Uncomfortable

2019-04-27 17:32

All in all, you are demonstrating a good grasp of certain core aspects of construction here. There are issues I'll address, and some things we'll try to sort out, but by and large if I had to assess the overall direction in which you're moving, and the qualities you're presenting here in regards to your understanding of 3D space, of how forms can be manipulated and combined to create complex objects, you are coming along quite well.

Your demo follow-alongs

To start with, you've demonstrated a good deal of attentiveness and careful analysis as you followed along with the demos. While it may seem like following along with a demonstration should be easier (and it is of course easier at least compared to drawing from your own reference images), it still requires a good deal of understanding in order to apply the concepts and even be able to follow along with the different steps and reach a positive result. Many of your demo drawings came along quite well, and I'm honestly rather impressed that you broke down the construction of those that didn't even have as much step-by-step information.

Above all else, I think your bear demos captured a very strong impression of an awareness of your volumes, how different forms connected to one another, and the results benefited greatly from it.

Moving onto your own constructions, while some of the earlier ones are still a little explorative (which is a pretty normal way of starting out), you do start to fall back on the fundamental grasp of construction. That said, there are a couple issues that stand out.

Skipping some steps

First and foremost, I think you have a tendency to start with construction, but jump too soon into detail. Often times there seem to be steps that were perhaps skipped, often in the interest of ensuring that your end result is a nice, detailed drawing - rather than focusing on the idea that these are all exercises intended to develop your understanding of form, construction and 3D space.

Drawing basic construction too lightly

To push this idea, I'm noticing that you also have a tendency to lay in your basic construction with much fainter marks than your pen is capable of. This is a fundamental difference from how your follow-alongs with my demos were approached (and furthermore, different from the process I showed in those demos). You'll notice that when I do those demonstrations, I specifically pick a photoshop brush that doesn't let me hide anything - every mark is 100% opacity, bold, and confident.

Attempting to keep certain marks more hidden than others is a process that is a little taxing on our focus and mental capacities - instead of focusing fully on keeping those marks confident, smooth, etc. we're now focusing on that alongside keeping them faint and hidden. In your case it didn't have a particularly negative impact, but in principle it is still something to be avoided.

'Replacing' linework

The other important point is that when you lay in your basic forms lightly like that, it requires you to go back in and "replace" those lines with darker strokes once you're ready to commit - that's a process that more often than not has a likelihood of stiffening your linework (because you're following along more slowly), and is generally a process I call out as being something to avoid as early as lesson 2's form intersections video.

To put it simply, it's important to accept that every single mark you put down is going to be a part of your final drawing, from the very first ball you lay onto the page. Once we get into the line weight stage of things, we can bring some lines forward by reinforcing them with a little local weight (drawn using the ghosting method, with a confident execution so as to keep it smooth and fluid, even if this risks missing the mark a little, and to limited sections rather than attempting to reinforce a long line all together). Still, each and every line is a part of that drawing, and should therefore be treated as such.

The sausage method for legs

In a lot of these drawings, I'm noticing that you have a tendency to construct legs using elongated ellipses for each segment, rather than the sausage method explored in lesson 4. I see sausages on occasion, but more frequently they end up being more akin to a single ellipse or ball that's been stretched - resulting in that curvature that you'd find reserved for the ends of a sausage being stretched out across much more of the form. Take a look at this diagram from lesson 4.

There are a few very specific elements to this technique. The first being the use of sausages (two equally sized balls connected by a tube of consistent width) rather than a stretched ellipse, as these forms can flow much more fluidly and convey the rhythm and gesture of a limb more easily. Second is being mindful of how those forms overlap - initially there's nothing really telling us that these forms are three dimensional, but if we get them to overlap as shown in that diagram, and then reinforce that intersectional joint with a single contour line, this joint reinforces the idea that both connected forms are in fact three dimensional, and when done correctly, it can do so very effectively without the addition of any more contour lines.

Ensuring that they are overlapped properly and that contour line is placed correctly is important, but once nailed, the impact is extremely useful for conveying form and volume with minimal linework. Of course, not all limbs are of a consistent width, but we can then go back to build on additional forms to bulk them up after the fact wherever necessary.

Ribcages

I am often noticing that in your drawings, you have a tendency to draw the ribcage masses as being quite small. In your own study notes, you did note this yourself ("BIGGER!") but over the while you worked on these exercises you may have forgotten. It does help a great deal to review the lesson notes every now and then to ensure that stuff remains fresh.

As explained here, the ribcage should occupy about half the length of the torso. It's quite similar to what you'd find on a human, with the ribcage taking up half, the pelvis taking up about a quarter, and the remaining quarter in between being more flexible.

Adding additional masses

You're definitely not afraid of adding more forms to your constructions wherever you feel it necessary, and that's great to see. That said, when adding these forms, it's important not to view them as shapes being tacked onto a flat drawing on a page, but rather as actual masses (similar to the organic intersections exercise) being piled on top of one another.

For example, with your camel, here are some thoughts on how I'd approach the issue of its hump. Be more mindful of how the forms wrap around one another, and don't let them end at a sort of flat, sharp edge. Think of it more like putty - the putty always exists in a rounded sort of mass, and contour lines running along its surface will continue to hook back around along that edge rather than coming to a sudden stop.

Fur

Part of the reason your fur textures aren't generally that successful is because of what I mentioned previously in regard to some steps being skipped between the basic construction and the addition of detail. Without the construction being fleshed out fully (note the stage at which I have the wolf demo before I start adding fur), there's not enough for the fur to really latch onto. And because of the tendency to draw those basic constructions as much lighter and fainter, you end up relying on the fur to both carry the solidity of being "committed" lines, as well as trying to convey the illusion of a furry surface.

With construction, every mark, every shape, every form is generally looking to accomplish a single task, answer a single question, or solve a single problem. When you start assigning multiple responsibilities to a mark, it ends up doing a mediocre job at all of them (at best). Breaking everything down into those constructional phases is what allows us to separate the tasks out, answer problems one by one, and keep everything consistent.

This critique hit reddit's limit, so I'll continue in a reply to this comment

Uncomfortable

2019-05-01 21:03

This submission is something of a journey. There's a lot here, and with all of that mileage, there's a lot of growth and improvement in certain areas. There are also certain mistakes that persist throughout, so identifying them for you should help you adjust your trajectory and keep you improving.

To start with, you're definitely thinking quite a bit in terms of form, which is great to see. It's clear that you're really pinning down how each and every element exists in 3D space, with ample (sometimes excessive) use of contour lines. For the most part this is a good thing, though there are certain places where you use too many contour lines, and just how you use them does you a bit of a disservice.

One of the most notable issues is that your constructions have a tendency to feel very bubbly - like your animals are made up of balloons. They do feel like three dimensional balloons, which again, is a step in the right direction, but it does result in things looking off. This, compounded with the proportional issues (which are totally normal at this stage, and will continue to improve as you do more studies and observational drawing of this sort), definitely throws things out of whack.

