Uncomfortable

2019-03-25 21:13

Overall, not bad! I definitely noticed that you had some drawings where you didn't draw through your forms, or didn't draw them in their entirety (opting to draw only as far as they're not overlapped by another form). These were generally much less successful than those where you drew each form in its entirety - reason being, you get a much stronger grasp of how each form sits in 3D space, and how they all relate to one another.

I honestly think that's been your biggest issue throughout - you've got a lot of drawings where you're not quite as intent on drawing everything completely, and that's where things fall flat.

Secondary to that, you do have some trouble with proportions - this isn't abnormal, as developing an eye for these size relationships is something that happens with practice, but it definitely plays a pretty big role in the drawings that didn't come out quite as well as you may have hoped.

Additionally, make sure you understand what the sausage method actually involves, as I don't think you necessarily apply it correctly all of the time - or even most of the time. Sausages are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Not any kind of a stretched ellipse, or an uneven shape - sausages can bend and be flexible, and convey the rhythm and gesture of the appendage. No swelling towards one side, no pinching in the middle, none of that. Just a simple sausage form. Legs are composed of multiple of these forms, overlapping, with their intersectional joint reinforced by a single contour line. No contour lines along their lengths, as this'll cause them to stiffen. Be sure to look at this diagram and learn it well.

You can always build on top of these sausages (like if one end of a segment is bigger, you can add another form on top) but they should always exist in this manner as their base.

The last thing I want to mention is that you shouldn't fill things like the spots on a ladybug's shell with solid black. At no other point in these drawings do you attempt to convey the local colour of a thing, so the spots on a ladybug shouldn't be any different - treat them like they have no colour at all, like they're all a flat grey. Cast shadows should be the only thing that get filled in that manner.

Now, you have a lot of successful drawings here, especially towards the end, and while you do ignore certain core principles (like drawing through forms) throughout, you definitely are showing considerable improvement. So I'm going to mark this lesson as complete - just make sure that you adhere to these principles more consistently from here on out.

Uncomfortable

2019-03-30 23:30

There is definitely a considerable degree of growth over this set, but there are also a number of places where you're missing a few important points. Over the lesson I can definitely see you building a more mindful understanding of how the forms themselves relate to one another in 3D space.

What stands out most to me is the fact that through just about the entirety of your homework (aside from where you drew along with the louse demo) you drew the segments of your legs as stretched ellipses, rather than the sausages that were demonstrated in the lesson.

Basically stretched ellipses are by their very nature (and by the fact that they steadily widen towards the center and then taper towards the opposite end) very stiff. There's not much there to bend, because of how they're always growing or shrinking. Sausages on the other hand follow a much more flexible path - the width between the edges does not grow nor shrink, it remains consistent, allowing you to bend it as needed. This helps us capture the sense of rhythm and flow.

We also want to avoid dropping contour curves along the length of our sausages. Contour curves can stiffen and lessen the fluidity of a form. Instead, we can reinforce the solidity of the form very conveniently by placing a single contour curve right at the joint - where two sausages intersect, defining that intersection, and thereby reinforcing the relationship between these forms as being one that exists in 3D space.

Sausages are key. Learn them. Use them.

You actually started to play into that with your dragonflys which I quite liked, but here you were playing a little fast and loose with your forms. Take a look at the top left drawing on that page, specifically the middle leg on its right side (our left). Notice how you drew in a simpler form of one of its segments, then went back over it to make it a little more specific, a little more complex?

When doing so, you effectively ignored the shape that existed there underneath, resulting in two distinct stories being told. On one hand, you've got the straighter, rigid segment, and on the other, you've got a more fluid one with a thicker end. You didn't build the more complex information onto the first - you replaced it, resulting in two contradictory stories being told in your drawing, and therefore leaving an inconsistency in the lie being sold to the viewer.

Construction should be approached additively whenever possible - meaning you build directly ontop of your previous forms. If it's got a snaking s-curve, use a regular sausage form to achieve that, then tack on a ball to the far side to create a thicker end and merge that back with your sausage. It's like you're playing with clay or putty - you're building it all up as you go, never drawing over something like it doesn't exist.

Every single thing we put on the page is essentially a solid three dimensional form that now exists in the world. It has to be dealt with.

Those two points are my only real concerns here. Aside from that, you've demonstrated a great deal of improvement overall, and while your proportions are a bit hit-and-miss, that's entirely normal and expected. Our ability to identify those proportional relationships will improve over time.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want to see 3 more pages of plant drawings from you, demonstrating proper use of the sausage method for constructing leg segments, and avoiding any sort of replacement-of-forms.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-14 23:26

So to start with, your organic forms with contour curves are looking pretty good. Keep in mind though that these sausages are essentially just two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width. Avoid any pinching through the midsection, and try not to stretch out the ends (most of yours have their ends a little elongated, so the curvature happens over a greater length, rather than the way you might see a sphere behave). These points are important when we get into using them as part of the leg construction.

Many of your constructions here are quite good, though there are a number of things I want to mention.

To start with, I quite liked this one. It was dead simple, but really did focus on many of the major components of construction and applied them quite well. You drew through your forms, applied the sausage technique to a degree of success (overall I do think this is something you struggle with, though moreso in other drawings than here). The only issue with it is that you drew it very, very small on the page. All the same, it still came out quite well.

In general, it's important to take advantage of the space you're given on the page. Construction is a spatial problem, and when dealing with spatial problems, our brains benefit from being given more room to think. Drawing small is one of the reasons that your use of the sausage method for drawing legs is going a little bit awry.

As explained here, the point is to create solid sausage forms that flow fluidly through space and interconnecting them. By overlapping their ends, we create an intersectional joint (which we reinforce with a single contour curve), thereby reinforcing the illusion of form and volume for the entire segment. If we then want to make one end larger, we can do so after the fact by adding a ball on top of that end. It's all about working constructively, and retaining the rhythm and gesture of the leg.

The way you've been employing it tends to come out quite stiff, and doesn't afford enough of a clear overlap between the segments to give us the impression that they feel solid and three dimensional. Here they feel very stiff and rigid. The ant was better in terms of flow and rhythm, but you made the ends different sizes, which undermined the illusion of solidity and form to a degree.

When it comes to foreshortening, it's important to remember that when we end up with a lot of foreshortening, it often implies objects at a very large scale (or that we're very close to the object we're looking at). With insects, this is rarely the case - you'll get some foreshortening, especially when we're looking right down the barrel of a form, but even then it's not going to be to too great a degree. In those cases, I'd still draw the sausage with ends that are the same size, and then add a larger ball around the end closer to us, adding form in a constructional manner rather than trying to tackle that manner of complexity all in one step.

You did a pretty decent job of following the wasp demo with this one, though one thing that jumped out at me was the fact that the back edge of the abdomen doesn't seem to have any variation to its silhouette - it's quite flat, which breaks the illusion created by the opposite edge, where each layered bit of segmentation bulges out nicely.

All in all, you're employing construction well, though you do need to work on drawing larger and giving yourself more room to think through these spatial problems, and improve on your use of the sausage method. Be sure to reread the diagram I provided on that point. You'll have plenty more opportunities to tackle the sausage method in the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-28 23:03

To start with, your initial organic forms with contour curves are coming along well, with the contour curves wrapping nicely around the form. One thing that did stand out to me however was that your curves have a tendency to maintain the same degree throughout the form, rather than shifting in degree as explained here.

There's definitely a lot of strengths through many of your constructions, though there are a few points that I want to comment upon that I believe should help you continue to improve.

On your first page, the wasp's primary forms especially are extremely solid and convey a strong sense of being three dimensional and carrying considerable volume. I did notice however that when you add the segmentation along its back, you don't push those additional layers past the silhouette of the form, and instead keep them tucked in. In doing this, you lose a fair bit of impact that you could have upon the illusion of form (as explained back in lesson 2).

The way the spider sits in 3D space is also quite well done, though your approach to the legs does not properly employ the sausage method discussed in some of the demonstrations. You are indeed starting to utilize sausage forms, but they're not overlapping enough to provide space for a single, clearly defined intersection contour line along the joint. This joint line helps reinforce the illusion that both forms are solid and three dimensional. This is also missing (to a degree) from the wasp.

As you push further into the set, I'm seeing a tendency to start sketching more (drawing loosely, rather than planning each and every mark you put down with the ghosting method). This results in your constructions starting to get a little hairier, with your line economy dropping and some of the lines appearing less smooth.

When we get to the scorpion, we start to see some more broken lines, especially towards its claws. You need to slow yourself down and think more before the marks you put down, rather than relying on sketching by reflex. While that manner of sketching is perfectly okay in general terms, our goal here is not simply to draw some insects, but rather to learn helpful habits and specific skills. As such, while doing the drawabox lessons, you should stick to the processes and techniques covered here.

Sticking with the scorpion, I'm noticing that here you laid in the main mass for its body, but then went on to cut back into the flat, two dimensional shape of this initial mass as you moved forwards. This is a common, but pretty significant mistake, because rather than cutting into the three dimensional form, you treated it as though it were flat - and in doing so, reinforced the idea that the drawing is in fact just flat shapes on a page. This contradicts the illusion you're trying to create with your drawing, and confuses the viewer.

Instead, it's generally best to work additively, building up our forms on top of one another and respecting the solidity of the forms we've already put down. These aren't arbitrary shapes, but rather solid, three dimensional forms that exist in a 3D world. When necessary it is possible to carve back into these, but in doing so we need to define clearly how both pieces (the part that is cut away and the part that remains) exist in 3D space, with clearly established planes around the cut. This is considerably more difficult, and not often necessary. In the case of this scorpion, merely building up further layers on top of the initial mass rather than cutting back into it would have sufficed.

As you get into texture and detail, I can see that you're observing your references quite closely and generally attempting to transfer over specific details rather than just scribbling wildly or drawing symbols from memory - all of that is good to see, and moving in the right direction. I'm also pleased with how you're entirely willing to really push your darks to create large areas of solid black. Just remember that every single mark you put down - whether it's construction or detail - is yet another statement you're making as you build up a lie that you're telling to your viewer. Always be sure that each mark continues to reinforce and echo what you've already established through previous phases of construction. Generally speaking it often helps to be a little light on texture/detail, focusing only on the bare minimum you require to communicate concepts to the viewer (this shell is bumpy, this head is fuzzy, this surface is rough, etc.) and letting their brains fill in the rest.

Aside from the points I've raised here, you're doing a pretty good job. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Edit: I actually didn't realize until I finished writing the critique that you're actually not eligible for a lesson 4 critique! It's set at a minimum tier of $10, while you're sitting at $7. I'm not about to remove my critique, so I guess you got lucky this time.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-29 20:03

Across this set, you've demonstrated a great deal of growth and improvement. You definitely started out with a sense of uncertainty as to how you were to approach these things. Your early stuff wasn't necessarily badly done, but it did feel like you weren't entirely sure of yourself, and that lack of confidence and commitment to the forms you were putting down definitely came through.

One of the issues that I found most common and jumped out to me most was that when drawing the sausages for the various segments of your legs, you did often allow them to be more complex than they should have been. For example, you'd sometimes draw them with a bit of a tapering or pinching through its length, or one end being larger/smaller than the other, etc. What's really most important with these sausage segments is that you construct them to be dead simple - two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width.

Reason being, the more complexity we attempt to add all at once, the more the illusion of solidity and three dimensionality that we're trying to create falls apart. We need to ensure that the bedrock of our construction is as solid as possible, and from there we can start building on top of it, adding more forms as needed to develop that complexity afterwards. A lot of this is covered in this simple diagram.

Also worth mentioning in regards to the sausages, an important part of this technique is ensuring that your sausage segments overlap enough to be able to put a clear contour line to define where the two sausages intersect with one another. Defining this joint helps reinforce the illusion of solidity and form for both segments, and when done correctly will do so well enough that no other contour curves will be necessary along their lengths.

Every now and then, I'll see you put down an early shape to block in one of the primary masses of your construction, but then decide to ignore that shape in favour of something else, behaving as though the mark was never placed on the page in the first place. Remember that by drawing, what we're essentially doing is crafting an elaborate lie - a lie to convince our viewer that what we've drawn is real, that it's three dimensional. Every mark we put down is a statement we're communicating to the viewer in the interest of furthering that lie - but if we put down statements that contradict each other (our first statement suggesting that this form exists in the world, and all other statements refusing to acknowledge its presence), then we end up undermining ourselves in our efforts to deceive the viewer.

As such, it's important that no matter what you put down on the page, that you continue to move forwards, respecting the fact that it is a solid, three dimensional form in the scene. No matter what you do, it has to be with an acknowledgement that the form exists there - you may build on top of it, you may even cut into it (demonstrating an understanding of how it exists in 3D space, not simply drawing flat lines on your drawing), but you have to treat it like it exists.

Anyway - all that said, towards the end of your submission you definitely started to show considerable increases in your overall confidence, and your internal grasp of how these three dimensional forms relate to one another. I was especially fond of this page, specifically what I assume to be a mantis head in the bottom right. The construction felt very natural, like you fully believed in the 3D nature of the forms you were putting together, and that you believed in the illusion and lie you were creating. It's a pretty big step to make, and is a very good sign for things to come.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There's definitely important things for you to continue to think about and work on as you move forwards, but you should be good to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-01 19:43

Overall your work is fairly well done, though there are a few things I'd like to call out. I'll also address your questions towards the end of this critique.

To start with, the pages where you followed along with the demonstrations were fairly well done. You demonstrated a great deal of patience and care in following the steps and applying the instructions closely. I especially liked the drawing of the louse - you demonstrated some very confident linework, some well crafted forms, and overall attention to detail that definitely gives me a great deal of confidence in your abilities.

In many cases these demo drawings were somewhat stronger than the others - likely because the other drawings put a lot more stress on your observational skills, giving you a lot more to juggle simultaneously. Still, your use of construction was often well managed.

One issue I saw frequently as that you have a tendency to put your initial marks down quite lightly and faintly. I can see that you're separating your drawings right off the bat into lines you want the viewer to see, and lines that you'd prefer to hide. Similarly to how having to parse your reference image makes demands on your cognitive capacity, some of your resources also have to be allocated to the process of keeping your marks faint. This impedes your ability to put those marks down in a manner that is confident, and in turn can have an impact on some of the resulting forms' integrity. Above all, our main task here is to ensure that we believe in the three dimensional nature of every form we construct, and especially as we're getting used to this concept, it can demand a great deal of effort.

That's why we stick to the most basic, simple primitives as the bedrock of our construction, and why we don't worry about drawing faintly, or deciding ahead of time which lines will be a part of the "final drawing" and which won't. There is in essence no final drawing, and every mark we put down is treated as though it is part of the end result (though we do have the opportunity towards the end to build a hierarchy using line weight, but all of those lines are still present and respected at all times).

On the topic of keeping form simple and primitive, you did respect this for the most part, but there are cases - like this ant's head for instance - where we start out more complex. Instead of starting with a basic ball here, you attempted to push into some of the greater complexity of the ant's head, and as a result the form you put down came out rather flat. Instead, I would have put down a basic ball, and then appended further forms onto it, connecting them together to build out the more complicated object.

It is worth mentioning that I did really like how you put together this praying mantis. Your linework is more confident than some of the others, you work from dead simple and gradually build things up, your forms respect how their neighbours occupy space, and you clearly grasp and believe in how this drawing truly is a three dimensional object (rather than merely being representative of one). That personal perception helps sell the illusion you're creating.

Back to some of the issues, I am noticing in various parts of this set a tendency to waffle between using sausages and using stretched ellipses. If you remember from this diagram, I am quite specific in what I describe to be a sausage form. Two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. It allows for a flowing rhythm we simply cannot achieve with stretched ellipses, which tend to be much stiffer. Additionally, having the various sausage segments overlap and reinforcing their intersectional joint with a clear contour line really helps to reinforce the three dimensionality of both forms. I've noticed that you sometimes forget to reinforce the joint in this manner.

To this point, in your iniital organic forms with contour curves, I noticed that you have a tendency to take those "spherical" ends and sometimes stretch them out so their roundedness covers a greater distance than would be proportionally described as a sphere. Keep this in mind, as the more you stretch out that sphere, the stiffer the result will become (for the same reason that stretched ellipses end up quite rigid).

As far as your linework goes, you've got some great examples of confident strokes, as well as others (like parts of the dragonfly) that come out a little more stiff, so keep on top of that. Make sure that you're using the ghosting method, and focusing on why it's so important - it's not just because it allows you to prepare and get ready beforehand, but because it separates the mark making process into stages with their own specific priorities. The last one - the execution of the mark - must exhibit no hesitation, no thinking, just full trust in your muscle memory. Stiffness comes from hesitation, from trying to guide your hand with your brain.

The last thing I want to mention is that while you exhibit a pretty solid use of line weight, I do want to warn you against any situation where you attempt to apply weight to the entirety of a stroke. Remember that we're not intending to replace existing lines with fresh, darker versions of themselves - we're using it to clarify how forms overlap in key areas. This falls back into the point about drawing every mark with confidence, and not trying to draw things faintly - it's simply too easy to end up hesitating and drawing slowly as you try and replace a mark (because you want to match it closely). Instead, ensure that every single mark you put down is done so again with the ghosting method, and if a line is too long to add weight to without flying way off course, you're probably trying to add weight to too much at once.

As for your questions:

• How do you know when you can fix a mistake: Through these lessons, I'd recommend just avoiding it altogether. Our drawings are each of them a lie we're telling to the viewer, and every mark we put down is a statement. You can't take a statement back - once it's been made, all you can do is roll with it, or if it's especially egregious, act like it never happened and hope for the best. The more you try and rephrase or represent it, the more attention is drawn to it, and the more damage it does. Once you're more comfortable in the manipulation of form and construction, you'll be able to renegotiate those statements with lawyerly gymnastics, but it's not something we really need to be thinking about right now. ... i may have just been watching hours of senate hearings...

