that it was resting on definitely felt notably flatter however (it doesn't seem you put much thought into how it existed as a form, and instead jumped right from its basic silhouette into the little details on it). The wings were also a little too quick to jump into the feather detail, which was then quickly abandoned. It does seem like you were experimenting here and not entirely sure of how to tackle wings, so I'll give that one a pass - experimentation is fraught with failure but should never be discouraged. Just make sure that you focus on breaking everything down into individual forms. The bird's right wing (the one towards the middle of the page) is clearly made up of two separate forms for the different sections of the wing - here you've fleshed it out as a single more complex shape, rather than breaking it down further.

For #5 to #7, one thing that definitely jumps out at me is that you have a tendency to approach some of the fur a little sloppily. It's actually not too bad, but if you look back at some of the newer material for lesson 1 (which admittedly was added after you completed that lesson), I explain that it's not a good idea to zigzag your lines back and forth. Instead, divide your strokes up into those with different trajectories, lifting your pen and starting another at every sharp corner. The biggest reason for this is that when you zigzag, we have less control over the actual intentional design of, say, the tuft of fur, and we also have a tendency for our intended path to degrade as we push onwards. I also want you to take a little more time to think about each individual tuft - in this regard you're headed in the right direction, as I can see you thinking about how these clumpings of fur break the silhouette, but a little more time (along with more practice) will definitely help make this appear more natural.

I did notice that when you draw your eyes, you frequently leave out the eye socket, or construct the eye socket as being separated from the boxy form of the muzzle. Remember that this eye socket really is important - it is carved with individual segments to ensure that it feels cut into the cranial ball, and it fits into the other forms of the head as though it were a three dimensional puzzle.

To this end, I do think that the tendency to divide the page up to accommodate multiple drawings is also hindering you. Construction, especially as we get used to it, benefits from being given as much room as possible. Instead of putting two or three drawings to a page, dedicate an entire page to each drawing and draw big, so even the intricate construction of the head is given enough room for you to solve its spatial problems.

I really love the camel you've done for #17. You've done a great job of capturing its legs, the solidity of its body, and the generally awkward manner in which it runs. The additional mass for the hump you added to its back is better than the same technique applied elsehwere in your drawings (in that it wasn't just dropped on top, but rather attempts to wrap around), but it's still not quite right. The mass you've drawn comes to a very sharp corner, like it's had a section cut out from its inside before fitting snugly against the camel's torso. Instead, take a look at this quick diagram I did for a student a while back. Notice how the mass for the hump is more similar to the full sausages from the organic intersections exercise? All we're doing is piling simple forms on top of other simple forms - that simplicity is the key. The more complex you make a form, the more difficult it is for it to stand on its own.

Now, I feel like your kangabexapus, more than anything, tells me that you really are absorbing the concepts of construction, and while you do struggle here and there, it is absolutely sinking in. These hybrid exercises force you to work not only from reference, but to solve complex spatial problems that cannot simply be resolved by relying purely on observation - and you've done a pretty great job here and the result is, while entirely strange, oddly plausible and believable.

So - keep up the good work, and while there's still plenty of room to grow, you're well on your way. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. I believe that'll be the 250 cylinder challenge, as that is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-03-14 19:50

You have definitely put a great deal into this set! And it has certainly paid off in several important areas. There is still room for improvement, but I can see a lot of very specific, targeted practice, as well as the growth that has come of it. You clearly spent a lot of time struggling with heads, and while there's more room for improvement, you've come a long way.

To start with, your organic intersections are quite well done. I'm getting a good grasp of how they relate to one another, and how their individual volumes and masses are resolved against one another to settle in a sort of equilibrium, where their volumes are respected, but nothing interpenetrates.

This understanding of volume and relationships comes through in even your earlier animal drawings, both as far as they apply to organic forms, as well as the more geometric elements. The first pages definitely start off cartoony, but are still quite effectively solid, with a good grasp of 3D space. The biggest issues here are instead to do with proportion, which will largely be developed through further observation and practice as you hone your ability to asses what you see. When it comes to constructing things on the page, you're already coming along quite well.