When we get into more complex 3D objects (especially faces, both human and animal), we come to a point where we need to be a lot more precise in our awareness of the various 'planes' of an object. That is, where we can distinguish the front from the side and the top, or in the case of a human face, the divisions between things like the cheeks, the eye socket, the brow, etc. In order to understand with greater specificity how these objects occupy space, we put our curving, organic lines down in favour of straight lines and flat, chiseled planes.

Your drawings here have a tendency to go in the opposite direction - everything ends up being smooth and rounded. We can actually see this illustrated best on this page of heads, if we look specifically at the eye sockets. You've got one drawing there (middle in the top row) where you've drawn the eye socket as a non-elliptical shape. It's clearly got corners to it, and it's been crafted a little more deliberately than the others, where all you've done is put down a simple, vague ellipse. The eye socket with the corners actually tells us more about the face - it communicates how the brow ridge and the cheekbone all buttress against this eye socket, giving us the impression of distinct forms that fit together like a three dimensional puzzle. The other heads however are lacking this, and instead everything just fuses together like a mass of putty, especially the bottom right. The top left is somewhere in between, as it conveys some borders between interconnecting components, but they're still fairly rounded. Also worth mentioning, that skull in the top right is really beautifully drawn.

Another element that's not quite employed correctly is the sausage method recommended for the legs. This is the diagram I usually reference, from lesson 4, though you can also see it employed in this part of the wolf demo. The sausage method hinges on a few different points:

• Every segment is composed of a simple sausage. That means a form that is essentially two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width. The important thing to remember here is that this is not just an ellipse or ball that has been stretched - so the rounded curvature you see on either end is limited just to those ends. When a ball is stretched, you see that curvature progressing through the entire length of the form, and it gives it a sense of rigidity. Sometimes I see forms that are somewhere in between, where the spherical ends themselves are stretched. Always keep those ends a spherical as possible, meaning that their rounded ends are limited just to that section. Most of it should maintain a consistent width. This ensures that the form has a gestural flow and rhythm to it.

• These sausages are intended to overlap and intersect fully. This allows us to reinforce that intersectional joint with a single, critical contour curve. This contour curve, when done correctly, is enough to reinforce the illusion of three dimensional form for both sausages, meaning that you do not need to, and simply should not, add any further contour curves along its length. These additional contour curves when overused can result in things getting overly stiff.

• If you need to, you can build up additional form around them, but at their core these sausages should be as described here. Don't go making one end bigger and one end smaller because that's what you saw on the reference - instead, add more mass/forms after the basic sausage chain is constructed.

A frequent mistake I'm seeing in your constructions is that you have a tendency to draw your initial ribcage as being way too small. Give these notes a read - it specifically explains that the ribcage occupies roughly half the torso, and does so for just about all animals. Furthermore, when constructing the large sausage for the torso, it should essentially just be an act of taking the ribcage mass and the pelvis and wrapping them snugly, as shown here.

If we look at this deer, we can see both of these mistakes in action. First off, your ribcage is very small, only occupying the very front of the torso. Secondly, your pelvis is floating way above, resulting in a torso-sausage that has effectively been constructed through guesswork, rather than grounded firmly in the construction from the previous step.

Now, you do have considerably more successful drawings later on, though you're still employing many of the same mistakes. This tells me that you do have a very strong grasp of 3D space, but that you're not fully absorbing the principles in the lesson - and therefore you're building on rickety foundation, resulting in a lot of hit-and-miss. So you need to slow down, revisit the lesson material, and focus not on drawing what you know, but rather take more time in applying the concepts that are being explained to you.

So, here's what I want you to do:

• Reread the lesson and rewatch the video. I think the way in which you did so initially may have left some gaps, as you missed some elements that were laid out pretty clearly (like the ribcage issue). I get a lot of students who are somewhat rearin' to go here, so seeing students not pick up on the material entirely on the first time around is pretty common.

• Then I want you to draw along with both the wolf demo and the tiger demo. Don't stray from the instructions - follow everything exactly as it is described to you. Better that you follow the step-by-step in the written stuff than drawing along with the videos.

• Do 4 more drawings applying both what I've explained here in the critique. The key here is to follow the instructions as closely as you can - you may have an approach for drawing animals, but that's not what this lesson is truly about. It's about learning to employ the principles of construction, and using animals as a subject matter.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-10 21:24

To start with, your organic intersections at the top are coming along, but there is an issue I'd like to address. If you look at the top form in your first page, I noticed there that it seems to ignore the arrangement of forms beneath it, in a way that makes it look like it was cut and pasted on top of the pile, rather than actually integrated into it. Take a look at these notes, where I show how the form should have behaved in relation to those beneath it. This kind of thinking is critical to how we use and manipulate our forms while drawing constructively, as it depends heavily on our belief in the illusion we're creating. That the forms themselves are three dimensional, solid, and real.

Next, moving onto the first two pages of birds, there are a few critical issues I can see, which I explain on this page of notes.

• You're treating your initial construction as more of a loose suggestion, which you then go on to ignore somewhat as you add further lines. For example, how I pointed out the initial ball for the head, which is then drawn on top of with a later line. Construction consists of a series of answers to questions, gradually building out a sense of what this object is. Every line you put down is a statement or an assertion, and if you go on then to put down a line that contradicts a previous assertion, you undermine the illusion you're creating. The viewer now has two conflicting assertions present, and are left less certain as to which to follow. As such, when you answer a question the first time, you adhere to it through the rest of your drawing even if it is not entirely in line with the reference you're drawing from. We're not here to reproduce our reference - we're here to communicate what we see in it through visual means.

• You definitely have a strong tendency here to fall back on using a lot of contour lines to make up for the fact that a form doesn't necessarily feel very solid. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't really work. Contour lines have a diminishing return - the first one can do a lot of good (especially on a form that doesn't have other qualities that make it feel flat). A second will provide fewer benefits, and a third, an fourth, etc. will eventually do nothing at all, aside from making the drawing feel stiff and robotic. As I show in the notes, your beak there was doomed from the beginning, because it wasn't drawn with consideration for how it existed as a three dimensional form, and how it related to the cranial ball it was connecting to. The intersection/connection of that form to the cranial ball was just a basic curve. This makes the beak feel flat because it doesn't imply a division of top/side/etc. planes of a three dimensional form. If you look at my version, you can see that the intersection has individual lines - one showing the intersection along the top, one showing how the side plane connects, and so on.

• To this point, make sure you're taking the time to define just how the major forms connect to one another, ESPECIALLY early on in your construction. I noticed that you don't actually have any established form for the neck of your bird here. This is something I'm seeing a fair bit through many of your later drawings as well.

Moving on, as I look at your later birds and into the capybaras, I'm seeing a weird tendency to draw your eyesockets with dashed, broken lines. I'm not really sure why you're doing this, but there's two problems here:

• First off, broken/dashed lines do nothing for us. Most often they're used when someone's trying to show that a line is not really "there", which is irrelevant to us because we're not in any way attempting to make a pretty drawing. These drawings are exercises in spatial problem solving and construction, and therefore if we were to be concerned with the end result as a pretty polished drawing, we'd be taking away from that core goal.