• Exercises for studying proportion: Generally speaking it comes from doing more of these kinds of studies from observation, how a study is approached will be decided by the goals you've set out for it. An effective study does have a clear cut intent behind it - in our case, all of these studies are focused on construction, form, and furthering one's grasp of 3D space. But you can instead do studies that focus on understanding proportion, in which case you'd try to view your reference image as more of a flat, 2D thing. You'd break the reference down into shapes, comparing each component's size to its neighbours, and even looking at the relationships of these shapes to the 'negative' shapes around them (the space in between the actual objects). Keep in mind that this kind of study puts virtually no focus on form and construction. I wouldn't necessarily encourage you to worry about this right now though - as we're focusing on learning construction, form and 3D space right now, I think piling on proportion and observation in such a targeted manner may confuse things for the time being. This is a manner of study you can certainly attempt later on however, and as for now, you can try to pay greater attention to the negative space around your object, like this.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to continue practicing the points I've raised as you move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-20 17:40

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, there's a couple things that stand out to me. They're okay, but I don't believe these are necessarily the best you're capable of:

• What stands out most is that the curves themselves seem rushed. They seem to lack a degree of control, and as a result their degrees - though they show a steady shift as one would expect - seem to have a lot more variance that suggests a lack of preparation/planning/forethought. Additionally, they have a tendency to fall outside of the silhouette of the organic form - the contour curves should be as close as possible to fitting snugly between the edges of the form so as to convey the illusion that they run along the surface of the object.

• Your sausage forms should essentially be two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, as shown here. Right now your sausages have a tendency to stretch those spheres out, resulting in the rounded ends occupying more of the overall length of the sausage.

Now, moving onto the actual insect constructions, you're actually doing a really good job overall. The primary issue comes down to what I mentioned above - you're drawing more than you're thinking, resulting in a lot more marks going on the page that serve no real purpose. You're solving problems as you draw, rather than solving them and then putting the result down.

Some are definitely a bit messier, while others are considerably cleaner. For example, you've got a lot of experimental lines being put down here, whereas this one is generally better thought out.

On the bright side, you're doing a very good job in terms of demonstrating that you both understand and believe in how your forms sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another. Aside from being a bit rough, they are believable and give a sense of solidity and tangibility that goes a long way to demonstrating an understanding of the concepts covered in the lesson. I'm very pleased with how you're wrapping forms around one another - especially when it comes to segmentation - and how your head constructions feel like a three dimensional puzzle where all the pieces snap together nicely.

So, as you continue to move forwards, what you need to work on is holding yourself back. Think before every single mark you put down, and remember the process of the ghosting method. You need to be aware of the purpose of every line you add to your drawing, and ensure that nothing is put to waste. That, of course, is something you can continue to work on in the next lesson.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-05-29 20:37

All things considered, you may have struggled, but you did reasonably well in a lot of areas. There are however a few important points I'd like to raise that should help.

Firstly, I'm noticing a tendency to put construction lines - or rather, the early forms you drop in - down in a might lighter stroke. It looks like a purposeful choice, where you're expecting to override those strokes with a darker one later on, and in some cases you do. Try to avoid working this way. When putting forms down, draw them without trying to temper your line weight, or make strokes easier to hide. Just focus on putting the marks down confidently, keeping your focus on the execution of the mark rather than whether or not you want it to be part of the "final drawing". You'll notice that in my demonstrations, I'm using a pretty unforgiving brush that doesn't allow for that, and while I may go back over lines to add weight later, it's to help build a hierarchy in my drawing, rather than trying to hide or replace lines I've already put down. Everything that goes on the page is, ultimately, part of the end result.

Secondly, your organic forms with contour curves are pretty good, though keep in mind that our sausage forms should be very basic - like two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Keep the ends the same size, and keep the roundedness to those ends (rather than stretching them out over the course of the form).

Thirdly - and here I want to reference that same sausage diagram - I'm noticing that you're not quite using the sausage technique for drawing legs as well as you could be. Early on I can see an effort being made to apply it, but I'm seeing quite a few sausages that end up more as stretched ellipses, or that end up getting pinched through their midsection. These qualities cause them to appear more stiff, or less solid.

In your wasp drawing, I can see small signs that you're drawing the actual intersections between your sausage segments, which is great - though this is something that tends to be missing as you move forwards (though your sausage forms themselves get better, like in the lice drawings). So you're improving on some fronts when it comes to this techniques, but forgetting about others.

The sausage technique is critical because it allows us to construct legs in a way that carries their gestural rhythm, but still maintains their solidity and illusion of 3D form. It's those overlaps and the definition of their intersections that gives them that solidity, as it defines very clearly how the forms relate to one another. So when you draw the sausages, try and understand them as 3D forms, and keep that in consideration when you overlap them. We're not just piling flat shapes on top of one another - we're taking two 3D sausages and allowing them to interpenetrate, before defining that intersection very clearly with a contour line.

Now, overall you are demonstrating a pretty good grasp of form (even in some of the legs, though I still want you to really grasp that sausage method, as it's a valuable technique to have in your arsenal). The drawings by and large feel as though they exist in a 3D world, and feel fairly solid. The house fly for instance is very well constructed, with the only weak point being the legs which don't quite hold up as 3D forms. The main body however is very solid.

Alongside this fairly successful construction, I do tend to see little signs of impatience. Signs that you're falling back into trying to draw from reflex, getting a little sketchier, etc. For example, the ladybugs do have a much rougher quality of them, where the linework isn't necessarily all intentional. It looks more like you were faced by something difficult, and started to feel overwhelmed. Once a student becomes overwhelmed they'll often stop thinking and rely more on just putting marks down in the hopes that something comes out. Better to take a step back and reassess the situation. Drawabox is all about making sure your marks are planned and meaningful, and that you understand what each stroke is trying to achieve.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two more insect drawings, specifically focusing on use of the sausage method for constructing legs. And please, this time leave the commentary out. It interferes with my ability to give you direct, useful feedback and an honest assessment of your work.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-31 20:51

Sausages are the key! There are a handful of things I learned in the process of developing the lessons beyond what I had been taught myself, and I feel like sausages are one of the most valuable.

Your work here is, again, really well done. You're definitely demonstrating a clear and thorough grasp of the material. There are a few minor points worth mentioning, but you're really hitting the nail on the head here.

The first thing that caught my attention was that while your organic forms with contour curves at the beginning are very good, the placement of your contour lines is a little rushed. Taking a little extra time in ghosting them beforehand will help you ensure that they fit more snugly between the edges of the sausage form. Remember that the contour lines essentially derive their effectiveness from the illusion that they're running along the surface of the form. Getting them to touch those edges is critical for engaging this effect. Of course, the confidence with which you're drawing them, keeping them smooth and even, is much more important, so I wouldn't want you to stiffen up in an attempt to be more accurate - but it's a good idea to keep working on improving your overall accuracy while maintaining those smooth, confident strokes.

For the most part, your constructions are really solid, and I'm seeing a gradual evolution in how you approach line weight and detail over the course of the set. Your scorpion was definitely very detailed, but the subtlety and simplicity of the beetles you approached later on were considerably more endearing, because they focused on what you were trying to communicate, and not going beyond that.

On that scorpion however, I did notice that with the claws you laid down a rough ellipse/ball form. to flesh out their position, but ultimately ended up ignoring it once it had served its purpose. That is to say, if every mark we put down represents a solid form that we're adding to our construction, the way you approached that part broke that premise, because you drew directly on top of them, but without actually respecting its presence.

Generally speaking, we could put down a larger form and then cut back into it, but this is a process that involves demonstrating a clear understanding of how that form sits in space, and how the pieces that are cut away and the pieces that remain do so as well. We need to define the relationships between them in 3D space.

Now, the easier way of approaching this is to start out with smaller basic forms and build up from there. Drawing a smaller ball form and then adding additional layering of segmentation and other forms to it (and establishing how they all relate to one another in 3D space) would save you from having this proto-form laying about but serving no purpose.

The reason we don't really want to have these kinds of lingering, ignored elements is because of the idea that the act of drawing is essentially the same as telling a lie. Each mark we put down is an assertion or a statement, that a form exists here, or that some two forms relate in a particular way. All of these statements need to work together to flesh out this overall illusion.

In this case, that ignored mark becomes a contradictory statement that undermines the illusion we're trying to create. It speaks to the presence of a form that the rest of the construction ignores. This breaks the suspension of disbelief for the viewer, and weakens the overall construction.

Not to say you can't get away with it - there's always a certain degree of tolerance for such things, and your scorpion is very much believable, and generally speaking is a very strong, convincing illusion. Still, as far as these drawings go as exercises, we're always striving for our statements to be completely in line with each other, to create as consistent a lie as we can.

Also worth mentioning on that same drawing - you ended up putting some contour lines along the length of the leg segments. I'm pleased to see that in later drawings you refrained from doing this, as you improved in your use of the sausage method. Generally speaking, contour lines do a lot of good, but they also have the tendency to stiffen our forms, especially if we overdo it. The contour lines we drop at the joints between our sausage segments on the other hand, we kind of get for "free". Which is great, considering how effective they are, often making those additional contour lines unnecessary.

I am noticing that you do still deviate from the sausage method in certain places as you move through the lesson. Always remember that you need to be drawing through both sausages, clearly defining how they interpenetrate. This is so you can put down that clearly defined intersection (with our contour line) to take advantage of that "free" solidity. Try not to let your sausage stop where it gets overlapped by another form.

I also noticed a couple places where you drew sausage segments that had one end being larger than the other. While leg segments will often demand this of you, you still want to start out with a sausage with equally sized ends. You can then go onto adding an additional mass to one of the ends, effectively following the constructional principle of starting off simple and building up complexity.

ANYWAY! I've rambled on enough about sausages - I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Despite my points raised there, you are still doing a great job, and are digesting most of the information quite well. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-11 18:30

Reddit's spam filter has been on the fritz of late, and I have no idea why. For some reason it tagged your last submission attempt as spam, despite being no different from this one. I would have been able to fish it out of the moderation queue, but I'm glad you went ahead and checked for yourself.

All in all, I'm very impressed with your work here, especially compared to the struggles we've worked through together in the past. That's not to say there aren't issues - there are a couple - but by and large you are demonstrating an overall understanding of the concepts covered in this lesson, and of construction as a whole, and I'm confident you'll continue improving that grasp as we move along.

You're doing a much better job of demonstrating an understanding of how the components of your constructions exist in space and in relation to one another, overall. It is fair to say however that I do think your most successful constructions were where you foolowed along with the demonstrations - so you will want to continue reflecting upon what you did there that you may not being as consistently in your own drawings.

One good example of applying those concepts correctly is with what I assume to be a cicada. You did a good job with the segmentation along its abdomen, treating each bulging plate as though it is wrapping around the underlying form. There are a couple places where the underlying simple form does peek out in between them just a little bit, as shown here.

Always remember that construction focuses on the idea that every form we draw exists as a three dimensional mass in the world, like it's made out of clay. If you were to construct a simple abdomen for that cicada out of clay, and then go on to wrap strips of clay around it to create those segments, you would not be able to wrap them around in such a way that the underlying form would peek through as it did in those highlighted points.

Now it's obvious that this happened largely because the underlying ellipse was loose - so the solution is mostly just to get used to tightening up those ellipses (without sacrificing the confidence with which you draw them and the evenness of their rounded shapes). It's a matter of mileage more than anything else, but that whole point about drawing the forms such that they respect the mass and volume of those beneath them, rather than allowing them to peek through, is critical. The real world doesn't allow us to ignore such forms, and so our drawings cannot either.

The one biggest issue I'm seeing with your work here however is actually related to the sausage technique for drawing legs, and it starts out by going back to the actual organic forms with contour curves that you'd drawn at the beginning.

In the exercise description for organic forms with contour lines, I state at the beginning:

So we're going to start out with a simple sausage form. It's basically like two balls connected by a tube of consistent width.

You got this right a few times, but most often you were drawing one of the following:

• Stretched balls/ellipses (which continue to get wider up to their midsection, and therefore end up appearing quite stiff with no capacity for flexing or bending).

• Forms with one end being larger/smaller than the other.

Being able to draw basic sausages is important especially when it comes to constructing the legs of our insects (and later, animals), and you certainly are capable of it - if you look at your follow-along of the louse demo, you did a pretty good job constructing basic sausages there.

On the other hand, there are a lot of cases where you've drawn stretched spheres, most of all with this spider.

This diagram of the sausage method is a pretty good summary of the main points we keep in mind when constructing legs. It covers the three main points:

• Stick to basic sausage forms - two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (which we discussed above)

• Make sure the sausage forms interpenetrate a healthy amount and define their actual intersection with a clear contour line - this will help reinforce the illusion of form and solidity, and is something that is frequently, though not always, missing from your attempts.

• Whenever we want one side to be larger than the other, we can go back and add additional forms later on.

Now, before I mark this lesson complete, I do want a little extra revision:

• One page full of chains of sausage forms - try for three segments per chain. I want to see you maintaining the simple sausage form, and also having them intersect and reinforcing that intersection with a clear contour line.

• Three more insect constructions, showing me the proper use of these sausage forms.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-12 21:38

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally coming along pretty well, but just a couple of things to keep in mind:

• Continue to work on getting the contour curves to fit snugly within the bounds of the form, so as to maintain the illusion that they're running along its surface. You're close, but there are a few slipups here and there. Of course, maintaining the confidence of the strokes is more important, but since you're doing a good job of that, this is the next point to work on.

• The little contour ellipses you add at the end are definitely a good touch, but keep in mind where you place them. They're meant to basically sit at the tip of the form itself (it's a contour ellipse that sits right at the end, where the cross sections' diameters get smaller and smaller). A lot of yours are positioned incorrectly, creating an inaccurate visual cue for where the tip of the form would be. Always try to imagine it as though the ends are spheres, and that this ellipse sits around the "pole" of one of those spheres (thinking in terms of the pole of a globe).

All in all your constructions are quite well done, and you're demonstrating a solid use of the sausage method for constructing legs in fluid, gestural segments, as well as a general understanding of how these different forms connect to one another, and how they relate in 3D space.

There are however a few areas of weakness that I'd like to point out.

• In this spider I noticed a couple issues. First and foremost, the head definitely seemed vastly oversimplified. There's likely a lot more going on there, and you may want to revisit your reference and take a closer look at the volumes/forms that are present. Additionally, when it comes to the relationship between the abdomen and cephalothorax, you've drawn through both forms, which is good, but be sure to clearly define the intersection between them as you've done with your sausage segments on the legs. Additionally, adding a simple contour ellipse at the end of the abdomen as shown here would probably sell the illusion of that form much more effectively than the several contour lines you used. More than anything, I believe that topmost contour line ended up breaking the illusion somewhat, as at that point we should have been able to see a full ellipse (based on how that surface would have been oriented towards the viewer).

• I quite liked how you handled the segmentation of the lobster's tail, although going back to add a little additional line weight to clarify the overlaps of forms would definitely have helped to sell the relationships between the forms. That goes for all of your drawings - your constructions are solid, but a touch of line weight would definitely help to make things visually clearer and build a subtle hierarchy to aid the viewer in making sense of it.

• It is worth mentioning that the claws are drawn incorrectly - that is, you've added the claw sections onto the initial ball you started with as though they were simple flat shapes, rather than as forms. You need to demonstrate how those additional forms actually connect to the form you're attaching them to by drawing the form in its entirety and showing how the intersection line wraps around the simpler ball form.

• Your scoprion demo demonstrates this same kind of an issue, but has another major one as well. In it, you've drawn a simple box for its body, but then go on to draw over the box as though that box no longer exists. When applying constructional drawing methods, you cannot ignore the presence of a form that has already been drawn. Whenever we draw something, we need to treat it as though a solid mass has been added to our world, and we can no longer simply drop something else into the space it now occupies. Instead, we need to either build on top of it (wrapping forms around it in three dimensions) or cut and carve into it (which means demonstrating an awareness of both the pieces that we want to remain, and the pieces that have been cut away, as they exist in 3D space - usually using contour lines to define those cut lines along the surface of the object. Generally working additively is much, much easier, and we only work subtractively when we absolutely must. You'll notice that in my scorpion demo, even though I remove some of the back of the box I start out with, I'm still working within its framework as it exists in space - I never draw arbitrarily over it or attempt to replace it outright with another form.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two drawings:

• One following along with the scorpion demo from the demonstration video

• One scorpion drawing done from a different reference, on your own.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-17 20:46

Okay! So first I'll address your work as a whole, then the specific issues/questions you had.

Overall, I actually felt you did a pretty good job. What I'm looking for here is primarily whether or not you're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space, how they relate to one another, and how they can be combined to create more complex objects. I did notice a few issues however:

• For your organic forms with contour curves at the beginning, you pretty consistently focused on forms that would be larger on one end and smaller on the other, especially on the second page. Remember that the instructions for this exercise state that you should be aiming to draw a form that is essentially two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width. This is very important, as construction relies on keeping things as simple as possible, only developing complexity through the combination of several simpler forms rather than making the building blocks themselves more complicated.

• Overall you're definitely demonstrating a good deal of patience, taking the time to draw through all of your forms and really flesh out where they sit in space in their entirety. I am noticing however that in a few more minor areas, you do sometimes allow yourself to get a touch sloppy - for instance, in your dragonfly if we look at the ends of the legs where they get that segmentation, you're drawing quick lines to wrap around the underlying sausage, but the contour lines themselves do tend to be a little bit shallow. It's not entirely noteworthy, but I still felt like pointing out the tendency to perhaps not take as much time in figuring out how these should wrap around the underlying form properly, due to there being many of them, and them being quite small.

• On your scorpions' claws, you started out with a ball and then added the claw bits, which is fine. The only issue is that when you add the actual pointed sections, you add them as though you're adding to the silhouette of that initial ball, rather than constructing a separate form and attaching it. It's important to demonstrate the actual intersection between both forms, rather than only defining the pointed section as it exists in 2D space.