I do want to talk a little about the fur on this page. It stands out because it, unlike the rest of your construction and decisions, staunchly contradicts the illusion you've otherwise created. The fur is made up of marks on the page, not really demonstrating an awareness of the other solid forms that are present, but rather just adorning a drawing, rather than something that really exists in the world.

Notice how in some places your jagged lines cut back into the silhouette of the forms? In doing so, they most egregiously contradict the solidity of those forms, making it very clear that they're just shapes on a page. Whenever possible, we try to build additively - piling forms on top of forms. When we have to work subtractively, we have to be very careful, making it very clear that we understand both the pieces that remain and the pieces that are removed as they sit in three dimensions - these jagged fur shapes do no such thing, and so they bring the rest of the construction down to their level of flatness.

The fur itself isn't designed with any particular sense of intent. They're just arbitrary spikes you've drawn, frequently with continuous strokes (back in lesson 1, though this will have been covered after you completed this lesson in a more recent update, we talk about lifting the pen at every sharp corner where the trajectory takes a significant change.

When we draw with a single continuous stroke, we tend to fall into the trap of just mindlessly repeating a pattern of movements, rather than attempting to ensure that every stroke reflects an intentional design. Here you've replaced the quality of intent with quantity resulting of going on auto-pilot, and the results reflect that.

This one's fur is definitely a step up. The tufts of fur are better, there's not as much cutting back on the forms, etc. Still room for improvement but a move in the right direction. In this same drawing, I do want to point out the feet - they're quite simplistic, and drawn in such a way that how they occupy 3D space isn't entirely clear. You've started them off as a ball, which certainly can work, but we don't achieve any real understanding of the various major planes of the paw (the top, the sides, the front), and so it ends up feeling very vague, and therefore not very solid or convincing. I touch on this briefly at the end of this step.

I'm also noticing a common tendency to work with cranial balls that are simply far too big. It tends to make the heads somewhat swollen and bloated. Remember that the cranial ball is not the whole of the head, but instead is merely the element upon which everything else is built up. You have more reasonably sized cranial balls throughout your work, but you do have a tendency to waffle back and forth. Always err on the side of smaller - if it ends up being a bit too small, you can always add more forms on top to build back up, whereas if it's too big, it becomes much more difficult to resolve. That really goes with construction as a whole - you can always work your way bigger, but stepping back is risky at best.

Jumping over to your birds, I find that you're frequently skipping between two different tactics - on one hand, you've got some drawings where the torso feels a little more flexible (like the duck on the bottom right of this page and the top left of this page), where they feel a lot more lively and believable. The less believable ones tend to have torsos that are very stiff, like the owl, and the bird to the left of the duck. On top of the stiffness of their torsos, the center line in these tends to be very off, leading to a rather confusing and uncertain construction. All in all, these fail the believability tests, while the more flexible ones feel considerably livelier.

Coming back to the fur, on this page you're definitely going overboard, and again going in favour of quantity over intentionally designed tufts of fur. Remember that our goal here isn't to perfectly render all the fur, but rather to merely suggest that the form has a furry quality to its surface. A few tufts along the silhouette, focusing on slightly longer and more flowing bunches (rather than shorter ones which tend to read more as stiff and spikey) are going to be a lot more successful. You can see how I apply fur to this raccoon.

One of the major weaknesses in your struggles with the head constructions - though they definitely do improve over the course of the set - is that you're not really dealing with them consistently as a three dimensional puzzle, as it's described in the lesson. The head is not a ball with a muzzle and two independent eyes. The eye sockets themselves are positioned against the muzzle, against the cheekbone, the brow, and so on. These are all individual components that fit together. The "footprints" of these elements (the space they occupy on the cranial ball) should never be drawn as ellipses as you do in certain places, because this shows no regard for the different puzzle pieces that make up each edge. Instead, we draw an independent line, like a knife cut, defining the edge of each individual neighbouring piece. These cuts are drawn mindfully of the curvature of the cranial ball, considering how the slice moves through three dimensions and not just as an ellipse, which is really just a flat shape.

The third of your antelope is somewhat better in that regard. You don't have as clear a footprint, but I can see a better integration of the muzzle and the brow ridge, and how they define parts of what becomes the eye socket.