• Secondly, the eye sockets are being drawn as smooth ellipses (a point I specifically warn against here). Ellipses take no consideration for the surface of the form you're adding them to - they do not flow along that surface, they assume a specific trajectory, and if the object you're working with doesn't flow in that matter, too bad. Instead, we construct our contour curves by thinking about how the surface of the skull will actually behave, as though we're cutting into it with a scalpel. Similarly, we construct our eyelids around the eyeball form by wrapping these new forms around the ball. Your eyelids tend to ignore the curvature of the eyeball and cut across it instead. This is definitely at least in part due to how small those parts of your drawings end up being (it's considerably more difficult to think through spatial problems as a beginner in small areas), though I see the same kind of problems even when you do more focused drawings of heads alone. Also looking at those drawings, I believe you're making your eyeballs way too small. As you can see in my demonstrations, I draw the eyeballs considerably larger than the portion of them that is going to be visible.

I demonstrate these points in these notes.

I also mention an issue with how you handled the bumps along its body - you constructed your sausage form for the torso, and then cut into it to create the various bumps you'd perceived in your reference. Working subtractively in this manner is considerably more difficult than working additively (as explained here). The way you cut back into those forms didn't really show much definition for how the pieces that were cut away and those that were left sat in 3D space and how they related to one another in 3D space. Instead, you treated it more like a flat shape on the page, and as a result, the torso was flattened. Some contour curves added a degree of volume back, but it was definitely not a great way of approaching that problem.

I've put a fair bit of time into this critique thus far, so I'm going to hit the last few points briefly:

• It doesn't look like you're following the sausage method much when drawing your limbs. Look at this diagram from lesson 4 once again and take a look at this part of the wolf demo as well as the donkey demo to better understand how this method should be approached. Keep in mind that there are several parts to it - drawing a simple sausage for each segment of the leg, ensuring that they overlap enough, and then defining the intersection between them to establish how those forms relate to one another in 3D space. When done correctly, you will not need any more contour curves along the lengths of these sausages.

*You definitely have a tendency at times to get a little vague, faint or loose with your linework. It's not to such a considerable degree, and generally your linework is fairly confident (and your individual major forms are drawn to be fairly solid), but looking at drawings like this one, specifically how the lines have a tendency to fade in and out, only half-existing on the page, it suggests to me that you may be planning your linework out a little less conscientiously than you ought to. Don't forget to ghost, to consider the mark you want to put down, etc. before executing the mark.

• In general, your attempts at texture don't work out too well. From what I can see, you attempt to draw texture from memory rather than direct observation. That doesn't mean that you're not studying your reference frequently, but rather it means that when you look at your reference image, you identify specific elements "there's a bunch of bumps here, there's some feathers here, there's scales here", and then draw those named objects. That is, you draw scales rather than the specific shadows cast by the specific scales that were present in that part of the reference. You're relying on representative symbols of what was there, rather than actually drawing those specific textures. You also tend to approach texture purely with line, rather than capturing the shadow shapes cast by all of the little forms that exist along the surface of the object. Lines do not exist - they are a construct we use to define the bounds of objects in construction, but they serve little purpose when it comes to attempting to capture something as specific and detailed as the kinds of textures that exist in our drawings.

• Lastly, generally whenever you tackle hands, you jump straight into a complex shape with no or little underlying construction. No simple forms, no consideration for how those 3D elements intersect with one another, etc. Just complex, flat shapes. This isn't an uncommon problem to see, and I believe it comes from an uncertainty as to where the border lies between construction and detail.

So, to start, I want you to do 4 pages of animal drawings, construction only. Take the construction as far as you possibly can, but add no detail or texture whatsoever. If you're uncertain of how far that means, you can take a look at the donkey demo. Step 12 is where my 'construction' phase ends.

Before tackling the extra pages, I want you to go back over the lesson once again, reading it carefully. I think there are a lot of areas here where you've neglected to follow along with the processes outlined in the lesson, and have gone about things in your own interpretive fashion. Again, it's a common thing to see, especially when students don't go back to the notes to refresh their memory. You can even follow along with the demos - you can include those if you do them with your submission, but they won't count towards your 4 pages.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-12 19:26

So the first thing that jumped out at me in your organic intersections was that you were doing a pretty good job of conveying how these various forms relate to one another, how they deform around one another rather than cutting right through each other as they find a state of equilibrium. That said, your linework did have a tendency of being quite stiff and uncertain. This, along with other signs - such as a distinct uniformity to your individual strokes' line weight (specifically that there's no visible tapering towards the ends of the strokes that generally occurs naturally as the pen touches down) suggests that you are likely drawing a little too slowly and hesitantly.

As we move onto the animal drawings, this stiffness definitely continues to be a problem, and I can regularly see that you are not drawing through most of your ellipses (something you should be doing for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons).

Looking at this page, there are aspects of your constructions that are well done - you're drawing through all of your forms, for example - but there are a few issues that cause many of your forms to flatten down into shapes.

I am very glad that you're applying the sausage method for your legs, though you're missing a critical step - clearly defining the intersection between sausage segments to help define how they relate to one another in 3D space, rather than just as flat shapes on the page. On the far left, the standalone construction there (which I assume to be a leg or something similar), you did make efforts to define that intersection between sausages, but the contour line's curvature was much too shallow, and didn't give the impression that it wrapped around the other side. Additionally, you seem to have attempted to add bulk around the joint, but instead of actually adding separate three dimensional forms to the construction in that area, you simply added a few individual line - similar to just adding a flat shape. This in turn, flattens things out. In case you're not sure which parts I'm talking about, I've pointed them out here.

On the following page, one of the birds caught my eye, though it's a bit hard to describe my observations here in text, so I've written some more notes directly on the page. It comes down to always building up your construction bit by bit and adhering to the solid forms established in the underlying phase of construction.

The (upside-down) bear on the top of this page was constructed fairly well. I'm seeing somewhat more appropriate use of the sausage method (though you do need to work on keeping your sausages consistent in width through their lengths, yours are tending a little more towards being like stretched ellipses, where they continue to get wider until they reach their middle, which in turn tends to stiffen them. I'm also pleased to see better use of the additional volumes - you're doing more to wrap them around the underlying body.

On both of these bear drawings though, I'm noticing that the feet tend to come out very flat. Whenever drawing any form, try and keep yourself aware of the divisions between the various planes of that form - in the case of the feet (and of most simple forms), consider where the form's top, side, front, etc. lay.

Moving down to the full page bear head, there are many elements of head construction that you're applying well, though your eye sockets are definitely too small. Take a look at the tiger head construction demo again. Also, consider how the ears attach to the head - especially the bear's right ear (on the left side of the page). It doesn't just stick out from the silhouette of the head like that - we would be able to see how it specifically connects to the cranial ball.