Aside from these fairly minor points, you're really demonstrating a solid grasp of the lesson material, and your skills in terms of the use of construction are coming along swimmingly. It really goes to show you that against your own expectations, and against your own particular criteria, your work may not be up to scratch, but those are generally going to be ill informed. Whereas I know exactly what I'm looking for, and I can brush other things aside as being minor points that will simply improve with continued practice. What I'm seeing is that you are indeed buying into that illusion that these aren't just lines on a page, but rather real, solid forms in a 3D world.

As for your questions/concerns:

• There's two things to say about shadows. Firstly, focus on what their actual purpose is - as with every other part of this drawing, we're focusing on communication, and the shadows are intended specifically to communicate the idea that the object is grounded, that it's not floating arbitrarily. To start with, our shadow doesn't need to match the object all that closely to achieve this. Once we do start trying to create that sort of match, then we can start to run into issues where some parts of our shadows contradict others in terms of where our light source is. For example, if we look at the rhino beetle on the bottom right of this page, that shadow suggests two separate locations for the light that casts it. On one hand, the shadow is clearly being cast from over the viewer's right shoulder (resulting in the shadow pushing further away from the viewer), BUT we also see the part of the shadow cast by the beetle's main torso being cast closer to the viewer. That's what makes it look off - it's not consistent. On the other hand, on the bottom left, that shadow is pretty vague, not really trying to make any strong declarations, but it does serve to make the beetle feel quite grounded. Once you're able to get your light source matters more consistent, then you may also want to play with the idea that the legs do in fact have multiple joints, and these would influence the shadows they cast. Right now you're riding the line between vague and detailed shadows, and often the quality of our work comes from our decisiveness, and the clarity with which we know what we are looking to achieve.

• For your sausage intersections, from what I'm seeing there isn't really anything wrong with how you're handling them in those examples. The only issue I saw was that the first example you linked, the legs you pointed out weren't really following the whole spheres-of-equal-size rule, and you weren't quite achieving a healthy amount of overlap between the intersecting sausages.

And of course, the bit about the scanner doesn't bother me at all. Plenty of people submit with cameras instead, but I take no issue with what you've done here.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-06-18 19:55

You certainly did have a lot of whining (your word, not mine!) but to be completely honest, your work here is really phenomenal. You're demonstrating an extremely well developed sense for construction, fluid and confident linework, and a well developing approach to texture and detail. As such, it's probably important that I remind you - your own perception of the quality of your results is rarely in line with the truth (for better or for worse). In this case, you're likely nitpicking on fairly minor points.

Now, it is certainly true - your more recent pages are leagues ahead of your older stuff, but even the older points were quite strong. The major difference is that your prioritization of form and construction, and your use of line weight to reinforce those elements, has matured considerably.

Your older drawings did have forms that were fairly solid, but there was still a tendency to think more in terms of the flat shapes that were sitting on your page - from the looks of it, your brain would start navigating the two dimensions of the page, and then gradually try and push what you'd drawn into the third dimension. As a result, contour lines were a little shallower, and you had a tendency to draw larger shapes and then cut back into them - again, as 2D shapes, without going very far to establish how the piece being cut away existed in 3D space.

Your newer pages are vastly improved in these areas. There's a strong impression that you've moved past the notion that you're drawing a page, and every form you put down conveys the impression that it exists as a solid element within a three dimensional space. The pieces fit together as individual, separate components merged into a single complex object. For example, if we look at your praying mantis' head, the spheres of the eyes feel tangible, in how they connect into sockets in the rest of its head. It's all very believable and real.

On top of this, your approach to texture and detail has developed a great deal. Your wasp and butterfly were beautifully rendered, and really carefully detailed. There's definitely a lot of patience and care there, no doubt about it - but I did get the impression that it was a little noisy, and it had the tendency of creating focal points that you may not have intended.

On the other hand, if we look at your mosquito, you focused more on communicating the surface texture of your objects to the viewer, rather than really brow-beating them with it. At the end of the day, focusing on this idea of "communication" rather than detail for detail's sake is key. It allows us to avoid situations where textures become overbearing, and also allow us to focus on our primary goals. There is of course the risk that a texture will end up being drawn in such a way that it contradicts the underlying construction in small ways - for example, a texture can very easily make anotherwise rounded surface start feeling flat. Being more subtle with our details can help to avoid this.

There's just one thing I wanted to mention in regards to your organic forms with contour lines. Yours are entirely fine, they're conveying the illusion of solidity and volume extremely well. That said, in the instructions (back in lesson 2) I do mention that you should strive to keep the sausage forms themselves fairly simple. That is, you essentially want to match the form of two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Try to avoid having these forms pinch in their midsection, or shift from an end of one size to another. This is at the heart of construction - developing complexity through the combination of more forms, rather than making our base building blocks more complex themselves.

Anyway! Keep up the fantastic work. You really are doing a great job, so try not to get so caught up with the little issues you may perceive. Perfectionism is not a character trait that defines who you are - it is something everyone struggles with to different degrees, and it is something we work past. It is something you too will conquer, but you need to work at it, to push past the voice in the back of your mind and remember that the goal here is not pretty drawings, but rather to learn from each one as an exercise in spatial reasoning. And of course, you certainly have been. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

As for the pen issue, you may be finding that a 0.4 is easier to use with a subtler touch, and that a 0.5 feels more heavy handed, making it feel awkward to work with. On this front, all the more reason to continue using the 0.5, as this will further develop your pressure control.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-21 00:58

There's some key weaknesses here, but overall you're actually demonstrating a pretty good understanding of construction as a whole. Your drawings end up feeling fairly three dimensional, and convey a good grasp of how these insects exist in 3D space, rather than just as flat drawings on a page.

I'm also noticing a good use of layering forms for the segmented abdomens of many of these insects - you're pushing past the silhouette of the initial abdomen form to create the impression that these are layers of carapace/exoskeleton that build on top one another. This really helps to push that illusion that it's all 3D.

The main issue that I'm seeing is that your linework isn't always entirely steady, especially when you have to draw skinny forms like the sausages we use to construct our legs. You can draw larger forms/ellipses to be fairly evenly shaped, but when you have to maintain the spacing between the edges of a sausage, especially at a smaller scale, you do struggle to keep it consistent. As a result, most of your legs end up being made up of forms that feel quite flat.

You also have a habit of reinforcing your lines, as though your sketching roughly, going back over them if you make a mistake, or if you feel that it's not clear enough. This works against the fundamental principles of drawabox, where we get used to drawing every single mark with the ghosting method, and think about each stroke before putting it down. If something goes wrong, then it's always best to leave it be, rather than piling more ink onto it, as this will draw more attention to the mistake.

I know that some of these drawings were were you were testing the water beforehand, kind of sketching your way through solving the problem before tackling the real drawing, but as you work through Drawabox, I want you to try and apply this kind of mindfulness, the ghosting technique, planning/preparing and finally executing each stroke for all the work you do. You can do many drawings of the same thing if you like, but I still want you to focus on drawing each mark in this manner.

It all comes down to these drawings themselves being exercises - so treating them as being practice drawings followed by a "final" isn't really the kind of approach we want to take.

Getting back to the sausage forms, they're the main area in these constructions that you need to work on. As shown here, you need to focus on the forms being the same as two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You also need them to intersect a good amount, and most importantly, you should be reinforcing their intersection with a clear contour curve. The sausage forms themselves should be simple enough to give the impression that they could be three dimensional, but it's this contour curve that establishes how the different sausages relate to one another in 3D space - by adding them correctly, we make it very clear that the forms are three dimensional. Currently you're skipping this step, and your forms tend to be more complex (with ends with different sizes, and widths that are not entirely consistent), and as a result they end up reading as being quite flat.

Aside from that, you're doing a pretty good job. There's certainly a good bit to work on here, but you'll have ample opportunities to do so in the next lesson (as the sausage method is still very important when constructing the legs of other animals). So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5, but be sure to keep working on what I've mentioned here.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-05 17:39

Honestly, your work here is strong. You've done a great job, and while there are a couple things that I'd like to point out, you're generally demonstrating a good grasp of constructional drawing, and all the concepts covered in the lesson.

To start with, your organic forms with contour lines are generally coming along very well. Your first page, with the contour curves, do have some sloppy cases among them (areas where your curves slip outside of the silhouette of the form, where the curves aren't aligning correctly to the minor axis, etc.) but towards the right side of that page, things get much better. Furthermore, your second page, with the contour ellipses, is exceptionally well done. I have just one comment there - on the top right, you have a form that bulges through its midsection. That's something you'll want to avoid, as we want to keep our sausages as simple as possible. Construction relies on successive passes with the addition of more simple forms to build up levels of complexity, rather than simply increasing the complexity of the base forms.

Now, this is a concept your insect constructions convey very nicely. You're building things up bit by bit, and demonstrating a strong awareness of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space.

The area that I feel is perhaps weakest is how you approach drawing your legs. There are areas where you approach these rather well (like the louse demo), but there are a variety of others where there are issues.

Starting with the scorpion, you've very clearly applied the sausage method. What I am noticing however is that when you built up around them (like here), you did so in a manner that felt much flatter and more two dimensional, like a flat shape being added to the drawing, rather than a solid three dimensional form being added to the three dimensional construction. As a result, this flattened out the drawing.

There are a few reasons why it felt this way. Firstly, the form itself was more complex - it's larger towards one end, and narrower towards the other. What might have been more successful would have been actually adding a ball mass towards the far end of this section, and then blending it up with the rest of the form, rather than tackling it all at once. Another is that we can see a rather nicely drawn contour line towards the bottom, covering the joint and defining a clear relationship between forms - but this additional shape you added ends short of that. Having it extend all the way down to it would have allowed it to benefit from that contour line's reinforcing qualities.

In other insect constructions, you deviated from the sausage method altogether, choosing to pick your approach on a case-by-case basis. For now, I really do want to stress the importance of applying the sausage method consistently to all subject matter, largely because of how well it allows us to capture the gestural rhythm of a limb, while also maintaining its solidity purely by reinforcing the intersections with a single contour line right at the joint. This is actually something that you're skipping on occasion - remember that as explained in this diagram, that contour line at the joints is key. This sausage method will also be put into play in the next lesson, when we tackle animals.

I think this drawing was definitely your weakest, and stands out a great deal from the rest. I believe this is because you deviated from the general process you followed for the rest of these - you're not as mindful of the construction as a whole (building up complexity gradually rather than all at once), and you have a tendency to treat your forms more as though they are flat shapes. For example, you laid down the abdomen form, as a basic ball mass, but then drew directly on top of it as though you could simply replace what was essentially a solid form that already existed in the world.

The last thing I want to mention is that your use of texture is, for the most part, really coming along well. It's bold and you don't shy away from really heavy areas. You also pay clear attention to the fact that the marks you're putting down for texture are the shadows cast by the little textural forms along the object's surface, and you're free to merge them together as you please. This helps you to avoid creating unintentional focal areas, so you can continue guiding the viewer's eye as you please.

So! You do have some things to work on, but by and large you've done a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-11 20:18

As your homework has been submitted a week early (your last submission was on July 4th, so you shouldn't have been submitting any new lessons until July 18th), I was going to tell you to hold onto it for another week. Then I realized that you are DrIsaac on discord, and figured that I should try and give you some guidance right now, rather than having you wait another week. In the future, definitely mind the 2-week-between-submissions rule.

I believe what is holding you back is how you apply your observational skills to a drawing. When drawing along with the various demonstrations, you show a lot more patience and care. It's true that the demonstrations do a lot of the thinking and analysis for you - it identifies the major masses for you, and generally breaks the complex object in front of you into simpler parts. When given that information, you do a considerably better job of actually applying construction itself.

When you're left to do that analysis yourself, you very quickly get overwhelmed by everything you're seeing. You panic, and let go of what you learned from the demonstrations and the rest of the lesson. Furthermore, your focus diminished as you worked through the whole set, and as you mentioned yourself in our brief conversation, you purposely rushed through just to get to the end of the lesson. That of course doesn't really help much, since those drawings don't really convey anything about what you actually understand, and what you don't.

Overall I could piece together that when you draw, you rely a great deal on your memory. That is, you'll look at your reference image, and then try to pull everything you're seeing into your head. Then you go to draw a bunch, and don't look at your reference again for a while. "A while" is a pretty vague measurement of time - it could be thirty seconds, it could be minutes, it could even be just a few seconds - but what matters most is the fact that what you're taking with you when you go to draw marks on your page is all very heavily simplified. In order to take all of that information with you as you looked away from the reference, your brain had to throw away the vast majority of what it had seen. Sometimes when we do this, we'll focus on the things we can ascribe words to. For example, "a leg" or "a head" or "a wing", and then we go and draw what we believe that named element to look like. And of course, it's always very, very wrong, because as human beings, we never evolved to remember that kind of information. To survive, all we had to retain were the absolute basics of what we saw - usually a predator - so we could identify it quickly and escape. Here we are actively fighting against our nature to rewire how our brains work. So yeah, it's not easy, and it's not meant to be easy. There's no surprise that you're frustrated.

You are however allowing that frustration to distract you. Instead of taking a step back and thinking about what your next step should be, you're throwing the entirety of the lesson and everything you've learned up to this point aside, and that simply isn't going to do us any good. The most important thing that you need to accept is that you are not special. The things you're struggling with here are the same things everyone has struggled with. Like I said - we are actively fighting against what we were designed to do as human beings. None of this is natural. If you get caught up on the concept of "talent" or feeling that you are specifically, uniquely unsuited for this task, you give yourself an excuse to regard drawing as some special thing, when it's nothing of the sort. It's no different from any other skill, and developing it is no different than going to school, or going to work and hammering in a nail every day for weeks and months. Just as you can be disciplined in dragging yourself out of bed at 7am to go to a shitty job, you can be disciplined here.

To put it simply: you're making drawing out to be something it's not.

Here are some point-by-point suggestions on what to do:

• In your work, you gradually shift away from drawing individual forms in a 3D world. You start basically drawing simple flat shapes, and eventually slip into just drawing loosely associated lines. You MUST think about every single form you add to your drawing as it exists in 3D space. As though the page you're drawing on is just a window looking out into a larger world, and where form you add to your drawing is a solid mass in that world.

• The lesson gives you a sort of step-by-step formula of what to look for, starting with the three major masses (head, thorax, abdomen). Study your reference, and identify where these basic masses are. Then transfer that forms to your drawing, focusing on establishing them as solid and three dimensional. Ensure that every single form is complete - don't stop drawing one when it gets overlapped by another form, as we're focusing on understanding how each form sits in space on its own, and how they relate to one another within that 3D space.

• When two forms intersect with one another in your drawing, define that intersection with a contour line defining where they meet.

• Get used to observing your reference directly, and identifying very LIMITED pieces of information. Identify individual forms and transfer them one by one - don't draw what you remember seeing, draw exactly what you see there. The way you're approaching things right now is very cartoony, due to oversimplification. It's not because you haven't got talent, it's because your observational skills are currently not developed.

• Use the sausage method correctly when constructing legs. As shown here, each sausage is essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. That means the ends need to be equal in size, they need to be spherical (don't stretch their roundedness out), and there should be no tapering/pinching/swelling through their length. You did this fairly well in your demos, and very poorly everywhere else. As explained in a previous point, where those sausages intersect with one another, you should be placing a single contour line to define their intersection, right at the joint. When done properly, this is enough to reinforce the illusion of 3D form in both connected sausages, making it entirely unnecessary to add contour lines to their lengths.

• When drawing contour lines, focus on wrapping them around the form's surface. Looking at your organic forms with contour curves at the beginning, you are wrapping these around believably, but in your other drawings they tend to be very shallow in their curvature. Now, in that particular exercise, there were a few minor issues - you're DEFINITELY pressing too hard with your pen and/or drawing too slowly, resulting in lines that are very uniform rather than flowing smoothly and confidently. You've also got some where the contour lines don't quite fit snugly within the form, though you've got many cases where they do. Overall these exercises are still showing skills that are VASTLY superior to what you exhibit in your actual insect constructions, which just means you're not investing the time, patience nor focus to actually demonstrate what you are currently capable of.

• You mentioned before that you're focusing on construction rather than detail/texture, but based on your work that's not true. As you push onwards, I see many halfhearted attempts at adding texture and detail, as though that is somehow going to save a weak construction. Adding the lines to these insects' wings, adding fuzz to a moth, etc. None of these things are necessary, and they're all distracting you from focusing on the core construction.

• Remember that construction is fundamentally all about moving from simple to complex, gradually building up that complexity in successive phases. NEVER draw a form or shape that is more complicated than the scaffolding you've already put down will allow. For example, if we look at the praying-mantis looking thing on the top right of this page, the wings have all kinds of curves that amount to complexity, though there's nothing there to help support it. You jumped in too complex too early.

I hit the 10,000 character limit for reddit posts, so I'm going to include the last bit in a reply to this comment.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-15 13:20

Looks like your last submission (the revisions on lesson 3) were submitted 8 days ago on July 7th, so you'll have to hold onto this submission and resubmit it no sooner than July 21st. It occurs to me that the wording about the 2 week rule may have been a bit confusing before - basically if revisions are requested, you can submit those immediately, but they'll still 'reset the clock' so to speak. So it's counted compared to the last time your work had to be reviewed.

This is both to ensure that we're not getting swamped with critiques (be they full critiques or revisions) and that students themselves are given a solid amount of time to go through the work without any logical reason to rush.

I will mention that a quick glance at your work shows that it's come along pretty well. I'll have a few things to point out when I actually do my critique, but I expect I will mark it as complete. I still wouldn't recommend moving on until I've done that proper review, of course.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-21 19:05

So you've got a variety of results here - some weaker, some stronger - but overall you demonstrate a well developing grasp of the material. I do have a few things to point out however, and I'll start with the organic forms with contour lines exercise at the beginning.

There are a few things to keep in mind here:

• You're generally doing a good job of keeping these sausages simple, though I'm noticing that you have a tendency to have the ends of your sausages be different sizes, as well as a tendency to sometimes stretch the roundedness of the ends over a longer distance. Remember that, as explained here, the sausage is made up of two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. The equal size thing is obvious, but the fact that they're spheres means that their roundedness can only occupy so much space before transitioning into the tube of consistent width.