Beyond the eye socket, I also tend to see that the balls you construct within them tend to be small and misshapen, and therefore don't really have the capacity to uphold a more believable construction of eyelids and so on. It's really just a shape and never reads as being three dimensional in most cases, so that's something you're going to need to work on.

Finally, your hybrids are quite interesting, and well done. There' some stiffness, but the relationships between the forms are certainly believable, and you're demonstrating a well developing grasp of that. There's plenty of room for improvement across all your animals here, but I'm pretty confident that you're headed in the right direction, and simply need more mileage - and perhaps a review of the individual demonstrations and lesson material.

For now though, I'm pleased to say that I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-03-18 20:42

You've definitely demonstrated a great deal of growth over this set. There are a number of issues that you present early on, but you improve on them throughout the lesson, and while certain issues remain to a degree, many are in a much better state.

What jumps out at me from the beginning is that you tend to get a little preoccupied with detail. Right off the bat, we're seeing a great deal of fur and hair, but the construction itself shows a number of issues. For example, if we look at your squirrel, you're not drawing through your ellipses here, and you aren't making use of the sausage method for your limbs, so they come out quite stiff.

On top of this, your drawings are smaller than they could be - there's plenty of room on the page there, and on others you've fit a couple onto a single page, despite the fact that there are a number of elements that end up getting cramped (like the feet/toes), where additional room to work would definitely serve you well.

I'm also noticing a tendency not to approach your head constructions as shown in the demos. You're filling eyes with solid black (a point I made pretty clear in that point I just linked), and you're not really treating the head like a three dimensional puzzle where the eye socket is defined by things like the cheek bone and the muzzle, before dropping an eyeball in it on which to construct the lids. All of this is missing.

Now, as far as the overall results go, things start getting better as you work through the birds, though I can see you following the instructions much more clearly when you hit the hyenas, especially with the drawing on the bottom of this page. You're drawing through your ellipses more, being more confident with your linework and more mindful of the forms themselves. You're starting to leverage the sausage method more, though I am seeing some segments of your limbs that are still more along the lines of stretched ellipses, which tend to be much more stiff in nature. You're making better use of the eye sockets as well, and there's clearer muzzle construction, though the relationship between the eye socket/muzzle/cheek bone is still somewhat vague.

Onwards I start to see clearer grasp of 3D space and form, and while at times you overuse contour lines (like in the parrots - try to think about what the purpose of each mark you put down is, and what its job is meant to be, and whether or not that mark is really going to be necessary), you're clearly making good headway.

When you hit the elk, you start to slip back into some old sloppiness (your contour curves are both numerous and very sloppy, most with degrees that don't match the orientation of the form itself, and they're also often too shallow to suggest that they're actually wrapping around the form properly). Your attempts at adding the additional masses are also falling flat here, because you're not really adding organic forms here. You're just tackling on shapes and trying to make them feel 3D with contour lines. If you look at this demonstration you'll see how they're actual solid masses that are piled on top. Like muscles and fat, they do not adhere by default to the underlying form, and instead they interact with those forms similarly to the organic intersections exercise.

There are definitely some more successes, but your horses still feel somewhat weak, and I don't see any particularly good use of those additional masses. This suggests to me that you're leaning quite heavily on basic observational skills, rather than translating what you see into three dimensional information that you can manipulate.

Lastly, your hybrid animals are quite well done, and suggest that your ability to work in 3D space is coming along. It seems to be something that shifts back and forth - in some cases you're handling form and space well, in others less so.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do 3 more pages of animal drawings, but with no detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction. In particular, I want to see three things, so be sure to choose references that allow you to demonstrate these clearly:

• Head construction. Treat it like a three dimensional puzzle, where the pieces all fit together nicely. I want to see those eye sockets crafted with specific lines defining the edges of the cheek, muzzle and brow.

• The sausage method being used for the legs. Sausages are essentially two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width. These segments intersect with one another, with a single contour line defining the intersection between them at the joint. Sausages allow you to capture a sense of flow, rhythm and gesture in your limbs, so I don't want to see any stiffness here.

• The additional masses. I don't want to see them drawn as simple shapes - think about how these masses exist as independent three dimensional forms that are added to your construction like clay or putty. You need to resolve this addition as it interacts with your existing construction, just like the organic intersections exercise.