There is definitely further progress over the course of the submission, though I think certain points I've raised here continue to be a bit of an issue - especially the stiffness of your linework, not drawing through ellipses, and not fleshing out how certain forms connect to others.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do 4 more pages of animal drawings. It's totally fine to do one drawing per page, drawing larger so as to engage more of your shoulder and focus on getting your marks to flow more fluidly and smoothly. This matter of flow and confidence is really critical to your drawings at the most basic level. If you take a look at the bottom half of these notes, they may help.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-26 19:40

I'm thrilled to hear that the first page is the last one you drew, because it shows an enormous improvement, both over the other pages, as well as over the previous submission. The other pages shown here are also coming along well, but that first page is ideal. You're demonstrating a much clearer understanding of the material, of how these compound forms come together to create a more complex object, and how the forms relate to one another as they wrap around your major elements to add bumps and masses as needed.

I have no critiques to offer for that first page, but a couple things to mention your somewhat earlier drawings. The main thing I noticed was that you're getting the grasp here of carving into your head constructions, but that you still had a tendency to use curving, organic lines, rather than the decisive cuts that straight lines offer us. These straighter cuts tend to provide us with a clearer understanding of where the borders between planes rest.

This is actually something that lesson 6 goes into in a big way, so it is something you'll have the chance to play with there. For now, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete and reiterate - your most recent page is coming along GREAT, and shows that you've truly improved by leaps and bounds. Keep it up, and feel free to move onto the next step - which looks like the cylinder challenge, as it's a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-03 21:28

To start with, your organic intersections are looking great. Strong sense of volume and form, and an excellent demonstration of how these forms interact with one another in 3D space. Based on these alone, I already expect your constructions to demonstrate a sense of solidity and believability.

For the most part, my expectations in that regard have been met. It's a little rougher as you start out, which is fairly normal as you get used to leaning harder on the principles of construction. Generally speaking, it's pretty normal for students to start out focused heavily on transferring observation directly to the page, whereas what we're actually looking for is a middle phase, where we transform what we observe into concrete forms, which we then construct on the page. So the first few pages were still working towards this point, and as you pushed through you got a better hang of it.

There is one major issue that I want to address however, and it's an important one. We see it a lot in this corgi and in a more minor capacity later on.

Take a look at how you've drawn the stubby legs on that adorable pup. If you remember from the basic principles of constructional drawing, every single thing we put down is essentially a solid, three dimensional mass added to the world. This is in line with the idea that every mark we draw is a statement or an assertion, and our drawing is a big lie that we're telling our viewer. All of these assertions must be consistent - any assertions that contradict one another will undermine the overall illusion we're creating.

The problem is that the initial masses you put down (the bigger ball-blobs) were not actually used as solid forms, but rather as containers for smaller leg segments that you drew afterwards. Often you treated these as entirely flat shapes, or suggestions to effectively be ignored after the fact. They were never truly a part of the construction. As a result, we have these elements that tell of an entirely different leg - they contradict the leg you ultimately drew, and so, undermined the resulting illusion.

Whenever possible, we try to work additively - we put down smaller forms, and then build up masses as needed. We build these up with an awareness for how these forms connect to one another in 3D space (similarly to how your organic intersections did a great job of slumping over each other, selling the idea that they were piled up together, rather than just being cut-and-paste on top of each other on the page). Working additively here would have definitely been possible - and generally speaking, you should have applied the sausage method to your legs.

Now, if we do have to work subtractively, then we have to follow the same premise - respecting and defining how these forms exist in 3D space. Start out with a form, and then when cutting away from it, you have to clearly define how both the piece that remains and the piece that was cut away exist in space. This usually means defining that cut with contour lines, and whatever other tools (like drawing through forms and such) we've learned in the past. Simply drawing a shape on top of a shape won't cut it. We need to constantly work to maintain the illusion of 3D form we establish from the beginning, because the second we abandon it, it becomes MUCH harder to ever get it back - if it's possible at all.

Another thing I wanted to mention, is that when you add the additional masses (like along the corgi's back, and elsewhere that you've added additional muscle to other animals), these are okay, but you are somewhat falling into the trap of pasting shapes on top of your drawing and then trying to reinforce them with contour lines. When drawing your organic intersections, for the most part those things still would feel 3D even without your contour lines, based on how the silhouettes of each form curve and wrap around each other. The contour lines merely serve to take what's already there and really accentuate it. You need to strive to sell the idea that the additional masses exist as forms of their own, wrapping around the underlying forms, when constructing these animals. If you look at this original version of the wolf demo, specifically at step 5, you'll see how my masses actually curve around the underlying forms.

The last point I want to raise is about your linework. Right now your linework is just a little bit hairy, and it tends to make your drawings lean a little bit more towards the messy side. Try to hold yourself back before putting those marks down and think, applying the process of the ghosting method before each stroke. You're not far off, but things are getting a little bit away from you, and you're probably ending up putting more marks down than you need to, causing a sketchier result. Similarly, when you draw your tufts of fur, they end up looking more like individual lines sticking out form the form, rather than actual extensions of the form's silhouette. Remember that a tuft of fur is a carefully designed, intentional addition. While you may have the odd flyaway, they are for the most part not individual lines, but shapes, and so you need to take more care in getting them to touch where you mean them to, rather than having many gaps, or lines that miss one another. Essentially: slow down, plan more, ghost more, and try not to fall into the trap of putting marks down quickly and overly energetically. Your marks should still be confident and without hesitation, but only once you've planned them out properly.

So! You definitely have some things to work on, but you've demonstrated a good grasp of construction overall (save that one major point I raised). I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-07 21:07

Unfortunately when it comes to that nervousness, the only way to deal with it is to dive into your drawings, accepting the possibility that things will go wrong. While it's important to plan and think about every mark we put down, we don't want to get into the trap of thinking that the end result of any of these exercises matters. It doesn't. They're just drawings and we could just as well burn them upon completion. What matters is what we learn from the process of drawing them.

It's entirely possible to be nervous, but to choose not to act on that fear. To acknowledge that you're worried that your next mark will "ruin" your drawing, but to push yourself into making it anyway. And that's what is needed. Doing a little study beforehand is totally fine, but when it comes time to actually work through the exercise, do not allow yourself to hesitate.

Anyway! Moving onto your work, you've definitely learned a lot through this lesson, and are demonstrating an understanding of many aspects of what was covered. There are however areas where we could see some improvement as well.

Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing a pretty good job of capturing how they pile up on top of one another, and how they wrap around the forms adjacent to them. This is a very important point to be mindful of, especially when we add additional masses on top of our constructions - they have to wrap around the forms beneath them in a way that feels convincing, so we can avoid the sense that we're just pasting shapes on top of our drawing. Everything needs to feel 3D, and we need to clearly comprehend how all these forms relate to one another.

All in all, your use of construction is coming along fairly well. I can see you clearly thinking about how you can resolve the relationships between the different forms you use. For example, the horse head shows a cranial ball and a boxy muzzle that fit very convincingly together.