• Keep an eye on the degree of your contour curves. Remember that the degree of one of the cross-sectional slices (which the contour lines represent) tells us how that slice is oriented in space relative to the viewer. Many of yours are pretty consistently the same, or in some cases they shift but they convey a confusing arrangement of orientations.

Jumping into your insect drawings, the follow-along of the wasp demo is definitely a bit off in terms of proportions, but it's a good start. I'd certainly have more to say if it was later in the lesson, but I will mention that the slight addition of "detail" to the wings should have been left out. That was clearly a half-assed attempt, and generally speaking when you want to dig into detail, it's going to mean spending a lot of time studying the textures in your reference image, identifying what actual little forms sit on the surface of the given object, and what kinds of shadows they'd cast. As discussed back in lesson 2, all textures are made up of shadows, and so we want to capture those details as a series of shadow shapes - not a few arbitrarily placed lines.

Your drawing of the louse has definitely come along much more successfully. The proportions of the head definitely make it feel a little cartoony, but I'm quite pleased with how you've handled the intersections between the different forms, and how you've applied the sausage method for its legs. The ribbing along its abdomen is also giving a strong impression of the three dimensional nature of this creature.

With a lot of these - like the scorpion - I do get the impression that the drawings would benefit considerably from being given more room on the page. It certainly would have been possible, given that a significant fraction of the page was left blank and unused, so it is a bit of a shame that you didn't take full advantage of that. Drawing larger gives our brain more room to think through the various spatial problems involved in constructing solid, believable forms, and in resolving the relationships between them. It also gives us more room to engage our full arm when drawing.

Jumping down to the ant, I'm noticed that you added a pretty heavy black portion along the underside of the major masses. If this was an attempt at adding some form of shading, I want to emphasize the fact that back in lesson 2, I mention that we do not apply any form shading through these lessons. More specifically, we do not want to get into any shading for shading's sake. If we need some sort of a transition from light to dark to communicate a certain texture (as those transition areas are where textures become most useful), we can use shading as a tool to achieve that, but in general since our focus is entirely on construction, we want to push the capacity to convey the solidity of our forms through those means rather than relying on any additional crutches.

Another point I wanted to mention about the ant was how you tackled its thorax. As we can see in the reference, the thorax is actually made up of two major visible masses. When drawing it, you approached it by applying the usual formula of one ball for the head, one ball for the thorax, one ball for the abdomen that was introduced in the lesson in a sort of rote-memorization fashion. It's important that you understand that these concepts are introduced with the expectation that you will think about why they are approached in a certain way, so when you're tackled with something that is a little different, you can apply those same principles, rather than following the exact same steps without any additional critical thinking. It's similar to how the leaf construction method is introduced in lesson 3, and how when faced with more complex, multi-armed leaves like maple leaves, we would apply the concepts conveyed in the leaf construction method, but not those steps directly (we'd approach it like this).

To that point, when you have two obvious ball forms like that, construct the thorax with two ball forms intersecting together. You did ultimately end up doing this, but not until after you'd already placed a solid mass there at the beginning. The reason this isn't correct is because you're asserting to the viewer that there is a mass encompassing the entirety of the thorax, then asserting that there are two forms within that space (and ignoring the presence of the first one). It results in a contradiction that undermines the illusion you're trying to convince the viewer to believe.

Try to focus on working additively for now - that is, rather than trying to subtract from forms you've added to the construction (which is valid, but considerably more advanced), focus on building things up only from putting forms down, and then attaching more masses to them, or around them.

Jumping down to the dragonfly, watch how you draw your contour curves, especially when using it to define segmentation. Along its abdomen, the contour curves were drawn backwards, telling the viewer that they segmentation is layered and wrapped around the underlying form in a very unnatural configuration.

The last one I'm going to discuss is the grasshopper. Overall, I quite liked this construction, and I felt like it conveyed a good grasp of 3D space overall. I can see that with its abdomen, you mistakenly drew in a much longer form, then opted to shorten it - this is the same kind of issue as with the ant's thorax, and I'd recommend instead sticking to the decision you made in the first place and seeing it through. Remember that every phase of construction is about making a decision and asserting it to the viewer. If you go on to undermine a decision and offer an alternate answer later on, you will gradually build up more and more contradictions through your construction - effectively making it more difficult for the viewer to suspend their disbelief and believe your lie.

At the end of the day, I'm not nearly as concerned with your ability to draw exactly what was in your reference, as I am in your ability to draw something that, without the reference present, would still be convincing.

So, overall you do have plenty of things to work on, but I am going to be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-19 15:59

Edit: Damnit, I just realized after finsihing the critique that you're still not at the $10 tier, and aren't eligible for getting this lesson critiqued. That's the second time I've done that, as I made the same mistake with your lesson 3 work. I'm going to make an additional note so I don't do this again in the future, and for now you can count yourself doubly fortunate.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally looking pretty good, with two main issues:

• The bigger one is that you aren't shifting the degree of your ellipses through the length of your sausage forms. Leaving them all the same degree causes the sausage to feel stiffer and more static, since it implies that the whole world in front of the viewer has been flattened out.

• As explained here, make sure you're sticking to the provided definition of a sausage form: two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This is particularly important when we start looking at the actual sausage method for constructing legs as introduced in this lesson.

Overall your use of construction throughout this lesson is actually really well done. There are a few little points I want to address, but your drawings feel solid and believable. I'll definitely be scrounging around at the bottom of the barrel for advice to offer you:

• The first thing that jumps out at me is that you are definitely cramming a lot of drawings into each page. Assuming that you're working around the standard A4 page, this can definitely result in each drawing getting a little cramped in its corner of the page. Construction as a whole benefits immensely from your brain having more room to think through all of these spatial problems. In addition to that, it also pushes us to engage more of our arm, and fall less into the pitfalls of drawing from our wrists. In general, it is best to give your drawings more room on the page, even if that means limiting yourself to two - or even just one - drawing on each sheet.

• You do have a tendency to draw your construction lines a little more timidly, like you're actively trying to keep them from being present in your final drawing. This results in these forms being drawn too roughly and loosely. For example, looking at the beetle on the top right of this page, the abdomen was definitely blocked with what resembles chicken scratch. That was definitely the most egregious of the lot, but taking the time to draw each individual form with full confidence and not worrying about how that'll impact your end result is going to teach you more about drawing solid forms. As you can see in my demos, I don't hold back on the underlying linework, and I'm always able to come back at the end and clarify my drawings by applying line weight to key areas.

• On the topic of line weight, because you put down a lot of loose, rough, and sometimes scratchy marks initially, they effectively become underdrawings that have to be fully reinforced and committed. This results in you using line weight in a manner that traces over existing lines and replaces them with a darker stroke. This is something I actively campaign against. As I mention back in the form intersections video in lesson 2, line weight should be reserved for smaller, local areas of lines rather than the entire stroke being replaced. Tracing over your linework carefully will stiffen it, and will take some of the life out of your drawings. Remember that line weight is about clarifying and building a hierarchy. It doesn't push any of your linework out of the view of your audience, but it does pull some lines forward and pushes others back. That isn't to say that it's meant to group your lines into "final" and "underdrawing" - it's not so binary as that. Instead, it's a gradient of importance, all built up with the intent of communicating clearly with the viewer.

• I noticed here and there that when you attempted to add detail to your drawings, you did attempt at times to add shading, or something akin to shading, purely for its own sake. As explained here, we purposely avoid shading/hatching in our lessons because we first want to hammer out a firm grasp of construction as it can be used to convey the solidity of our forms on its own, without any additional help. From there, we also push the idea of shading itself, if it is ever applied in any fashion, being a tool rather than a goal. Form shading by its very nature involves gradual shifts from dark to light, with grey areas in between. Therefore if we want to communicate the texture of a surface in a key area, we can use shading as a tool to give us somewhere to convey that texture (creating a gradient from sparse to dense texture). If there's no such target or purpose to our shading however, we end up with marks that don't really contribute anything, or worse - loose, generic hatching that can risk contradicting the underlying curvature of our forms. So, as a rule, if you end up wanting to use hatching lines, step back and think about why. There are a few cases where we purposely use hatching lines to flatten out rear legs to draw attention away from them, but other than that, it should be avoided.

So! Overall you're doing a good job, but you do have a few things to keep in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-23 21:10

Overall these are phenomenally done, and demonstrate a really solid grasp of 3D space, of how forms can intersect together to create more complex objects, and of well developed observational skills. There are a few minor things I want to point out here and there, but you're doing a great job across the board.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, a minor point - you've got some deviation here form the standard "2 equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width" definition, and it's important that we adhere to it (as explained here). We want to avoid ends of different sizes, and any sort of pinching/swelling through the midsection, in the interest of keeping our forms as simple as possible. Construction is after all, all about building up complexity through the addition of more simple forms, rather than by increasing the complexity of our base components.

Moving onto your actual insect constructions, I noticed that you didn't really apply the sausage technique covered in the lesson. Your legs were still generally pretty well done, though didn't always maintain the kind of solidity that they could have. There's a lot of leeway with legs to allow them to appear flatter without necessarily harming the result or the overall illusion that what we've drawn is three dimensional, but it is something that we still need to be able to control at our own will. You had a tendency to put down a bunch of loosely associated lines to flesh out the leg you saw, relying more on the sort of sketching we see in observational drawing (where we rely less on concrete forms) at first, before trying to tie it all together with contour lines (which themselves were at times a little rushed, and not always wrapping around the rounded forms in an entirely convincing manner). It didn't hurt your drawings much, and they still came out great largely because the torsos were so solid and well constructed, but the sausage method (as explained here) would have definitely given you a much stronger structure on which to build.

The key to the sausage method is that it allows us to capture the flowing gesture of a limb and its solidity with as little linework as possible in order to keep things clean and economical. We only put contour curves right at the joint itself, where two sausages intersect, freeing us from having to put any others along the length of a given segment. These kinds of contour lines can serve to stiffen things up at times, so we generally do what we can to avoid them where they're not entirely necessary.

Always remember that at its core, the constructional drawing method is all about putting down simple forms, and building them up in successive phases. Drawing through all of these forms in their entirety as they layer on top of one another, in order to understand how they all sit in space and to properly define how they relate to one another is critical.

Additionally, as these forms are solid, real masses that we have added to the world, it is necessary to interact with them in a way that conveys this degree of respect for their tangibility. I noticed that in the caterpillar on this page you had a tendency to cut back into it at times when adding the ribbing along the length of its body - this basically amounts treating our 3D drawing as though it is flat, and conveys that assertion to the viewer. We need to always treat everything like it's three dimensional - in this case achieving that ribbing by wrapping new forms around the circumference of that rounded body. You can see a better example of this in this section from lesson 2.

Despite these few key points I've drawn attention to, your constructions still do for the most part hold up a great deal of solidity. The wasp at the very end for example, has a body that feels believable three dimensional, and the use of line weight really pushes that illusion. There are however key, minor areas where you break away from the tenets of construction, like the antennae, where treating the drawing as being a two dimensional collection of lines can undermine the lie we're telling to the viewer. At the end of the day, you still manage to maintain their suspension of disbelief, but we want to avoid anything that could potentially erode it, as it is an accumulation of such mistakes that ultimately causes a drawing to fall flat.

So! Keep those points in mind as you continue to move onwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-24 21:36

Hah! Shouldn't tell me that - I might just assign more. I'm kidding, of course - but don't think me cruel if I decide you need it.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are generally pretty well done, but keep an eye on the alignment to those central minor axis lines. Your curves are frequently a little slanted relative to where they should be, especially when the flow of the sausage form turns. This impedes one's ability to get them to wrap convincingly around the entire form.

Your actual insect drawings are generally fairly well done, and demonstrate a decent grasp of 3D space, construction and the combination of forms. There are a few notable issues that I want to address however:

The biggest is that I'm noticing a tendency to put your early construction lines down really faintly, and then to go back over them with a darker line once you feel confident enough to commit to them. This kind of binary of "underdrawing" or "sketch" and "final drawing" is something I rail against as far back as lesson 2, where I talk about it in the form intersections video.

It's really important that you draw every single mark with confidence, not trying to actively hide them from the final drawing. Just put all your focus on ghosting through the motion and executing it as well as you can. Then when it comes time to add line weight, you can go back over limited sections of those lines with a similarly confident stroke to help add the kind of hierarchy that clarifies how the forms overlap and how they fit together, as you can see in my demonstrations. The word "hierarchy" is important here - it's not a binary of old lines and new lines - it's taking all the lines that exist and arranging them on a spectrum, and adding weight only to certain parts where they need it (rather than to the entirety of a given stroke).

One thing I was very pleased with was how you handled the segmentation on the ant from this page. The layered chitin looks really tangible and thick, and they wrap around the underlying form very well.

Another concern I had was that you're cramming a lot of drawings into each page. That in itself isn't a worry, but rather the issue is a matter of not giving each drawing as much room as it really needs. Our brains benefit considerably from being given more room to think through the spatial problems of construction, so when we try to draw something cramped in a quarter or less of a page, it really impedes how we're able to execute our marks. It also keeps us from fully engaging our arms, especially when not as confident or skilled in drawing from the shoulder.

One minor point that is worth mentioning is the relatively sloppy hatching you use to fill the cast shadows. Any kind of sloppiness should generally be avoided, but there are very few situations where hatching is actually something we should be adding to any of these drawings, as it often acts against the natural strengths of the tools we're using. Fineliners put rich, dark marks, and so as you may remember from the notes on detail and texture, we try to lean more towards leveraging those rich darks rather than treating our pens like they're pencils, or something else that they are not.

In the case of the cast shadows in particular, I'd have left them empty - laying down the footprint is enough to ground the construction, and anything more will tend to draw too much attention from the viewer, when you really want that attention to rest of the insect.

The last point I want to make is a minor one about texture and detail. You do tend to have a lot of cases here where after you've put down your fairly solid construction, you sometimes feel it necessary to add some sort of detail. The issue is that when you do so, you don't really go beyond a cursory attempt. For example, the bee's wings on this page have only vague, arbitrary marks. Its fur is also quite haphazard and random.

Detail and texture is not something to be done lightly. If you're going to add texture, take the time to really study your reference closely and carefully, and identify the forms that sit along the surface of the object. Those forms are what cast the shadows we interpret as lines - lines themselves don't exist. So being aware of each form as you draw the shadow it projects onto its surroundings is key to achieving an effective texture. This of course is a significant investment of time, and is not required, so if you don't want to put that in, that's fine. But don't split the difference and put down sloppy lines.

I do recommend that you reread the material on texture, specifically the lesson 2 page on it and all of the notes on the texture analysis page. This will help refresh some of your memory on the topic as you move forwards.

All in all, despite my concerns, you are doing pretty well. The matter of putting your construction lines lightly is definitely my biggest worry, but I can see that improving fairly quickly with a shift in your approach.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-07-27 15:48

It looks like you'd submitted this a day early, but instead of having you submit it again, I just put the critique off for a day. And look at that! Now you're on time :D

Starting with your sausage forms with contour curves, there are two main issues with these:

• In the exercise, you'll see that I have a specific definition for what constitutes a 'sausage' form. Two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This means the ends should be the same size, and there should be no pinching through their midsection. For this reason, it's very important that even when you feel confident you know what an exercise involves, that you go back and quickly read through its instructions, as there are often things that we forget.

• Your contour curves are drawn here pretty sloppily. In a lot of cases, the curvature is quite shallow as you reach the edge, There are also a few that slip outside of the silhouette of the form, and others that aren't quite aligned correctly to the minor axis line as the sausage turns. These are all things you definitely will need to work on, though first and foremost, take a step back and put more thought into how you want to draw each mark before you put it down.

As far as the actual construction of the insects goes however, you are doing a pretty good job. There are still issues, which I'll list below, but by and large you're building things up quite nicely and are respecting the general process of construction. Here are the issues I noticed:

• You've got a habit of not drawing through a lot of your ellipses. Remember that I want you to draw through each and every ellipse you draw for the drawabox lessons without exception. This isn't necessary for anything that deviates from a basic elliptical shape (so for example, sausage forms).

• You definitely struggle with putting down the smaller, narrower sausage forms. I saw all the practice attempts next to your wasp, and when we get down to the wolf spider, you're definitely struggling to maintain a consistent width through their lengths. What's important here is that you do seem to be striving towards that goal, but you do need to keep working at it.

• Don't forget that the sausage method for drawing limbs involves reinforcing the joint where the two sausages meet with a contour curve. This of course requires us to construct these sausages in such a way that we ourselves perceive them as solid, 3D forms, and having them intersect a great deal. This is where the whole consistent-width thing comes in. Keeping the forms as simple as possible really helps emphasize this illusion of being three dimensional, and in turn allows us to buy into that illusion ourselves. Even if there is further complexity to the form you're trying to capture - for example, actual tapering through the midsection - our focus isn't on capturing each visible form immediately. We build up towards that (adding additional forms as needed). It's more important that we maintain a consistent illusion of three dimensionality, which means building up from simple forms.

One significant concern I noticed early on, but much less so towards the end, was an initial tendency to focus a lot on texture by focusing primarily on drawing additional lines. Now you ended up leaving texture aside for most of the lesson, and frankly your drawings benefitted from it. At the end especially, the praying mantis is pretty solid, and the fly is fantastic. That said, it doesn't mean the issue was resolved, just delayed - which is perfectly acceptable as our focus here is on construction and form.

That said, the key to drawing texture is understanding that line isn't real. It doesn't exist in the world around us, at least not in that particular capacity. Line is a tool we use to help define the borders between volumes and forms, and is very useful when dealing with construction. Texture however is only different from construction in that it often involves a LOT of densely packed little forms that exist on the surface of our object.