On this same drawing however, there are two points that I want to discuss. Firstly, take a look at this side of the muzzle. You started out with a box-form, but then when you decided you wanted the muzzle to tuck in, you cut across it in a manner that ignored the integrity of that form. You effectively redrew a new form on top of it. When applying constructional drawing, we can't allow things like this to happen. Every single form we add to our drawing is essentially a new block of marble being added to the world. Any further action must respect the fact that it is present. So in a situation like this, you'd be forced to establish how that existing form is cut and carved - utilizing contour lines following along the surface of the form itself.

This basically falls in line with the idea that every drawing is a lie that we are telling the viewer. Every mark we put down is a statement or an assertion, and if different statements fail to keep in line with one another - if some statements contradict others - we undermine our overall story and decrease our chances of convincing the viewer.

Similarly, the other point I wanted to raise in regards to this drawing was how you added the bumps along the opposite side of the muzzle. Rather than actually adding on 3D forms to your construction, you extended these out as part of the drawing - as 2D shapes. There's no actual form there, instead we're left attempting to bridge the gap from the bump to those underlying forms, and it again weakens the resulting illusion.

Another case where you've got underlying, solid forms, but you're drawing flat features on top is the tiger head's lower jaw. You constructed the muzzle, but then you jumped ahead to features that used the underlying construction as a sort of suggestion - but there's no suggestion of how that lower jaw actually exists in space. It reads as flat, because we can't really separate the side plane from the front plane - something we can do in this stage of the demo. The form I added to help define that jaw further goes across, then turns where we transition into the side plane. Thinking about the actual planes is quite valuable - any form we put down would have a top, a side, a front, etc. though sometimes the transitions between them are smooth and vague. Even in these cases, you can impose your own sharp edges where they may not actually exist, simply because doing so helps us to better understand how the form sits in space.

This is something we get into further in the next lesson.

The last thing I want to mention is that you're not entirely consistent in the use of the sausage method for drawing your legs. You followed it when working along with the wolf demo, which is good, but in examples like your red panda you forgot about it entirely. The sausage technique is extremely useful as it allows us to capture the three dimensional form of a flowing object without giving it any undue stiffness. It allows us to establish solidity and volume while also maintaining any gestural rhythm. It should be the basis of all the legs you draw.

It's also worth mentioning that the point about top/side/front planes applies as well to how you draw paws, in the red panda as well as in the otter and others. Remember that everything is a form, that every mark you put down is part of a solid, three dimensional object, and that nothing can be drawn without it existing in that manner. There's no mix of lines on the page and solid forms in the world. Construction needs to be extended all the way through, as you'll notice in all of my demos - even when I start pulling away from construction lines, the marks I do put down still reflect how the forms themselves exist in space.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to try four more pages of animal drawings, trying to apply what I've written here. And don't forget to draw confidently at every turn - draw through your ellipses and commit to every stroke with enthusiasm, applying the three stages of the ghosting method (planning, preparing, and a confident execution). Don't let your nervousness control your actions.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-14 19:31

Overall, the degree to which you've absorbed the core concepts of the lesson, and of construction as a whole, really shows! It's always good to see students who feel their outlook on a particular topic has changed, and also have the work to back that up. There are a couple things I want to point out, but by and large you're doing a pretty great job, as you always have been.

The first point that jumps out at me is that when you're adding additional forms to your construction, you waffle between applying them well (wrapping them around the underlying form, with consideration for how the two interact in 3D space - similarly to the organic intersections from lesson 2, which is why they're included in this lesson as well), and applying them with less thought to how everything sits in three dimensions.

A great example of doing it correctly is how you handled the oryx demo, specifically the big mass above the shoulder. You can see how it curves around the neck. An example that is less good is the mass added to these two dogs' backs.

To be completely fair, as I scrolled through your work trying to find examples of the technique not being used as well, I realized that you're actually nailing it the vast majority of the time - so consider this to be a fairly minor nitpick.

While much more often than not you're pretty diligent with your head constructions, I did notice that when you ended up being a little more relaxed on that front (like this bottom of this page), it definitely had an impact, with the eyes feeling a little more pasted-on rather than fully built out. Again, I am definitely nitpicking, but you leave me with little else to prove my worth :P

It's also worth mentioning that your eye for proportion does have plenty of room to grow, though it's not actually something we dig into too much. Generally speaking students' sense of proportion improves with practice, as they do more and more observational drawing - although there are techniques very briefly mentionedin the otter video demo (around minute 12), specifically with identifying negative shapes present in your reference and trying to build around them in your drawing.

The biggest issues, proportion-wise, are generally the horses' heads (which even I messed up in the head-construction demo), so it's really just something to keep working at and get used to.

As far as fur textures go, you're definitely improving a fair bit through the set, but when you try and tackle particularly long-furred animals, or things with a lot of tufts, I do think that you may want to slow down and craft those tufts a little more - maybe reduce the quantity and focus instead on having teach tuft really sell itself. I think the little isolated tests you did on your elephant page were actually coming along quite well - they established themselves more as an extension of an imaginary silhouette, whereas some of your furrier animal drawings end up feeling as though you're tacking on individual lines, rather than adding to the actual shape/footprint of the silhouette as a whole.

Anyway, all in all you're really doing a great job and are continually headed in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6. I'm quite curious to see how your current skills carry over to more hard surface, geometric objects, as that ends up being one of the big first shifts that really establish how well one understands and applies construction - though based on what I'm seeing here, I'm sure you'll do fine.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-21 17:44

And feel good you should! You've done a pretty great job overall, and frankly I'm kind of impressed with your overall growth. I know I haven't seen your work that often, since it's been a few months since your last submission, but based on what I remember, you've improved a great deal. Your overall grasp of 3D space and form seems a lot more confident and flexible, which suggests that you're really starting to understand the underlying principles. This is giving you the capacity to take those looser, flatter gestural studies and then apply form to them to really bring them to life.

I'm especially pleased with how comfortable you seem to be with building up those additional masses to suggest the presence of underlying muscle. When you build up those masses, they very clearly sit on top of the existing construction in three dimensions, rather than just as flat shapes being pasted onto the page. It gives a strong sense of bulk being developed, which is exactly the effect we want to see. I think the line weight plays a big role there - you're not afraid to add more weight to demonstrate how the additional forms overlap those beneath them, and while as we discussed before you'll want to work on making your line weight more subtle (more whispering to the subconscious than shouting in the viewer's face), you're still building up a spectrum and hierarchy of weight so despite being a little heavier it still feels very solid and well built.

I especially love your head constructions. For example, on the middle-bottom of this page, that horse head is fantastically carved, showing clearly distinguished faces and building a sort of planar model that reads as strongly three dimensional. We can see something very similar in this weird fucking fish thing, where it maintains the three dimensionality of planar construction while still being fluid and organic - kind of like a car. A weird fish car. You're weird, sluggy.