If we attempted to use lines for this, we'd end up with a very visually noisy result - lot of lines packed together, lots of high contrast black/white, and so on. Doesn't work well, and it draws the viewer's eye where we don't mean it to go. It also tells the viewer that we're explicitly drawing every single textural form that exists along the surface of our object. We've drawn everything directly, and therefore nothing that has not been drawn exists. With texture, we instead often want to rely a lot on implied detail, so having to draw everything explicitly doesn't work for us.

So we need to employ a different tool. As discussed throughout lesson 2's texture section, that tool is cast shadows. We don't actually draw any of the forms present on our surfaces. We don't outline them at all, we don't draw their internal details, nothing. What we do draw however are the little shadows those forms cost - the things we often interpret to exist as lines. Shadows are however much more flexible as they don't simply exist as narrow lines. Sometimes they're narrow, but they are always shapes and can be expanded, can merge together with neighbouring shadow shapes, and so on. They can also be blasted away by direct light, causing shadows that get lost and found along the way.

In doing this, we end up drawing all of our detail as implied - drawing the shadows around the forms, and implying those forms' presence on the surface of our object by effectively drawing where they aren't. Give these notes on the subject a read. They're a fairly new addition, having only been added two weeks ago to help explain concepts students were often struggling with.

Anyway, all in all you're doing quite well, and while you have a number of key areas to continue to focus, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-27 16:17

Starting out with your organic forms with contour curves, these are generally okay, with a few minor points to keep an eye on:

• You're generally doing a good job of maintaining simple basic sausage forms though I am seeing a couple places where they widen through their midsection (often when turning).

• Keep working on getting those curves to align to the minor axis - you've generally got it, but just like the previous point, your alignment tends to go off the mark a little when your forms turn.

Your grasp of form and construction definitely improves a great deal over the course of the lesson. Your earlier drawings were rather rough - not terrible or anything, as they did demonstrate a growing understanding of 3D form and space, but they generally didn't fit together in an entirely believable manner.

Once you hit this spider however, I could see considerable improvement overall, so I'm going to offer my advice on these later ones:

• In that spider, I noticed that your use of the sausage method for constructing limbs was coming along decently, but had a few issues. Firstly, you had a tendency of drawing sausages that were more akin to stretched ellipses. Remember that we're looking for two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. The roundedness on the ends (provided by the spheres) of your leg segments tended to be quite stretched, like those spheres were elongated. This often yields a stiffer form. The other issue is that the sausage technique involves also reinforcing the joint between the two sausage forms with a single, clean contour curve. You don't seem to have been doing this, and in general, the intersections between your sausages tended to feel rather flat, making them feel more like 2D shapes rather than 3D forms. Make sure they intersect a little further, and try to think about how these sausages exist in 3D space rather than as lines on the page.

• You often try to capture some of the 'line' detail along the surface of the wings. It's important to always remember that line isn't really something that exists in the world. It's a tool we use to define the borders between forms and volumes, and when looking at detail, this tool no longer really works well - especially when you're looking to just create a line on its own. Instead, as discussed in lesson 2, the marks we put down for texture are the shadows cast by the small forms that exist on the surface of our objects. In the case of these wings, those 'lines' are actually veins that exist within the wing structure, and therefore they themselves are forms that can cast shadows. If you do wish to capture that kind of detail, focus on determining what kinds of shadows they'd cast in order to avoid the sort of overly noisy result that lines on their own tends to give us. You may also want to read these relatively new notes on handling shadows when transitioning from dense to sparse areas of texture.

• It's important to remember that again, back in lesson 2's texture section I mention that we generally stay away from shading. That is, the shading we apply on a form in relation to how it interacts with a given light source, with the parts facing away from the light getting darker and those facing towards it getting brighter. You have applied form shading of this sort to most of your drawings. Now you're actually not entirely incorrect here - there is a circumstance in which we do use shading, but it's never just for shading's sake. The great thing about form shading as a tool is that it provides us with midtone areas that we need to somehow achieve - a transition area from light to dark. And that is exactly what texture, with its arrangement of black shadows and solid white areas - can give us. So the one valid place I allow students to use form shading within the drawabox lessons is where you want to communicate the texture of a surface. You've almost done that - you've added some areas where that shading has been added, the only problem is that you didn't actually use any sort of the textures present within your reference in the transition areas, and only used generic hatching. As a rule, stay away from hatching like this in your drawings, purely because it works as a generic catch-all that makes you forget to really study your reference closely and identify the textures that are present there. Without texture, that shading is just there for its own sake, and is serving no real purpose. Our drawings aren't there to be pretty - we're learning how to communicate things by visual means, and therefore every mark we put down must somehow contribute to that goal. Sometimes students will try to use shading to help convey how a form is three dimensional, but construction itself already achieves that in a considerably more effective manner.

All in all, you really are doing well. While the legs are at times a bit of a weak point, you really nail the construction of their torsos, and demonstrate a really strong grasp of how these solid, three dimensional forms fit together to create a tangible, believable object that doesn't read as a series of lines on a page.

Keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-29 17:15

Very, very nice work! You've done a great job here and have really nailed the core concepts covered in the lesson. Your constructions are solid and believable, and your drawings come out conveying the full creepy-crawliness in full force.

There are just a few little things I'm going to call out - most are very nitpicky, as it's often difficult to find a way to validate my taking your money each month when students apply the concepts from the lesson in a particularly effective manner.

• The most nitpicky of them all - your organic forms with contour curves are well executed, but there are just a few that don't quite hold to the definition of a simple sausage as laid out in the exercise instructions. Stick to forms that are essentially two equal spheres connected by tube of consistent width. This is because construction is dependent on the idea of all our components being as simple as possible, and building up complexity through the addition of more simple forms, rather than increasing the complexity of those base components. So avoid branching, as well as forms that taper towards their midsection.

• Generally I caution students against drawing their individual insect constructions too small on the page (and as a result, cramming too many things onto one page). This is because it is more difficult for our brains to think through spatial problems without being given enough room to think. That said, you still managed this quite well, aside from one area - your use of the sausage method for constructing the legs of your insects tended to suffer most, specifically in establishing the clear intersections of the sausage volumes. You had some solid uses of it - like in the louse demo - but had weaker results in cases like this spider. You stopped using it altogether through many of your beetles - I understand that their leg configuration may look different, but remember that the structure we're putting down with these simple chains of sausages are not representative of the outside of the object - we can still wrap the chitinous exoskeleton around it as we please, and add additional forms to make one end of a sausage larger than the other - but it's an important part of laying down the solid groundwork for the leg and how it exists in space. This will continue to be a major factor as we move into lesson 5.

• In the bottom right of this page of beetles, you've got one with a lot of lovely little bumpy nodes along its thorax and abdomen. I noticed that when drawing these bumps you found it difficult to separate yourself from outlining each one in its entirety. As explained in this more recently added section of the texture analysis notes, this sort of full outlining should be avoided, as should the tendency to think in terms of line when dealing in texture. Lines are an excellent tool for capturing the boundaries between forms and volumes, but they don't work super well with texture. Instead, we stop drawing each textural form directly, and instead imply their presence by drawing the shadows they cast on their surroundings. This helps avoid situations where textures become noisy and distracting - something you've GENERALLY done a great job of (though this was the only occasion where there were a lot of clear, concrete forms being outlined in this manner).

Anyway, as I said at the top, you're doing a great job, and I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete. Keep these points I've raised here in mind and feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-02 14:48

As your last submission was just 3 days ago (On July 30th), you are way short of the 14-days-between-lesson-submissions rule. You will have to hold onto this and resubmit it no earlier than August 13th.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-02 16:39

So while there's still a lot of the issues I saw in your previous submission, there are a handful here that are very promising. Overall what that tells me is that while you're struggling a great deal overall, there are little breakthroughs happening, and that you do certainly have a path forward.

To start, your organic forms with contour ellipses are drawn quite well. The sausage forms themselves aren't exactly right but they are close - you just need to work on getting the ends to be the same size, and to eliminate any pinching through the midsection. Remember that back in lesson 2, sausages are described as "two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width". Nailing this form in its simplest state as described is at the core of then being able to chain these sausages together to create a believable, solid construction. If however we sneak in a lot of extra complexity to each form, it becomes much harder to make them feel solid.

It's worth mentioning that I'm also pleased that you're showing good use of the ellipses themselves - they're fairly evenly shaped, they fit snugly between the edges of the sausage form, and their degree shifts appropriately along their length.

For your contour curves, there are just two issues:

• I'm not seeing that same degree shift, so the sausages end up looking a little more rigid and flat.

• Their lineweight is EXTREMELY uniform. If you look at the ends of these curves, there's no tapering whatsoever, which tells us that you're either drawing with WAY too much pressure, or you're drawing way too slowly. I suspect it's probably both, but that applying too much pressure is definitely an issue for you. In general, we want to draw confidently and without actively trying to push our pen into the page - we just want to make contact with it. The natural tapering that comes as the pen touches down on the page while moving gives it a sense of liveliness that we don't see here.

That point on applying too much pressure definitely comes up throughout your drawings. I see a lot of lines that look VERY thick relative to the size of the drawing as a whole. This can be because the student is applying too much pressure, and also because they're drawing too small - but the result is generally the same. It makes a drawing much harder to work with, makes it more difficult to think through the spatial problems involved, and makes the drawings feel clunky and clumsy. It's the sort of thing that often makes students feel very frustrated with themselves, even though it is for the most part an issue of their own making. So don't press so hard, and draw bigger - there's nothing wrong with devoting an entire page to a single insect, especially if it allows you to engage your whole arm when drawing, and helps your brain work through the spatial problems involved in construction.

Now you follow along with the demonstrations fairly well, and I think they show us some issues that your other drawings don't quite accomplish:

• Your use of the sausage method in these drawings is generally much better than in your own drawings, but we can definitely see that the sausage shapes aren't nearly as consistent as the ones you did for the contour line exercise. As far as following the "two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width" formula, these are straying a great deal more. This means you are capable of doing better with these, but that when you try drawing them as part of something, you psych yourself out. You focus too much on the whole of what you're drawing, and not enough on the individual mark you're putting down at a given moment.

Also, I can see areas where you skip an important step of the sausage method - putting the contour curve down at the joint that defines the intersection between both sausages. So when you go to draw the legs of any insect or animal, because you have issues remembering all of the steps of this process, you should go back to this diagram and apply it directly, rather than trying to rely on your less than stellar memory.

Looking forward to how you construct legs in your own drawings, you tend to rely more on stretched ellipses rather than sausages, where the roundedness is stretched out over almost the entirety of each segment, rather than being limited to the end. This is what causes the considerable stiffness in each segment - where proper sausages can be used to convey rhythm and gesture in these limbs, yours are virtually straight and entirely stiff.

Another issue I noticed in the louse demo was that when you draw the ribbing along its abdomen - those layered segments that make it quite bumpy - I noticed that you're not really wrapping those additional layers around the solid form underneath. If you look at this demonstration from lesson 2, you can see two individual parts. First we have the simple sausage underneath. Then we have the segmented layering I've placed on top of it. At no point does the segmented layering cut back into the sausage form - it only ever builds on top of it. This is because I'm treating that sausage as a solid, three dimensional form. If I were to cut back into it as though it were a flat shape (which you do frequently in your louse's abdomen) it's going to undermine the illusion I want to create. So instead, I need to believe that this sausage form is solid and simply cannot be manipulated in that fashion. If you had a physical sausage in front of you and you were wrapping things around it, you wouldn't be able to wrap it in such a way that it actually went inside of the sausage. The notion would be preposterous to you - and so that's how you need to think about the forms you draw and how they interact with one another.

Looking through your own insect constructions, there is one that I felt shows real promise: this praying mantis. Most of your other drawings don't quite hold the illusion of being three dimensional, but this one actually does convey the idea that this praying mantis is sitting on a surface in front of us, in three dimensions. It's not without its own issues - there are several places where you haven't drawn through forms (like the back leg, you allow its lines to stop where it gets overlapped by another form), and the sausages aren't great - but the actual relationships between the different elements you've drawn are very well done. I'm also seeing signs that you were observing this one much more carefully than the others. This is a big step in the right direction.

With the rest, there are a number of the same issues as before:

• There are still some forms you don't draw in their entirety. Rather than thinking in terms of each thing you're drawing as being an independent three dimensional form that exists in the world, you're thinking about them as shapes you're adding to the page. If you were focusing on a form, you'd know that form would still exist in its entirety despite the objects in front of it. You are drawing through many forms here, but I do see a bunch of places where you don't, and this undermines your ability to think of what you're drawing as 3D.

• Your contour curves are all very shallow and don't wrap around convincingly. You CAN do contour curves quite well, as you've shown in the contour curve exercise, but you stop thinking about how to wrap that curve around your form when it comes to these drawings. None of this has to do with you not being able to do it - you're just thinking about a million different things at once, instead of focusing on the specific mark you're meant to put down at that moment.

• Observation observation observation observation. Your drawings are still very cartoony, and it all comes down to you still drawing more from memory than from what you actually see in front of you. This is also one of those things that comes from you psyching yourself out and trying to think about a million things at once, but this is definitely the biggest hurdle for you. You need to get used to drawing a tiny fraction of the time, and spending most of your time actually looking at your reference and thinking about how to break it down into its major forms. Only ever look away from your drawing for a moment or two before looking back. I explain this all here at length.

• Your choice of reference - as far as the insects themselves goes - is actually pretty good. There's a very interesting array of insects with reasonably simple construction. Just make sure that you're looking for reference images that are as high resolution as you can manage. Like 2k and above. Remember that these insects have evolved to be easily hidden in the wild - as such, unless you can get up very close, it's easy for their various parts to blend into one another, especially to an untrained eye. Working with super high res images can help make it easier.

I meant to make this critique a lot more brief since I'd already covered a lot of this in my previous one, but it seems I've talked at quite some length. So I'll end it here. You are moving forward and are making progress, but you have a long way to go. Here's what I want you to do:

• Draw a page of sausage chains - that is, sausages connected together in groups of 3. Focus on maintaining the two-equal-spheres-connected-by-a-tube-of-consistent-width. Fill the page up, and focus on achieving those smooth, tapered, lively lines in your contour curves especially. Don't press too hard.

• I want you to redraw every single insect in your reference images there, but try looking for higher resolution images for each. They don't have to be higher res versions of the same images, but rather high res photos of the type of insect.

• Focus on observation - what you've been drawing often does not reflect what is in the photos.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-03 17:50

I definitely see an overall improvement over this set, where you're striving to apply the principles of construction more conscientiously throughout, and making clear strides forward.

Early on there's visible shortcomings when it comes to establishing the relationships between the simple forms you add to your construction - you're definitely making a decent start, but I noticed the sausages in your legs being quite uneven and unconfidently drawn, and lacking the contour curve that is meant to reinforce the joint (you can see that additional step depicted in these notes).

I also noticed that you went through a phase of overusing contour lines at times (like with the beetle at the top of this page - the individual contour lines themselves aren't particularly well drawn, so you attempt to compensate with quantity over quality. Of course this isn't an approach you stick to for very long, as you clearly notice that it's not really working.

I am noticing however that when you do add contour curves on the thoraxes of the next few insects, they have a tendency to be quite shallow. Again, these do continue to improve, but it is something I want you to keep an eye on. Always make sure the contour curves are hooking back around at the edge, and overshoot them if necessary to really sell that curvature.

Jumping over to your scorpion, there are a couple things I want to point out:

• In the video demo, I construct inside of the box in a way where I'm adhering to the side planes of the box very closely. I'm using the box to help define the top/side planes of the body, and even though I end up occupying a smaller space of the box, I'm still constructing along its sides rather than floating arbitrarily within its volume. In your case, you're not quite adhering to it in that manner, and so it does break away from the constructional mindset. I actually do talk about this in the video, so you may want to revisit it.

• For the big claw that is closest to us, make sure that when you've got two different forms that are fused together, that you clearly define where they intersect with one another with a contour line.

Jumping forward, I think the last several pages have come out quite well. Still need to focus on using simple, basic sausages for every segment of your leg constructions - remember that you can build up on them afterwards just like everything else, but for that simple underlying structure, we need to start with something that yields as solid a form as possible, and that solidity comes from simplicity. You've got a lot of very good ribbing, especially in the third last page's abdomen. You've clearly wrapped around a solid form there, it's generally a much better example than other places where you've attempted similar things, where it's difficult to mentally separate the layering on top, and the underlying base form.

The last point I want to mention is about detail and texture. I'm mainly looking at the grasshopper, where you've attempted to add little bits of texture to its wings. It's important that you go back to lesson 2 and read through the notes on texture, both in the lesson and on the texture analysis exercise. The key here is that all texture is made up of little forms that exist on the surface of our objects, and any mark we put down is made up of the shadows cast by those small forms. Don't think in terms of seeing "lines" in your reference image and then attempting to draw those lines. Since every mark we put down is a shadow, we have to be aware of what form casts each shadow we draw. I explain this further in these notes in particular, but be sure to review that entire section.

Anyway, you're doing a good job as is, and you've shown a good deal of improvement. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-07 20:12

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are generally pretty well done, with a couple issues:

• Watch the alignment of your contour curves to the central minor axis line. Looks like you're getting a little too relaxed with that, and so they tend to come out a bit slanted relative to where they should be.

• Adding a little contour ellipse near the tip on the side of the form that is oriented towards the viewer can really work wonders to push that illusion further.

All in all, your insect constructions are very well done. You're demonstrating an excellent understanding of 3D space, and how your basic forms relate to one another within it. You're generally applying the sausage technique very effectively for the legs in a number of these constructions, although I think when you get into your own constructions you sometimes shift into trying to use other, less effective approaches. Experimentation is certainly valuable, but only when it's intentional.

One of the places where you strayed from the technique is your ant. You didn't stray particularly far, but you did end up with particularly rigid segments, some of which tend more towards stretched ellipses rather than sausages. The great strengths of the sausage forms is that they allow us to suggest just a little bit of curvature, even if kept subtle, and it works wonders to make our drawings feel more alive.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was that for most of these, you didn't deal much with texture - and that's totally fine. Construction is the core focus here, and if you want to set aside texture in favour of focusing more on keeping your forms solid and really making your drawings believable, then that's okay with me.

You did however attempt texture in a couple small areas, so I think I should address it. In a number of these, you're actually approaching it correctly. Or at least, in the right direction. For example, on the wasp's wing, you've focused not on drawing the different lines you saw in the reference, but rather actually captured the veins, putting shadows down instead of actual outlines. The only shortcoming was that you were a bit rushed and quick about it, rather than really digging into the piece you meant to texture, so it came out rather incomplete.

We do see less of this however on the last page, where you seem to have taken a step backward. Here we see a limited portion that is textured towards the midsection, and you've really just scratched on a few arbitrary lines. If you're going to put texture down, that means you're committing yourself to taking the time to really study your reference image (hopefully one that's high res enough to give you the information you require), and identifying the nature of the individual forms that exist along the surface of your object. Any mark you put down is going to be a shadow being cast by some form, but if you cannot actually identify which form is casting a given mark, then you really shouldn't be putting it down.

All in all, you're doing a pretty great job here, and I'm especially pleased with the way you've leveraged line weight to take your solid constructions and push them that extra mile, with proper organization of the features without attempting to replace lines in a sort of "clean up" pass. Instead you're merely building up a hierarchy, respecting all the lines you've put down and incorporating them all into your drawing - construction included.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5, and keep up the good work.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-10 20:09

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you've got the contour lines wrapping really nicely around the sausage forms. Just a few things to keep in mind here:

• A lot of the contour curves seem to be of roughly the same degree (if you were to picture them continuing around the whole thing as an ellipse). The degree should be shifting along the length of the form.

• Your sausage forms are pretty simple, but they're still deviating from the basic recipe of the sausage as described here in small ways. For example, the size of the ends are a bit different, and the ends aren't always spherical.

• Adding a contour ellipse right at the tip that faces the viewer can also help achieve a stronger illusion that this form is three dimensional.

As for your insect constructions, some are definitely stronger than others. I did identify a number of issues that you can work on however to better grasp constructional drawing as a whole.

Starting with this spider, one thing that stands out is how you went about drawing the spider's abdomen. Constructional drawing is all about each mark we put down establishing a new form in 3D space. Here you (very loosely) drew an ellipse/circle, effectively establish a ball in the world.

Instead of further pursuing the illusion of your construction being three dimensional however, you drew directly on top of it in a way that treated it just as a flat, two dimensional ellipse. You cut into it as it exists on the page, rather than as it exists in the three dimensional world in which we are working. That's not how construction works.

When applying construction, we want to reinforce the idea that everything is 3D with every single mark we put down. When we need to create more complex forms (like the spider's abdomen), we achieve them by putting down a simple form, and then building on top of it additively. We put attach more forms to it, building out that mass until we get the form we're after.

While it is possible to work subtractively, that's not something I recommend for people who are just getting used to this. Reason being, it's very easy for someone who isn't entirely comfortable with thinking in 3D space to treat working subtractively as you have here - dealing with the forms as flat shapes, rather than thinking about how they're cutting into them in all three dimensions. Working additively forces you to think more in terms of how those forms relate to one another in space, and helps further your internalized belief in the illusions you are creating.

Also worth mentioning, this spider's legs feature some well constructed sausages (mainly closer towards the spider's body), though those towards the ends of each leg tend to be drawn more sloppily, and don't have the connection between sausages reinforced with a contour curve.

I actually really did like how you constructed your scorpion. While there's still room for improvement (for example, you did again construct the claws subtractively, though there is a greater sense that you were aware of how you were cutting into them in 3D rather than just as 2D shapes here), overall this construction conveys a pretty well developed grasp of how to combine many different forms in 3D space. You were, for the most part, not afraid to draw through your forms, and the scorpion as a whole feels three dimensional and solid.

In this one it's clear that you experimented with different approaches to drawing the legs. Experimentation is always worth doing, but I'm glad that you went back to constructing things as sausages in later drawings, as those boxes clearly didn't work nearly as well.

One thing that stands out to me on this page is the excessive use of contour lines. Whenever using any sort of a technique or tool that you've been taught, think about what its actual purpose is really meant to be. Contour lines, for example, are intended to describe the surface of a form by running along that surface. Through its use, you should see that they tend to have diminishing returns - the impact from one or two contour lines is pretty meaningful, but as you start to add more and more, they become less valuable, and even start to stiffen up a construction. Focus your time on drawing two or three contour lines well, or in impactful places (like how with the sausage method we place them right at the joint where they have the greatest effect) rather on drawing a bunch of sloppy ones (like on the antennae).

Looking at your moth, this one definitely seemed to be rather sloppy. If you compare this to the care with which you constructed the scorpion, you seem to have rushed in a lot of ways - both in the construction of the insect, as well as in your observation of the reference image.

The last thing I wanted to mention was in regards to this spider. Many of the leg segments were constructed with stretched spheres rather than actual sausage forms. It's important to recognize the difference, as they are explained here. You also neglected to reinforce the joints with contour lines in most of these.

All in all, I think you've demonstrated the ability to take your time, think through a construction and apply the concepts covered in the lesson relatively well - but that you've also shown a propensity for not investing the time required to accomplish that. There's a lot of cases where you're perhaps not putting as much time into the studying of your reference image, and where you're working more from memory (as explained back in lesson 2).

This is what you need to work on the most. So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'm going to ask you to do 4 more pages of insect drawings, applying what I've said here.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-13 20:52

So your work here is, for the most part, well done. There are a couple important things I want to address, but you're moving in the right direction, and are very close to grasping the material well.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are quite well done - just watch out for the few that continue to widen through their midsection. You want to stick to the definition defined here in the instructions: two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width.

Moving onto your where you've followed along with the demonstrations, you've done particularly well when following an additive strategy - that is, building up your forms gradually to achieve the kinds of masses you want. This requires you to start out with a strong belief that the forms you're adding to your scene are all solid and tangible, and that anything you add is going to somehow interact with these forms - usually by wrapping around them, or intersecting with them in a specific manner. Their relationships are clear and well defined at all times, which helps push the illusion that we're creating something real and three dimensional, not just a collection of lines or shapes on the page.

You carry many of these good habits over into your own insect constructions, or at least, you do for the most part. In your mosquito, I can see some of your sausages getting a little weaker (especially when they get very narrow). This is pretty normal, but something to work on. I'm also seeing a few cases where you haven't quite drawn some of those sausages in their entirety, instead choosing to let the line stop where they are overlapped by another form. Remember that drawing through each form is an integral part of understanding how they all relate to one another in 3D space, and ultimately in making those relationships feel believable.

Jumping down to this scarab, the core construction of its body is good, but there are definitely some issues with the further extremities of its legs. To start, you're not quite allowing the different sausage segments to overlap enough to create a proper intersection between them. This causes them to read more as being flat shapes on the page. Additionally, I can see areas where you take one of the segments and then "wrap" them in a more complex shape to capture some of the pointier bits of the scarab's legs. Here you're not working in form - you're wrapping it on a flat, two dimensional shape - and in doing so, you flatten that section of the drawing. Instead, you should be appending further small forms towards the ends where you want to create those pointy bits, building up steadily and always defining the intersections between different forms rather than pasting flat shapes on top of one another.

Lastly, on that same drawing, you're again not drawing through your forms for the claws at the ends of the legs, so they too end up looking quite flat. You've got a lot of strong construction towards the head/thorax/abdomen and how they all fuse together, but that definitely falls away as you move out towards the tips of the legs.

Another major issue with construction becomes visible in your ants. It's an issue that we can see in this one's head, and this one's thorax and abdomen. Basically, you lay down a three dimensional ball mass, and then you go on to cut back into that mass to create the shape you want for that particular body part. The problem is that when you cut back into it, you do so by treating the ball mass as a flat shape, not a three dimensional form. Instead of cutting along the surface of this 3D form, you're cutting across as you would any other shape on the page, and this tosses aside any illusion that the components that make up this insect are three dimensional.

For the most part, I generally warn students away from subtractive construction (where you cut away). It IS a valid technique, but it is considerably more difficult and relies on a much deeper belief and understanding that the forms you're drawing are three dimensional. Conversely, it is much easier to develop and leverage this understanding and belief when working additively - and so students who approach their constructions additively wherever possible will eventually reach the point where they can cut back into their forms in a manner that respects those forms' three dimensional nature.

Above all else, you always need to make sure that every mark you're putting down reflects an understanding of the illusion you're creating, so you don't contradict it. As you gradually put down more marks that contradict the lie you're creating, you gradually erode the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

All in all, you're heading in the right direction, and I think the drawings where you followed along with the demos are quite strong - you just need more practice in applying the techniques you've used there to your own drawings, where you have to decide what to use and where.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do 4 more of your own insect drawings, using additive constructional techniques.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-14 19:39

Overall your work here is quite well done. You're demonstrating a good use of construction, as well as a strong sense of form and of 3D space as a whole. There are a few little hiccups, but by and large you've done a great job.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are pretty well done, just keep an eye on maintaining the simple definition of what a sausage form is: two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You've got some with ends that are of different sizes, and others with a little swelling/pinching through their midsections.

Your work on drawing along with the demos all came out quite nicely. You followed the steps quite well, and though sometimes the execution wasn't entirely refined (there's definitely hesitation in how you approach the wasp's sausage-legs, you applied the techniques correctly. It's just a matter of experience yielding greater confidence with which you approach each problem.

I especially liked your work on the louse - I actually left something important out of this demonstration, but despite that, you included it yourself. That is, the contour curves reinforcing the joints between sausages on the louse's legs. I mistakenly skipped that step, but you understood the technique well enough to clearly define those relationships between the forms, and to great effect.

One minor point I want to mention about the scorpion is how the relationship between the initial boxy form we put in for its body doesn't quite maintain a rigid, well connected relationship to the more organic resulting form that ultimately became its torso. If you look back at my demo, you'll see that I work with that box in a more direct manner - I cut along its surface, and split up its volumes, as though I'm going in with a carving knife. In yours, your later construction hangs in and out of that box form without those same strongly-bound relationships, which serves to start eroding the illusion that we're dealing with solid, 3D forms rather than a series of lines or flat shapes on a page. Now, you don't lose that illusion entirely, but that section in particular does weaken the overall effect. Luckily the excellent construction of the pincers, legs and head still maintain things fairly well.

Moving onto your own constructions, there's definitely a trend I can see in your results that shows considerable improvement - both in your constructional skills as well as your confidence in those skills. From the beginning you're a little uncertain of approaching these constructions without your hand being held, but by the time you reach the cicada, things start to solidify.

It may actually be because of the concerns and issues you had in building up the cicada that really helped crystalize exactly what you're doing here. I would say that the approach you described - laying in more organic forms, and steadily building up that mass on the thoraccic mass rather than encasing it in a larger form (which the original mass is mostly floating inside of) would have been a better move, especially for this kind of exercise. That said, you still pulled it off fairly well largely because of the fact that your grasp of form and space influenced how you put the marks down. You didn't treat them as shapes floating inside one another, you wrapped your contour lines around the volumes in a realistic manner, which seriously diminished the downsides to having elements float relative to one another.

The actual concept of adding masses on top of the underlying construction to build up muscle and volume is something we get into much more in the next lesson - so that you considered that as an option, even after the fact, again tells me that you're really getting the hang of this.

The last thing I want to mention is that I am still seeing a few very subtle examples of you working somewhat subtractively - like looking at the thorax of your grasshopper, how you put down a general ball, and then cut back into it just a little bit. Working subtractively isn't bad exactly - it's an entirely valid approach - but there's a certain nuance to it, to demonstrating how the cuts we're making exist in three dimensions, running along the surface of the form like a gliding scalpel, which you're not quite getting. Right now, you're cutting into it as though it is just an ellipse that exists on the flat page.

This is pretty normal though, and it's the reason I recommend working additively as much as possible. Additive construction builds a much stronger, more resilient awareness of how our forms exist and relate to one another in 3D space, and as we gain more experience working that way, we improve our ability to think in space as a whole, and ultimately improve our ability to eventually work subtractively when it is needed.

Anyway! All in all you've done a great job here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-15 19:13

Hah! A few days! Well I'm glad to see you've returned to the ranks of the drawing.

All in all, you're actually pretty well, despite the long break. I don't really see signs of getting rusty, and while I do have a few things I want to point out, you'll be good to move onto the next lesson.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, it is important to keep your eye on the instructions while doing exercises you feel you might be familiar with already. This exercise, for example, contains a pretty big alert about keeping your sausages to the basic recipe of "two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width". I can see in yours some ends that are of different sizes and some that continue to widen through their midsection.

Also, I'm noticing a tendency to stick to roughly the same degree for your contour ellipses, which makes them look kind of stiff and unnatural. You can read more about this in these notes.

Lastly, you're generally pretty good at wrapping your contour lines around the forms properly, but there are times when it comes out a little shallower - one thing to help with this is to have those curves overshoot a little as shown here.

Moving onto your organic intersections, these are really solid. You're demonstrating a very strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, how they slump and sag against one another, and generally your belief in the illusion you're creating. The organic forms with contour lines here are also generally an improvement over those from the previous pages.

Lastly, your fly construction. As far as the use of constructional concepts go, this is well done. You're building upon underlying, simpler masses, you're employing the sausage technique well (keeping the sausages fairly simple, allowing them to interpenetrate and reinforcing the joints with a single contour curve), you're layering elements of the exoskeleton/carapace on top of one another, etc.

I have just a couple concerns:

• You're not drawing through all of your ellipses - mainly the initial masses, and they come out a little unevenly for it.

• Adding line weight is probably your biggest weakness, because you're doing it in a manner that makes the underlying lines feel very stiff. You're tracing over the lines slowly and carefully, which results in lines that may have been otherwise smooth and confident being imbued with rigidity. It's important that when you add line weight, you continue to apply the same ghosting techniques to draw those marks with a sense of confidence and fluidity, even if that sacrifices your accuracy.

• Where you add line weight is definitely a little questionable - line weight should be applied with a purpose, mainly to clarify the overlaps between forms and establish which form sits in front and which sits behind. Additionally, the amount of weight you actually add doesn't need to be that much. Line weight isn't a matter of shouting at the viewer "HEY THIS LINE IS THICKER THAN THAT ONE" - it's a matter of whispering to their subconscious, and that only requires a fairly minor increase in weight that the eye might not necessarily notice immediately. Of course, I'm sure some of the really thick ones (on the wings) may have been places where you made a mistake when adding weight and filled in the gaps to compensate for it. In the future, I wouldn't recommend doing that. Leave mistakes as they are.

• You are definitely still struggling a little with narrower sausage forms (maintaining their consistent widths), though that is pretty normal. Make sure you're drawing from your shoulder, as smaller deviation in the form is often a sign of drawing from the wrist, since the shoulder can only really achieve broader motions. Also, drawing larger on the page can help avoid sausages that are so narrow that they become problems.

All in all, you are doing a good job, and are showing improvement over before. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-18 17:55

Your work here is really well done! I have just a couple things to address, but by and large you're doing very well.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are largely well done and confidently drawn, with contour lines that wrap nicely around the forms. There are just a couple points I wanted to mention:

• You generally stick to simple forms, but you've got a few that break these principles. This is especially important as we get into construction as we want to get used to increasing the complexity of our objects by adding more simple forms, rather than by increasing the complexity of our base elements.

• I noticed that while there are areas where you allow the degree of your contour curves/ellipses to shift over the length of the form, you don't always, and you seem to be particularly hesitant to allow the orientation of a given curve to reverse (like if we go from a wider degree, down to 0, and then curve the opposite direction).

Moving onto your insect constructions, these are phenomenally well done. You're demonstrating an overall strong grasp of construction, with just a few minor (yet still important) points to be made clear. Still, you're doing a good job of developing solid, three dimensional objects, and generally maintaining the illusion that what you've drawn is more than a collection of lines on the page.

• You've definitely done a good job of putting your lines down with great confidence, and I don't see any signs that you're attempting to do any clean-up passes (misusing line weight) that some students do often employ. You are however starting your constructions with visibly fainter linework, which is something I generally try to discourage. The negative points I listed (none of which I'm seeing in your work) are a common issue that come alongside a fainter "underdrawing", so I'm always vigilant about that sort of thing, but even still, despite the fact that you're approaching it all quite well, I'd prefer that you work towards putting every mark down with the same kind of confidence. Taking additional effort to reel in your pressure while putting those early marks down means that some of your mental faculties are assigned to that instead of being fully devoted to constructing solid forms and grasping the relationships between your forms. It also falls into the mentality of focusing on presenting a cleaner end result, which is not the goal here. Each of these drawings are all about the process, they are exercises to develop your understanding of 3D space, and how each drawing turns out isn't really all that important.

• I actually noticed a little bit of the issues outlined above on the top-right wasp of this page. So it's more accurate to say that you're generally not running into those mistakes, but on occasion you do. All the more reason to be more mindful of putting your lines down confidently, and then utilizing line weight only to further clarify how certain forms overlap, rather than thickening the entirety of your lines.

The other issue I wanted to mention isn't really one that is visible in any significant fashion in your work, but I do feel that it could become an issue based on a few minor things I noticed. So I figure it's important to lay it out now, in order to keep you heading in the right direction.

Generally speaking when employing construction, we work additively. That means putting down forms, and then building up on top of them as we go to increase the overall complexity. Working additively is great both to achieve most goals, but also as an exercise, because it forces us to understand how our forms relate to one another in 3D space, having any added ones wrap around those that already exist.

There is another approach however - subtractive construction - which is a lot trickier. It's tricky because it's very easy to try and cut back into a form you've drawn by treating it like a flat shape on the page. This ultimately going to result in flattening out that part of our drawing, since it undermines the illusion we're trying to sell to the viewer.

The trick with subtractive construction is that instead of helping to develop one's understanding of the 3D relationships between their forms, it fully demands that understanding already to be in place. It requires us to make our cuts along the surface of our existing forms, as if with a scalpel, clearly defining both the piece that we are cutting away, and the piece that remains. It's like laying out cuts with contour lines. It's very easy to forget this and to be a little too quick in laying down those cuts without thinking about how our forms exist in 3D space.