One of the few shortcomings I see is really just a bit of laziness. For example, looking at your birds' feet, these generally maintain the same kind of gestural sketchiness of your earlier thumbnails. The owls' feet in particular look pretty cartoonish, and were drawn all in one go, rather than constructed from simple to complex. It's small and inconsequential, and so you simply didn't put the effort to figure out how to tackle its construction. Not giving yourself the opportunity on that front isn't going to help you do better at it next time - so you should always be striving to try these things out, to mess them up, and to learn from that. Perhaps you're getting a little preoccupied with how nice your results generally turn out that you may not have wanted to "ruin" it? As you well know, that's not the way we want to look at these exercises.

Looking at your hybrids, there are a couple things I noticed:

• These drawings, especially the birdbear, were pretty small, all things considered. You handled drawing at that size fine with your other drawings, but these are definitely where it'd start ringing some alarm bells, likely due to your general lack of familiarity with this kind of a challenge. Giving yourself more room will help your brain think through the spatial problems, reducing some aspects that give you trouble and allowing you to focus on the more important stuff.

• You were visibly more timid when putting down your initial constructed masses, and as a whole, I can see a clear sort of "underdrawing" followed by you tracing over the lines you wanted to keep - a process we stay away from within the drawabox lessons. In all your others, you drew everything quite confidently, and as I mentioned before, built up a spectrum of weights and a hierarchy of linework rather than just a binary underdrawing/finaldrawing relationship. That's entirely missing here - so to put it simply, you didn't actually attempt these in the same way you drew everything else. As a result, they came out somewhat weaker.

Anyway! Overall you're doing great. You definitely do get a little bit spooked when having to tackle things that aren't coming directly from a reference image, but it's all psychological - you just need to work on approaching everything in the same way, rather than seeing things as different kinds of problems that require different solutions. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next step, which I believe would be the 250 cylinder challenge.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-21 18:39

Fantastic work. I do agree that your proportions are probably your biggest struggle, but all in all you're demonstrating an excellent use of construction, and a strong grasp of the material covered in the lessons. There are a few things that stand out that I want to mention, but by and large you're showing that you understand how the simple forms you're manipulating exist in 3D space and how they can be combined within it to create believable, complex objects. At the same time, you're showing solid observational skills, especially when it comes to identifying a lot of the more nuanced aspects of your reference image. You have an excellent eye not only for detail, but for the small textural forms that cast the shadows we perceive as detail along the surface of an object.

Most of all, I'm really pleased to see the overall improvement between those early sketches at the end of the album and the more recent ones.

So the issues I wanted to address are as follows:

• Obviously you're aware of the proportional concerns, so I won't get into that. Beyond continuing to observe your references more carefully and identify negative shapes (something I discuss in this video, around 10:50)

• I noticed that you have a tendency to make the torso sausage quite straight, and then add an additional mass to help convey the sag of the belly. In the lesson notes, specifically in this section, I talk about constructing that sausage with a slight sag to capture the belly's behaviour by default, then build up muscle along the back with additional forms as needed.

• In a lot of these additional forms, you tend to draw them more like they're flat shapes that are being added to the drawing, and then try to make them three dimensional by adding contour lines. Instead, I want you to think about how those forms exist in three dimensions right off the bat. Consider how those lumps would conform around the structure beneath them, and think about how they would maintain their own volume (instead of just flattening out). This is very much a practical use of the organic intersections. I demonstrate and discuss this in this section of the notes.

• Keep an eye on your use of the sausage method to construct legs. Often you do it just fine, but there are instances where I'm seeing sausages that are more like stretched ellipses, or where you've neglected to reinforce the joint between sausages with a contour curve. Always refer back to these notes. Additionally, even when you feel that a given leg is very stiff and straight, try and sneak in a little bit of a curve to it to create a rhythm going back and forth. This will help give your animal a sense of being a little more alive. I demonstrate this in this donkey demo.

• When drawing particularly furry animals - like bears - I noticed you putting down fairly skinny sausages for their limbs, and then drawing their fur a ways out. Instead, I want you to draw the original sausages as being the full width of that limb. This will help avoid a situation where we have components that have a "floating", less defined relationship to one another.

Oh, and one additional tip about spot/stripe patterns on animals - remember that it's still just fur. Fur is the actual texture, the patterning is more of a local colour. Usually we don't bother to capture the local colour of a texture, but in this case we can leverage those patterns as giving us somewhere to capture the furry transition from one colour to the other. As such, you wouldn't want to draw these with solid, clean edges to all the stripes or dots. Instead you'd want to leverage those areas to show the nature of the fur itself.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You've done a great job, and while you've got areas to improve on, you're more than ready to move onwards. Looks like your next step is the 250 cylinder challenge (a prerequisite to lesson 6), so feel free to move onto that.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-24 21:08

You definitely started out pretty strong, and maintained a level of quality throughout. You're fairly flexible and confident in your combination of shapes, and clearly have well developed observational skills that you lean on quite heavily throughout the set.

Often times when students have observational skills that are especially strong (usually developed from having drawn prior to working through drawabox), it's not uncommon to find those students drawing in a much looser fashion that can frequently fall a little flatter than they might intend. This happens especially often with more complex subject matter, like the animals we explore here. Focusing overmuch on the observational skills they developed previously can often cause them to slip up on the front of actual construction - they end up relying more on flat shapes, looser gesture lines and thinking in a manner that is more about a loose collection on the lines as an image starts to take shape. That is, as opposed to building up with firm, solid, tangible forms.

Now you aren't quite falling into that category. You are definitely leaning on those observational skills pretty hard, but you're still bringing a great deal of what you've learned through drawabox to the table, and so you're somewhere in the middle. What's important to point out however is that your constructions do tend to be a little looser, and you frequently start out with more complex forms than you should. Construction is after all, all about building up simple forms and adding more in successive passes, focusing on the idea that these masses are real and physically present in the 3D world in which we're working. That means we can't hop back and forth between treating them as being three dimensional and two dimensional - we have to respect the fact that they exist, and if we want to, say, alter their silhouettes, we have to physically cut into them in a manner that clearly defines how both the piece that is cut away and the piece that remains exist in 3D space.

An example of this is the drawing on the left side of this page, with the full cat. Notice how you have an earlier line defining the curvature of its back? This appears to be from the sausage constructed when joining the ribcage mass and the pelvis. You ended up redefining the curvature of that back with another line that was placed on top, effectively telling us to ignore the line underneath.

Construction doesn't work that way - once a mark has been put down, we have to work around it. If you remember back in lesson 2, we talk about drawing as though we are telling a lie to the viewer, convincing them of an illusion that is not real. Every mark we put down is an assertion about the thing we're drawing, just as we make assertions when lying to someone. Similarly, when we make multiple assertions that contradict one another, the audience takes notice. One or two minor contradictions may be forgiven, but they gradually accumulate and eventually we hit a point where the viewer has lost their suspension of disbelief.

For this reason, once we assert some quality of our drawing, we need to either adhere to it, or modify it in such a way that we don't simply tell the viewer, "oh ignore this line, that's not there."