Now, as I said - this isn't something you're doing right now, I just wanted to outline it preemptively in case it becomes a problem in the future. So, generally speaking, construction problems should be handled additively wherever possible, and if subtraction is the only feasible approach, make sure you think about how the forms you're cutting sit in space, and imagine that your pen is a scalpel running along the surface of the object.

So! You're doing a great job overall, so keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-18 18:44

There are definitely points of strength, as well as some areas of weakness that I'll address.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, it's very important that even if you feel you're familiar with an exercise, that you look back over its instructions to refresh your memory. Your contour curves do a good job of wrapping around the form (though sometimes they fall outside of the silhouette, so definitely work on getting them to fit snugly within it), but there are a couple issues:

• Watch the alignment of those curves to the central minor axis line

• What you probably forgot from the instructions - your sausages should match the definition provided in the instructions, which is two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This is especially important as we get into construction as we want to get used to increasing the complexity of our objects by adding more simple forms, rather than by increasing the complexity of our base elements.

Many of your attempts at following the demonstrations are actually very well done. There's also definite improvement early on, between your two attempts on the wasp demo. There certainly is room for improvement with your observation of proportions, but that's pretty normal, and will continue to develop with practice. Your combination of simple, solid forms here to create solid, believable constructions is coming along well however.

You also show your application of those principles in many of your own constructions, however there are a few things to keep an eye on:

• Every single form should be drawn in its entirety. You actually do indeed stick to this pretty often, with a few examples where you allow things to get cut off. The key here is that you want to think of each individual form as it exists in 3D space, and as it relates to those around it. You can't really think of a form as it sits in space if it's been cut off, as this causes us to think of it more in terms of being a flat shape on a page.

• Always stick to simple forms and build up complexity by combining them together. No complexity should be added that cannot be supported by the scaffolding that has already been constructed. For example, looking at the lower horn of this beetle, you've two points at its tip. This is complexity that should be built up in stages, rather than planting that shape down from the beginning. The result ultimately ended up looking quite flat, as you were trying to accomplish too much at once. Similarly, looking at the [neck on your praying mantis attempt here](https://i.imgur.com/68WeZ92.jpg, it ended up pinching a great deal through the midsection, which itself is a sort of complexity that causes the form to flatten out.

• Another thing you should be avoiding which is quite similar is building out your underlying forms, and then trying to "envelop" them in a shape as you've done here. This doesn't really factor in how those inner forms sit in space or relate to one another, and instead just allows them to sit there without conveying anything to the viewer about how this object is three dimensional. Instead, build those constructions up steadily by piling on forms and ensuring that the intersection/relationship between each form is clearly defined. We actually get into this more in lesson 5.

• Also worth mentioning, for the drawing I linked in the previous point, you definitely cut some corners as far as observing and studying the construction of the face goes. There's a lot more going on there than you actually drew. Again, we explore constructing complex faces more in the next lesson too, so you'll have ample opportunity to continue working on that sort of thing there.

As for the fur/hair, and really with any and all texture, the most important thing is to value quality over quantity. On the moth at the end, you didn't really put much time or effort into designing the individual tufts of fur you put down. Instead, you put down as many as you could along the edge, striving for quantity over quality. That just ends up ultimately looking hectic and erratic, and never really works. Remember that our drawings are all about communicating to the viewer - if you can communicate that something has a furry surface texture to it with just a handful of well placed, well thought out marks, then that is all you really should be putting down. We're not trying to replicate the photographs we use as reference - we're merely communicating what they contain to the viewer. Once again, there will be ample opportunity to work on this in the next lesson, as it also contains some notes on this subject.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You do have areas of weakness you need to work on, but for the most part you'll be able to do that while working on animals. Just make sure you take what I've said here to heart, and do your best to apply it - especially when it comes to constructing complex objects from only simple forms. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-23 16:14

Starting out with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally pretty good as a whole, but there still are a number of things you need to keep an eye on:

• Your contour ellipses and curves tend to have roughly the same degree, rather than demonstrating the appropriate shift over the course of the form's length.

• Your contour ellipses are accurate and fit nicely within the form, but you're drawing them hesitantly (too focused on that accuracy) and as a result they're a bit stiff and wobbly.

• You struggle with alignment to your central minor axis line especially when the form turns/bends

So moving onto your insect constructions, you've got a mix of results, but overall I am seeing your work moving in the right direction. There are still a number of key issues that are holding you back however. The most remarkable strong point is that with many (not all) of these, you're demonstrating a good grasp of the fact that what you're drawing is a three dimensional object, and are building them up from solid forms. Some pages are especially strong examples of this, like this one.

There are still a few where this is not the case - where you focus more on drawing flat shapes on a page (like this beetle, the most notable issue with which is that you've drawn the abdomen with a non-simple form that gets squared off on one end, breaking the basic principle of construction where we move from the most basic forms, gradually making things more complex).

There are also some where you are moving in the right direction, but neglect to define the intersections between your major forms with a clear contour line to help establish how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. For example, here and here there's no clear relationship being established between the thorax and the abdomen, no contour line defining where they intersect with one another, and as such they end up reading more as flat ellipses on the page rather than spheres that are interconnecting. On the second of those, this further is compounded by contour lines that are especially shallow, rather than wrapping around properly (though more often than not you handle your contour lines well in other drawings).

When talking about reinforcing the intersections between forms, I'm specifically talking about techniques like what is shown in the sausage technique, towards the center of this page, where a chain of 3 sausages is presented.

And on that note, I'm seeing you partially following the sausage method, but skipping many key parts. For example, your sausages are not simple as they should be. We combine basic, simple sausages (as explained here) to create the underpinnings of the leg construction. Then if we need to make one end of a sausage larger, we can add a ball at the end of it to give it some additional volume. We tackle one piece of complexity at a time, and build up towards it. The sausage technique is still an excellent basis on which to construct legs of any sort.

The last point I wanted to make was that you have a tendency to get sketchy at times (like in this insect's legs), so keep an eye on that and make sure you're applying the ghosting method to every single mark you put down. This is both to ensure that your marks are drawn correctly (with no chicken-scratching and sticking to one stroke per line), but also to ensure that your linework is as confident as can be (rather than putting your marks down with hesitation and letting them stiffen up).

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do the following:

• 5 pages of insect drawings with no detail or texture whatsoever. Everything you do should be through the act of adding additional forms to your construction, take that as far as you can and then stop.

• Make sure you're clearly defining the intersections between your forms to communicate their relationship to one another in space

• Use the ghosting method more consistently! You seem to be getting sloppy on this front.

• Draw bigger - you tend to put your drawings in a small corner of the page, when there is so much room for you to work. Your brain needs that space to think through these spatial problems, and by cramping up you're taking away what it needs, while also impeding your ability to draw from your shoulder, and also making the linework thicker and clumsier relatove to the overall size of the drawing.

No rushing on these revisions. You had a habit of working through the revisions from lesson 3 too quickly, so make sure you take your time to properly study your reference image and work through each construction with care. I don't want you submitting this work any earlier than August 30th.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-23 22:17

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're generally doing okay with a couple things to keep in mind:

• Your sausage forms are generally pretty simple, but you stray from the 'simple' characteristics we're looking for in a few places. There's some with pinching through the midsection, some where the curvature of the ends extends beyond what would be considered a "sphere" (resulting in the sausage continuing to get wider rather than maintaining a consistent width through the entirety of its midsection), etc.

• Your contour lines' degrees are often too consistent. I can see signs that you understand how they should shift over the length of the form, but yours simply don't shift enough. Just something to keep an eye on.

Overall your use of construction starts out with some key issues but still moving in the right direction, and as you push through the set, your strengths become more consistent and the areas of weakness less prevalent. To put it simply, you show definite improvement.

From early on, you do demonstrate a good grasp of how your forms exist in 3D space and how they interact with one another, though you definitely are more willing than you should be to put forms down, and then draw on top of them as though they are just flat shapes that can be ignored. For example, The ladybug right near the beginning and the wasp beneath it - both have very large abdomens that you've dropped in, but they you go on to cut right across them instead of respecting the form that you have created within this space.

You do steadily develop a greater respect for these forms however, and I see less of this as we progress.

Another thing that I do want to stress is the importance of defining the intersections between forms - especially cases like the abdomen and thorax masses. You drop them in as individual balls/ellipses, which is great, but there's a lot to be gained from clearly defining the contour line right where they intersect with one another. Not only does this help sell the illusion to the viewer, but it also helps us as the artist further our belief in the lie we're telling them, that all of these forms exist in three dimensions and that they relate to one another in a specific way.

On that point, I am noticing that while you're generally using the sausage method quite well, you are often neglecting to reinforce the intersection at the joint as shown in the center of this diagram, on the chain of three sausages. It's the same kind of thing as I described above, and really helps to reinforce the illusion of form.

The only other issue I wanted to address was the tendency to have areas of very heavy black in certain places. There are cases where it's done well - for example, on the mosquito's thorax near the head, where you've clearly used it to separate out the forms by filling certain cavities and make it read more clearly.

There are however other situations where you've done thins like fill eyes in with solid black. This is a case where you've seen something whose local colour was very dark, and decided to communicate that in your drawing. When doing so, consider the fact that if something is orange, or pink, or yellow, that is not something we communicate - and therefore we're not really communicating any colour information here (and where you did so on the butterfly definitely went awry, since it clashed so heavily with the purposes of our drawings). Try and picture the objects you're constructing as though they were all a very flat grey. All we care about is construction (which has no rendering/colour/pattern) and texture (which is strictly made up of the little shadows cast by the textural forms that exist on the surfaces of our constructed objects). All of this is in some way or another a matter of communicating form information, just at different scales. Therefore the only solid blacks we should have should be used to achieve these ends, and not to communicate any kind of local colour information.

Aside from that, you're doing quite well, and you're expressing a very solid understanding of construction as a hole. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-24 19:39

All in all, you're doing a pretty solid job here, with a few things to keep in mind.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally well done, with a few things to keep in mind:

• Some of these show an awareness of the natural degree shift that needs to occur as the viewer's orientation relative to the orientation of each cross-sectional slice changes with the slice's position along the length of the form, but the majority of them don't. To put it simply, your contour curves' degrees should not remain the same throughout the form, as explained here.

• Give these notes on the particular characteristics we're looking for as far as keeping our sausage forms "simple" goes. You're hitting most of the points, but you do have some that have ends with different sizes, and others that get wider through their midsection. Keeping the sausage forms as simple as possible is important because in constructional drawing we strive to achieve complexity by combining different simple forms, rather than by increasing the complexity of those base elements.

All in all, your use of construction in the insect constructions is pretty solid. You're generally demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms can be combined together, and you're respecting the fact that they are three dimensional (although in your comment you mention the use of "elliptical shapes" - the language we use is important, so it's worth correcting this as being ball forms that exist in and interact within 3D space, rather than flat elliptical shapes that exist on the page).

There are a few simple things I want to point out however, but all in all you are doing a great job.

• I do feel that you draw a little small in some circumstances. For example, the wasp on the bottom of this page ends up feeling very cramped due to how you're really not taking advantage of the space it's given. Our brains really make a lot of use of the room we give it to think through spatial problems, so don't let yourself cramp up.

• Your use of the sausage method when constructing legs is a bit hit-and-miss. You've got a lot of good examples of its use where you've got nice sausage forms with intersections defined clearly with contour curves, and you've got others that seem not to follow this methodology as conscientiously (likely just forgetting those techniques and steps). For example, the back leg of this beetle is a lot weaker than the middle leg. The sausage forms themselves are drawn hesitantly, and ou've got contour curves through the length of the sausages but none defining the actual intersections. Those at the intersections are going to accomplish far more than anywhere else, and they come with none of the artificial stiffnes that those through the midsection can imbue. I can also see that the segment that connects to the beetle's body is more of a stretched ball/ellipse rather than a proper sausage.

I do agree that you have a tendency to get overly focused on detail, but more than that, I suspect that when you know you're going to dig into detail for a drawing, you approach it differently. You may not be as focused on construction, and you may skip through it more quickly. Here are a few things to keep in mind on that topic:

• Not actually specific to just the detailed drawings, but in general - don't forget to draw through all of your ellipses.

• We haven't actually tackled this yet so I don't hold it against you, but in lesson 5's notes we talk about avoiding exactly how you approach it - with lines perpendicular to the surface of the form just sticking straight out. Instead, try to design the actual shapes of fur tufts as they come off the surface. There's also notes about this here.

• Always remember the difference between texture and local colour. That is, in this wasp, you've taken to adding some striping to its abdomen. You've also coloured in the wasp's eyes. These are examples of local colouring, which is something we largely ignore (treating our entire object as though it's just a middle grey, no matter the surface itself). This is because of the nature of our pen and what we're specifically focusing on communicating through these exercises. Our ink is reserved largely for communicating the forms that exist on the object, both at a macro scale (overall construction) and at a micro scale (texture, made up of small forms that exist along the surfaces of our major objects). In the case of texture, we're really just drawing the shadows those forms cast on their surroundings, so actually attempting to colour objects with a literal black colour would get in the way of achieving this.

I've mentioned a lot in this critique, but all in all you're still doing a great job. Aside from the issues with the sausage technique (which you're largely doing a good job with, just having a few areas where you're forgetting key instructions), there aren't any problems that are fundamental to what we're doing here. You should be proud of your work here, and your development with constructional drawing as a whole. So, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-25 03:44

Alrighty! So, let's start off with your organic forms with contour lines.

So your first page (which based on your numbering seems to be the one on the right), has a few concerns:

• They're very rigid in their nature, and a number of them don't follow the basic definition of a sausage form outlined in the exercise instructions. Seems like you may have gone through this exercise without looking at the instructions, instead doing it based on what you remember of them. Don't trust your memory.

• All of your contour curves, if extended into full ellipses, seem to be of the same degree/width, instead of having the natural shift across the length of the form. Remember that the degree communicates that cross-section's orientation relative to the viewer, and so even if the form was straight across our field of view, it should still be changing. This further contributes to the forms' rigidity.

On the second page, you've totally neglected to include the minor axis line to which we align our ellipses, and the bottom couple seem to get pretty sloppy. These are signs that you're rushing through and focusing more on getting the work done rather than getting it done well and learning from the process. So, the big takeaway here is to always reread the instructions to exercises rather than trusting that you remember what you need to do, and of course keeping in mind that these exercises are for your benefit, and that rushing any part of them defeats the purpose of what you're doing here.

Moving onto the insect constructions, there are various strengths here, along with a few pitfalls to keep an eye on. I'm seeing a lot of general success in the combination of forms overall, so you're definitely moving in the right direction.

One thing I really liked about the right side of this image was how you fused the major masses between the forms. You clearly defined how they intersected (and more than just a simple contour line, which is a nice touch), and in doing so you established how they exist in space and how they relate to one another. One issue with this drawing however is the fact that you put down a loose sausage for the thorax, and then went on to completely ignore it. When dealing with constructional drawing, it's really important that when we put any form down on the page, that we literally treat it as though we've put down a solid chunk of marble in a 3D world. You can't just draw over it like it's not there - you have to deal with it somehow. Usually we work additively, starting with the smaller masses and then building on top of them, which you otherwise did do a good job of (big sausage form aside). It's also worth mentioning that the wasp on the left side of that image definitely went astray with proportions, and that you ended up tackling the abdomen in a fundamentally different manner. The proportions aren't a big worry as that comes with practice, but when following along with a demo it is best to try and reproduce what I'm doing exactly, so you can put yourself in my shoes and get a little closer to understanding why I've made the decisions I have.

Once concern I have is something we can see on the praying mantis' forelimbs especially. The sausage forms you've put down are more complex, with multiple bends in them, that end up undermining their solidity. It's kind of swinging in the opposite direction of your organic forms with contour lines - instead of being really rigid, you've exaggerated their noodleyness to the point that they don't maintain their form and end up looking like flat shapes. Study this diagram carefully. Here we can see how the sausages are fluid but simple, and we really reinforce their volume and form through the clear contour lines defining their intersections. I do see you drawing some of those intersections but you're trying to solve so many spatial problems all at once that those joints don't end up being defined well at all. The back legs are similar in this regard, especially as we get further out to the extremities. You've got some better sausage forms closer to the body, but as we get way out, you definitely struggle with maintaining the consistent width of the longer ones. Definitely something to practice.

The torso and head are done a little better, although watch out for the segmentation on its abdomen - it doesn't generally give the impression of wrapping around the form very well, and instead flattens things out.

I really like the way you handled the segmentation on the louse's abdomen. I think it's got a very strong illusion of layering and form, so it's a big turn from the praying mantis. The way the forms wrap around is very convincing. I do feel though that the ends of the legs (the claw forms that come out from the nubby legs) flatten out somewhat, due to the fact that their intersection with the main nub is not really defined. Contour lines defining those intersections can help a great deal here, just as they can at the joints between the sausages (which you did, but ended up being quite shallow instead of wrapping around convincingly).

I think these trends continue with your scorpion, where you've got some nice segmentation along the body but legs that get very small and cramped, with sausages that are less than ideal at times. The next one though - the spider - I feel was a rushed job, and does not reflect where your skills currently are. There is definitely some great stuff going on with the mosquito and housefly, and the last two drawings are showing a lot of promise as well. I'm seeing growth on many of the issues I've outlined, though the abdomen on the last one definitely comes out a lot weaker than the rest of the drawing (though it's a particularly tricky angle, so I won't hold the experimentation against you). Your legs are getting better, though it's partially because you've stopped trying to use the sausage technique as much. Unfortunately the sausage technique is particularly useful, so I am going to insist that we get it sorted out so you're not left without an important tool moving forward.

All in all you're getting there, but have a ways to go. Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do the following:

• Two pages of organic forms with contour curves after rereading those instructions so as to do them as intended rather than from memory.