Another element your drawings tend to be lacking is the defining of the actual intersections and connections between forms. For example, in this drawing the connection between the tail and the backside is left quite flat, because we're just given flat shapes interacting with one another. Adding a contour curve to properly define where the tail intersects with the torso would give considerable reinforcement to the illusion that these are both three dimensional forms.

Your drawings are generally really well done when working for reference, but the looseness with which you apply the actual principles of construction caused you to have much weaker results when asked to stray from those references, or combine several together to create something new. Specifically, your hybrids definitely suffered because there was less to latch onto as far as observation goes, and the underlying construction wasn't strong enough to support it.

Your construction actually did improve a fair bit towards the end (as you worked through the demos - you demonstrated this improvement in that fantastic toad). Still, once you hit the hybrids, it was far enough out of your wheelhouse that you reverted to past habits, and tried to sketch loosely.

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do the following.

• Reread the first page of the lesson - look carefully at the diagrams there, specifically at how I've drawn them. Each form is drawn carefully and fully. There's no loose sketching, everything is drawn to be precise and clear. Also, pay attention to the section on additional masses - notice how the forms themselves are solid and maintain a sense of volume? They wrap around the forms beneath them, they don't just get pasted on like flat shapes with a few contour lines added after the fact. The actual silhouettes of the forms convey how they are three dimensional as well.

• Refamiliarize yourself with the sausage method for drawing legs. This applies to limbs of all sorts, as it allows us to maintain the confidence and gesture of our forms while also keeping them solid.

Then, a few extra pages:

• 3 extra pages of animal studies

• 3 extra pages of hybrids

Your drawings are lovely, but we need to make sure that you're focusing on the specific lessons being taught here, not just on having something pretty at the end.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-02 15:37

Overall your use of construction is pretty solid, though there are a few issues here and there that are impeding you along the way. There is however a great deal of improvement over the course of the whole set, which is great to see.

One of the things that stands out to me early on is an issue with proportions - specifically the heads of your animals. That first wolf and the donkey both end up feeling quite juvenile due to having heads much larger than they ought to be. This is something you improve upon however, which is good to see.

When it comes to head construction, you're definitely doing a lot of things right, but there are a number of reasons some of your heads are considerably weaker than others. For example, if we look at this one, it's quite well done. You're mindful of how the snout connects to the cranial sphere (curving along its surface), and you've drawn the eye socket with decisively straight lines that cleanly carve that sphere into a more planar form. The cranial sphere itself is a little bit on the big side, so I would lean towards making those smaller than your instincts may desire, but overall this is well done. You've even been mindful of how the connection between the ears and the sphere exists in 3D space, keeping them from appearing flat.

On the page after it however, we don't see those strengths quite as clearly. You're still mindful of the muzzle as a structure and how it connects to the sphere, though your eye sockets are considerably more vague and curved, and the curvature of the ears as they connect to the sphere is inverted. Those edges should curve into the ears when seen at this angle, rather than bulging outwards.

One major factor with that particular drawing is that it's a lot more cramped. You're trying to solve the same spatial problems, but you're giving your brain a lot less room in which to do it. I also noticed that in general, you tend not to draw through many of your ellipses (as you're meant to for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons). When you do draw through them, you often still try to do so with a fairly careful stroke, resulting in a lot more stiffness rather than a confident, even shape.

There are some places where your ellipses are better - like the elephant's ribcage and pelvis - although the ribcage itself is proportionally incorrect. Ribcages are generally going to be longer than they are tall, as shown here.

Another concern I have is that you're not applying the sausage method for constructing legs as consistently as you ought to, and when you do, you're not always minding the full process. For example, you frequently leave out the single contour curve we place at the joint between two intersecting sausages to help reinforce the illusion of form there. You also tend to draw these legs very stiffly, rather than taking advantage of the sausages' capacity to convey rhythm and gesture. Even when a limb is seemingly rigid in a reference image, you should try to seek out that subtle flow so and exaggerate it a little in your drawing so as to ensure your animal doesn't look stiff and lifeless.

When adding the additional masses we use to convey some of the bumps and bulges that the basic structure doesn't capture, it's important to remember that these aren't just flat shapes that we're pasting onto the constructions, only to add a few contour lines as an after thought to try and make something flat feel three dimensional. Instead, you need to regard these things as solid, three dimensional volumes - like a lump of putty - that you're placing onto the construction. It's going to have its own volume already, which is going to govern how it tries to wrap around the forms beneath it. As you can see in the lesson notes on this topic, where yours (like on this wolf's back) still feels rather flat, the masses in that diagram even if removed from the rest of the construction still feel three dimensional on their own. Even without the contour lines, the way the silhouette is crafted would still convey this.

This brings me to my last point - we are not drawing a series of flat shapes, or a collection of lines on the page. Constructional drawing is all about treating the process of drawing as though you are physically building something in a three dimensional space. Every individual component you add is itself solid and three dimensional, and you cannot jump between treating them as flat and as 3D as you please. You always have to respect that illusion of solid form, and you have to believe in it - otherwise you will contradict it, and you will erode the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

When you make moves to start adding detail to a drawing, it becomes very easy to forget about the solid structure underneath and only pay attention to how the lines you're adding make the flat drawing feel. These detail additions and decisions can very easily undermine the underlying structure, by cutting across a form you've drawn (for example the back leg of this wolf - we can see where the thigh used to extend into space, before you cut into it as though it was a two dimensional shape), or by adding hatching that unintentionally flattens areas you mean to feel solid. When adding detail, you need to always focus heavily on how each mark you're putting down jibes with the rest of the construction. They need to constantly reinforce each other, rather than undercut the illusions you worked hard to create previously.

So. Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do three more animal drawings. For these, I want you to do each drawing on its own page (give yourself as much room as you need), and focus ONLY on construction. Take that construction as far as it will take you, and don't worry about detail or texture at all. Once that's done for all three drawings, take pictures of them. Then go back in with each drawing and add as much detail as you like.

Submit the photos of the constructions, as well as those of the final drawing - so I expect to see six individual images.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-04 16:27

Starting out with your organic intersections, what stands out most to me is the modification of the exercise. I can certainly understand why one might want to rely less on contour lines, especially as many students have a tendency to overuse them (focusing on quantity over quality and not putting the time into drawing each one correctly). Eliminating them altogether isn't going to teach you anything about how to use them properly, however.

There are two primary issues here:

• Some of your sausages have a break in flow across their tops, I'm guessing where you start and end your stroke. This added complexity (a break in the flow) undermines the illusion of this potentially being a three dimensional form, and flattens the image out. We always want to aim for as simple a base form as possible in order to push the illusion that these things are 3D.

• One of the major benefits of using contour lines in this exercise is that it tells us how a surface flows through space - and so when another sausage form is piled on top of it, we have a better grasp of how it should wrap around the lower form's surface. In this case, yours do not wrap around each other in a believable manner, which further breaks the illusion.

Next time, follow the exercise as the instructions state, and you'll be in a better position to learn from the process.