• Two pages of chains of sausages. Fill the page with chains 3 sausages long, where the joints between them are well defined with a contour line. What I'm looking for is basically a lot of what is shown in the middle of this diagram. Start out with some thicker, juicier sausages, and then gradually work your way to skinnier ones (which seem to be a particular point of difficulty for you).

• Two pages of insect drawings.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-25 04:24

Starting with your organic forms, these have their strengths and their weaknesses. You've definitely aimed to keep things simple, although keep in mind all of the characteristics we're looking for, which are listed here. The main thing you're missing is ensuring that the width is maintained consistently through the length of the form. Think of it as though there's two spheres of equal size, one on each end, and that a tube no wider than either sphere connects them. This kind of form gives us a lot of flexibility, whereas if that form continues to get wider through its midsection, it's going to end up being more stiff and harder to work with when using it for construction.

It's also worth noting that the contour lines themselves could use some work, specifically in terms of the confidence of the execution to keep them flowing more smoothly over the surface of our rounded form, and the accuracy of getting them to fit more snugly between the two edges of the form. Both of this comes back to the use of the ghosting method to achieve both accuracy and a confident execution without hesitation.

The drawings you did along with the demos are actually fairly well done. You've demonstrated a lot of patience and hit most of the major points we were exploring. Some of your proportions are off, but you're definitely building upon basic forms to achieve greater complexity. Great segmentation of the wasp's and louse's abdomen. On the wasp, you've got some well developing sausages, though on the louse I feel those sausage forms are drawn more timidly and so their shapes don't come out too well, and end up feeling much more flat.

I do feel that the change in strategy shown in your attempt at Mr. Snippysnaps (the scorpion) is successful in some areas, but much less so in others. The main thing about dropping balls in for the joints is that it only works if the different sausage segments are going to be the same size. If however you've got segments that get smaller, as the legs do, then constructing two independent sausages that overlap in a meaningful way is going to be much more useful. In your attempt, it looks more like you've got basic tubes for segments, and that the last segment jutts out of this tube, giving a very weird impression that doesn't really work.

Jumping to your dragonfly, this is definitely a tricky subject specifically because of its long abdomen. I do agree that the branch method may have worked better, so we'll look primarily at the thorax/legs/head. I suspect that some issues may be rising from your observation/study of your reference, though this is often harder to speak to. Most dragon flies I'm aware of have a much bulkier thorax which is better approached with a ball mass rather than a box. One can then go on to layer segmentation over that ball (which is missing in your drawing. Additionally, your leg segments are much thicker than a dragon fly's would generally be, and the nature of y our linework (we can see multiple breaks in the lines that suggest you drew them with a few different strokes) have little bits of unintended complexity that serve to flatten out the forms. I think this drawing would have been less difficult had you given it more room on the page, though I understand that it's not always easy to judge how big things are going to have to be. In the future, don't worry too much about the wings - frankly, I couldn't care less about them. If it means you get more room to work and think through spatial problems, then leave them out in favour of giving the other forms more room.

Either way, take more time to study your reference more carefully, and always remember to look back at your reference frequently, as we cannot rely on our memory with these things.

There's definitely aspects of the head that are lacking in your next drawing as well, though I do like the segmentation along the abdomen. Make sure you're using reference images that are large enough to give you a good view of everything that's going on. It's easy to get stuck with small images, and as a beginner, one doesn't often think that maybe I'm missing information here, since your eyes are able to make sense of the object as a whole. High-res photos help a great deal with this, and if you're not able to find a pose you like with sufficient resolution, finding alternate photos to help fill in the gaps can be very useful.

I think of all your drawings, this one is the most promising. It has plenty of issues (your sausages are not simple sausages, the line quality is at times somewhat hesitant with breaks in strokes where they should not be, the head is missing steps), but what's important here is how you've built it up with small forms arranged in 3D space. It comes down more to the individual forms and how you draw them, which is a much easier problem to solve. What we do see here is that you're arranging the forms more directly in relation to what you see in the photograph, without a lot of the oversimplification that is present in many of your other drawings.

So on that note, I am going to assign more work to get you there:

• One page of organic forms with contour curves.

• Two pages of sausage chains - that is, just like the middle of this page. Fill two pages with chains of three sausages each, focusing on keeping the sausages simple, creating a flowing rhythm with them and reinforcing their intersections with clear contour lines. Start with juicier sausages, then work your way to narrower ones.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-30 02:27

Alrighty! So overall you're doing a pretty good job, but there are a few things I want to bring to your attention.

Firstly, for your organic forms with contour lines:

• It seems you're using the same degree for all of your contour lines, rather than having them shift naturally along the length of the form to better represent the change in their orientation relative to the viewer. In your contour curves, you did have a bunch were the degree reversed, but it was a sudden jump rather than a gradual shift.

• You neglected to include the minor axis line through the second page - this is still a very important part of the exercise and helps when aligning the contour ellipses and contour curves.

• Generally your sausage forms are pretty simple, which is great - but keep an eye on those shapes. Sometimes you end up with ends smaller than others. You also have cases where one end ends up being stretched out, so instead of being a spherical nub (as explained here) it ends up being pointier.

• I can see you trying to add little contour ellipses right at the tips of your sausage forms, which is great, but you're kind of timid and often not willing to place a full ellipse right on the tip (and in many you leave them out altogether). These are actually great and do an excellent job of really selling the illusion of form.

So looking at your actual insect constructions, many of these are very well done. Overall you're demonstrating a good use of form, you're combining them pretty well, and aside from some areas where you get distracted by detail, you build up the illusion of volume and structure very effectively.

There are just a few things to keep in mind:

• One thing you're generally not doing is defining the relationships between forms. For example, if we look at this praying mantis, which generally came out quite well, you can see how if we look at the major masses (for example the two balls you set out for the abdomen), they're basically two ellipses that overlap. If however you define the actual intersection between them, the single contour line that runs along the surface of both at the same time, we can clearly define them as being three dimensional forms instead of just shapes. It's a cheap (in terms of number of lines required) and really impactful approach to establishing the illusion of form.

• Also on the same praying mantis, if you look at its head, you'll notice that while you dropped a ball form in for its head, what you ultimately ended up doing with it involved pulling back from the bounds of that ball. You placed a head within its space, rather than building on top of it to create solid structure. This doesn't work well because it's a process that involves dropping a form into the world, and then promptly ignoring it in favour of other forms (without it ever truly going away). We generally prefer to work additively (building up forms on top of existing forms). When we do have to work subtractively (cutting back into forms), we need to do so in a very methodical fashion that involves cutting along the surface of the form so as to constantly reinforce the relationships between the piece that remains and the piece that is cut away. It's considerably more complicated. Furthermore, additive construction actually helps reinforce your own understanding of construction and 3D space (because of how you're forced to combine forms), while subtractive often leads to students forgetting about 3D space and just pasting shapes on top of each other.

Now the last thing I wanted to mention was that you definitely have a lot of experimenting with texture. This is good to see, but the most important thing is that you not even think about texture until your construction is completed. That's not a metaphor - I literally don't want you to think about it, because when we know we're going to add detail to a drawing, we immediately start approaching things a little differently, and splitting our mental faculties between construction and "how am I going to add all this really cool detail".

It's also important to keep in mind when adding detail that every mark we put down on the page is an assertion about what we're communicating to the viewer. It's very easy to end up with assertions that contradict one another. For example, maybe the construction suggests that a surface is rounded and voluminous, but the way the texture has been added to it suggests that the surface is more flat. Generally you haven't fallen into this trap too much, but this page and this one end up getting so heavy with noisy texture that it does start to become something of concern, especially with the nature of that stippling. Stippling will of course get much more dense as the surface it's on turns away from the viewer, and much more sparse when it is facing the viewer head on. Don't be afraid to let that stippling merge earlier into solid black areas, especially as those surfaces turn away.

All in all, you're doing a very good job. I've listed some things here to keep in mind, but keep up the great work all the same. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-09-01 21:57

This is looking considerably better - especially with the dragon fly. You definitely still have a lot more room for improvement with the particularly skinny sausages, but you're showing a lot of improvement. Keep working at it, but feel free to consider this lesson as complete and move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable

2019-09-03 20:40

Starting with the organic forms with contour, these are quite well done. I am noticing some weirdness when it comes to the actual ends - they aren't quite shaped like spheres, and instead get a little pointed at times, or more tapered, or sometimes a little flat. Keep an eye on this and remember that the spherical ends is both about them being rounded, but also having that roundedness be limited to a certain section rather than stretching out along more of the overall sausage. You are doing a great job with the midsections however, and your contour ellipses and curves are coming along well.

You've done a pretty solid job of following along with the various demonstrations, with great uses of the sausage method to construct solid legs, and other successful combination of simple forms to build up greater complexity. Keep in mind that some of the informal demos are quite a bit older, and as such while they have some value to offer, following along with them exactly is not always a great idea. For example, with this one, the importance of drawing through your forms (like the legs) so we can understand how they exist in 3D space is critical. So if you do follow along with these, make sure you think about the concepts that have been taught to you thus far through drawabox, and try to apply them alongside whatever that demo focuses on.

Now I am definitely noticing some issues with proportion, though this is fairly normal, and it will improve as you continue to practice drawing from reference images and thinking about how the size of different forms relates to one another. For example, gauging how many heads would fit into the abdomen to better determine how big certain things should be drawn on the page.

Speaking of size, you definitely do have a tendency to draw your constructions fairly small on the page, with lots of empty space around them begging to be used. Drawing larger will help you both engage your shoulder to keep your lines fluid and smooth, and will also help give your brain what it needs to sort through these spatial problems.

While your use of the sausage method is coming along great - your sausages are well shaped and they've got healthy overlaps between them - there is one thing that is missing. That is, the actual step of reinforcing the intersection between them using a contour curve. as shown in the middle of this diagram. It's sometimes not easy to do so when those connection areas get especially small (another reason to push yourself to draw bigger), but it is critically important when conveying how any two forms relate to one another. These intersection areas give us the opportunity to really sell just how certain forms exist in 3D space, and can kick what appears to be a simple shape on a page into being seen as a solid, 3D form very effectively.

All in all, you are doing a pretty great job, and are employing the major concepts of the lesson very well. When you do delve into more detail, you also are moving in the direction of observing the actual textures that are present in your reference images, though I do think there's a lot more to be seen and carried over, so keep working on studying those references closely, and remembering that every textural mark you put down is a shadow cast by some bit of form information that exists along the surface of your object. This can help us to focus on what each mark truly represents, and can keep us from oversimplifying in a cartoony fashion.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-09-03 21:01

Starting with your organic forms with contour ellipses and curves, these are doing fairly well. Your second page definitely is stronger as far as the actual sausage shapes goes - the first page was alright, but there was a little more irregularity towards the ends (either swelling out slightly or stretching instead of being properly spherical). Some of this is present in your second page as well, but to a much lesser degree.

I do want to point out however that sometimes you place that last little contour ellipse on the tip incorrectly. Many of them drift further into the form than the shape implies, which undermines the illusion and confuses the viewer. Make sure you think a little more about where you're putting the ellipse at the tip, to get the most out of that highly effective trick.

There are definitely a lot of major strengths throughout your drawings here - you're doing a great job of combining forms to create more complex objects that feel three dimensional - but there is a key set of issues that I want to address above all else.

I actually only see it in one place, but it's significant enough to make a big point of it. In this ant, if you take a look at its head, you'll see some bumps you added there that were effectively taking the silhouette of the forms you'd previously combined, and then manipulating it as a two dimensional shape on the page. None of our drawing process should ever be perceived as taking place "on the page". Everything we do needs to either be the result of adding explicit forms to our construction, or at least drawing with an awareness of how the marks we're putting down move in three dimensions.

Outlining of any sort is pretty dangerous, and it's one of the reasons I push students to only add line weight in limited sections - because it's very easy to get trapped in the mindset of "tracing" over the actual lines you've already drawn, rather than emphasizing edges that exist in 3D. We can also see this problem along the abdomen, where you've taken the existing boundaries of the forms that were present and then pushed them out to create segmentation. Instead, you should be thinking about how you can wrap new forms around the abdomen, with an awareness of how they're going to layer onto it (like lesson 2's organic intersections) and building things out in that manner.

Fortunately this was only an issue we saw in any significant fashion with this particular drawing, and your others look pretty solid. That first wasp demo you followed along with did have some more subtle cases of this kind of mindset (of drawing lines on the page) but most of it was still reasonably well done.

Moving onto a different topic altogether, it's good to see that you're experimenting a great deal with how to push your drawings further with detail and texture, but without decreasing the amount of attention that you pay during the constructional phases. There is still a lot to be figured out, especially with the use of those larger bolder marks, but the most important piece of advice I can offer here is that line weight's greatest advantage is that you can use it to clearly establish how different forms overlap. Right now I don't feel that this is something that you're achieving as effectively as you could, as your marks tend to jump between a reasonably uniform range to really heavy black shadows. Try thinking about creating a hierarchy in your drawings, ranging from the confident lines you drew during construction, gradually building up to make the different overlaps and relationships between your forms easier to understand before jumping in with really bold dark areas.

Also, on your tarantula you seem to have placed a fairly arbitrary black spot along its abdomen that is rather difficult to rationalize. It's likely that you drew a coloured spot you saw in your reference. Local colour of this sort should not be carried over into your drawing, for the same reason that we don't try to capture the browns, yellows, reds, greens, etc. Imagine that your drawing is all grey.

In the next lesson, there are some notes on how to tackle fur as clusters and tufts rather than individual hairs - pay particular attention there, as it'll help you better design the fur textures on your critters.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-09-08 23:21

Lovely work! You're definitely nailing many of the major concepts. There are a few things I want to address, but by and large you're doing a great job.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are solidly done. Your sausage forms match the two-equal-spheres-connected-by-a-tube-of-consistent-width definition nicely, with no swelling or pinching through their midsection. Your contour lines wrap nicely around the forms as well, and align nicely to the central minor axis line. There's just one issue I'm seeing, and that's that your contour curves generally maintain the same degree throughout, rather than shifting naturally along the length as they should. I can actually see this done a little better in some areas of the second page, although it's somewhat inconsistent.

For your insect constructions, as far as the use of simple forms and combining them to create more complex objects, you're doing a great job. You've got excellent, tangible volumes in each of these, and you're generally respecting the volumes and solidity of your forms and avoiding situations where you might introduce contradictions to your drawings.

There are a few exceptions however. Most notably, cases like mr snippy snap (though admittedly this is somewhat my fault because I approached this a little sloppily in the video demo). In this drawing, you drew big balls for the claw sections, and then drew a new form overtop of each ball to create the top claw. The solid, 3D ball that you started with ended up being ignored and overridden, in favour of this newly introduced component. This is the kind of thing we want to avoid at all costs when applying constructional drawing, largely because it breaks the core premise of construction. You've added a 3D form, and then gone on to treat it as though it were just a flat shape that could be ignored.

Generally what should be done here is starting with a smaller ball that the top part of the claw would be extended off of (this is what was done in the demo, although the ball was a little loosely drawn so it wasn't as clear), integrating this initial form into the construction rather than tossing it away. This is an example of additive construction - where everything builds up on the previous forms that were put down - rather than subtractive construction. Subtractive construction is valid, but it's considerably more difficult to achieve because it requires a student to already have a very strong understanding of how their forms exist in 3D space. Instead of cutting into the shape as it exists on the page, we cut along the surface of the form, as though we were drawing with a scalpel. Additive construction, which I recommend students stick to whenever possible, actually helps build one's understanding of 3D space, making it an excellent part of the overall exercise, whereas subtractive construction requires us to already understand those concepts, and makes it very easy to do things wrong. As you continue to work additively (which you generally do), you'll increase your capacity to work subtractively when it is actually necessary.

Another thing I noticed was that your drawings tend not to take full advantage of the space afforded to you on the page. Even when drawing just a single insect to a page, you'll limit yourself to a smaller fraction of it. I can certainly understand not knowing fully how much space you'll need and leaning a little smaller to make sure you don't spill over the edge, but I think you'll benefit from drawing a little bigger so as to give yourself more room to think through spatial problems.

This also relates to the last issue I wanted to mention, and that's your current approach to texture and detail. Since your construction is quite strong, your use of texture and detail being somewhat on the weaker side actually isn't a big deal - which makes it easy to miss as an issue with room for improvement. That said, with a closer inspection I did notice that your details and texture are drawn to be somewhat scratchier, and more based on seeing certain marks in your reference image and drawing them directly without considering what they actually represent.

This actually makes a lot of sense, as you last crossed lesson 2 back before the major updates to drawabox. The texture section has undergone some significant updates, so I recommend that you give it a read (along with the notes for the individual exercises - you don't have to do them, just make sure you read through the notes).

To summarize, what we're doing here with our drawings is describing the nature of the forms present in our object. The large forms, we establish through construction, bounding their volumes with outlines and describing their surfaces with contour lines. The smaller forms - those that exist along the surfaces of the larger ones - are too densely packed and too small to properly apply the same techniques to, so instead we capture them by drawing the shadows they cast on their surrounding areas. Every single mark we perceive as part of a texture, everything we think of as a 'line' is really just a shadow being cast by some little form - a bump, a raised section, a ridge, a divot, etc.

So what's important when it comes to capturing these textures successfully, is that when you see a mark you want to carry over into your drawing, you don't simply draw it as it is. You pause, think about the nature of the form that casts that particular shadow, and then think about what kind of shadow that form would cast in your drawing. This additional step of relating it to the form itself will help make your textures more developed and more convincing. It is the same principle as construction, where we stop to think about the simple form that exists in part of a photograph, rather than simply drawing what we see.

Reading through those notes, especially this section of the texture analysis exercise should help clarify this a lot more.

Anyway! You're doing very well as it is, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Edit: I actually realized you're meant to be at the $10 tier for this lesson, but you've been supporting for so long without submitting homework that it's not really an issue. You're welcome to stay at your current tier (though I expect I'll forget and remember many times for all of your future submissions).