Moving onto the animal constructions, honestly the proportions were pretty hilarious (most notably the kingfisher, which already looks funny to begin with). Because the construction of your birds was executed quite well, these feel more like you've faithfully captured some slightly wackier animals. You also leverage your texture/detail fairly well, though the little feather patterns along the kingfisher's wing doesn't really sell as well as those along the raven's.

For your tiger heads, this is better illustrated by drawing directly over your page. Mainly I think you may need to observe your reference more carefully, specifically focusing on finding the various planes of the structure. These aren't actually badly done by any stretch, and I quite like the way you've handled the mouth being open on the left, but there are definitely still issues - like the eye sockets being drawn rather small and timidly, and the eyeballs not being large enough either.

Now when it comes to the rest of your constructions, there are two main problems (aside from the proportions):

• When utilizing the sausage method, you're not using sausages. You're pretty regularly using stretched balls/ellipses as demonstrated on the bottom left of these notes. A sausage is two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. The rounded portion of the form is limited to the very ends, and the rest maintains the same width throughout its length. Using stretched ellipses as you have tends to force us to keep them very stiff. Additionally, I'm noticing that you tend not to follow through the step of reinforcing the joint between those sausage forms with a single contour curve. This is important as it defines the relationship between the sausage forms in 3D space, and strengthens the overall illusion.

• When adding additional masses, you fairly frequently ignore the fact that these need to be individual, solid masses - as though you're taking a clump of solid putty with its own volume in your hand and slapping it onto an existing construction - and instead you treat it as though you're adding arbitrary shapes to a flat drawing. This, as one might expect, just emphasizes the fact that it is a drawing, and breaks the illusion. As shown here, each component you add to a construction needs to be itself a solid, three dimensional form on its own. This applies as well to your tendency to wrap your leg structure in a sort of enveloping shape to bridge the gaps between your sausage/ball forms. This is only acceptable when the gap is actually causing skin to stretch over otherwise empty space, but if there is any muscle forms underneath, you need to be padding actual organic forms. When adding those organic forms, you need to be aware of their own volumes and how they wrap around the forms they're being piled onto. Again, look at the notes I linked, specifically how in the diagram the mass wraps around the underlying forms in such a way that it gives the impression of thickness and volume.

All in all, I think that perhaps in an attempt at getting this done as quickly as possible (I can see that you've had a tendency to submit right on the 14 day mark following your previous submission), you've skimped on reading and absorbing the notes. Your actual drawings aren't too rushed, which itself is good to see, but you need to slow down and read - and reread, as needed - the content.

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

• 2 pages of organic intersections

• 5 pages of animal drawings, construction only, no detail. Try not to cram so many drawings into one page, and take full advantage of the space you've got so your brain has as much room as it needs to think through all the spatial problems involved.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-05 16:05

So the first thing that comes off a bit strange to me is that you've drawn your organic intersections with no contour lines whatsoever (despite them being part of the instructions for this exercise). Stranger still, is the fact that while students generally don't neglect that part of the exercise, you're the second person in two days to submit their lesson 5 homework with organic intersections entirely lacking in contour lines. Might just be a coincidence, but if there's something unclear in the instructions then let me know.

The thing about the contour lines is that they help us better grasp how the surface of a form deforms through space, which is particularly helpful when wrapping another form around it. It effectively tells us how to wrap the silhouette of our next form over the underlying one - something you do with varying degrees of success. You're not doing too badly with this, but the interactions between forms still does have room for improvement, where the contour lines may have helped.

Moving onto your animal constructions, your submission is a mixture of some definite strengths, and a few areas of weakness. To start with, you're very, very focused on building things up from their most basic components and adding complexity on successive phases, which is great to see, and is at the heart of construction as a whole. There are also many places where you demonstrate a strong grasp of how the forms you're working with relate to one another in 3D space. For example, I really like the construction of this beagle. You've applied sausage forms quite well, have defined the strong contour lines at the joints/intersections between forms the define their relationships clearly and reinforce the illusion that they're all three dimensional. You've also paid special attention to elements students sometimes struggle with - like how the muzzle intersects with the cranial sphere's curved surface.

Now there are a couple issues in this drawing - for example, your ribcage is much too short. As shown here, it should occupy a full half of the torso. Think of your own ribcage, and how it's longer than it is wide or deep, and how it fills out your torso. These relationships are the same in most, if not all animals. This seems to be an issue in a lot of your animal constructions.

The other issue isn't about construction at all, and is a fairly minor point. As shown here (alongside a few extra notes in red), adding a little extra line weight and some cast shadows behind your forms after you're finished your construction can really help to organize and clarify your drawing as a whole. It's not about replacing your linework with a heavier clean-up pass, just about adding line weight to sections of existing lines to clarify how one form overlaps another. This kind of clarification can help the drawing feel less like a collection of lines and flat shapes in a manner similar to how the intersections do - they define how different forms relate to one another and bring things more into three dimensions with a sense of depth.

In a lot of your other drawings, like the horses, the elephant, and so on, the actual proportions of your simple forms seem to be a little exaggerated, which makes them feel more cartoony. I also see a tendency to draw the torso as a much more rigid, straighter form, rather than taking the advice explained here (always building a sausage that sags down to capture the belly). You seem to draw the belly sag as an additional mass. You may find that the illusion we're going after with the additional forms tends to rely a lot on conveying the illusion of gravity (how a mass will wrap around the mass below it, due to how it's being pushed down). Achieving the same kind of effect without that push of gravity (like building a mass along the underside of an animal's torso, working against gravity) can yield less favourable results. So for this reason, among others, I'll start out with the sag, and then build up the additional muscles along the back.

Another thing I'm noticing is that after a point in your submitted work, you stopped drawing through your ellipses. This is something you should be doing consistently throughout all of your drawabox homework.

Jumping forward to the shark, I noticed that you placed a very wide, almost circular contour ellipse right at the head of the shark. Remember that the contour ellipses are effectively cross-sectional slices of the form, and that their degree tells us how that slice is oriented relative to the viewer. Giving us a very wide degree on a contour ellipse tells us that the slice is oriented to face the viewer. The shark's head, however, seems to be turning away from us. This leads to a contradiction that breaks the illusion. That contour ellipse should probably be narrower than the ones preceding it, rather than wider.

As a whole, I see some examples of strong construction, but many places where you haven't quite followed the notes/instructions on the first page of the lesson, and some significant issues with observation and proportion that would benefit from taking more time to really study your reference and note the size differences between the major forms you put down. One thing that can definitely help is looking for 'negative shapes' as explained in the otter demo video (at around 10:50).

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

• Reread the first page of the lesson

• One drawing following along with the donkey demo.

• 4 more pages of animal drawings.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-10 16:58

You've definitely shown a great deal of improvement over this set. You started out with some key strengths, but some definite weaknesses that you address over the course of your work. There are still a few things I want to talk about however that should help as you continue to apply and absorb the material from the lessons.

Starting with your organic intersections at the beginning, these are very well done. They're demonstrating a strong grasp of how the forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how they're forced to manipulate their positions and orientations in a believable manner in order to resolve the interacting volumes. I especially like the set to the right of the first page, where your forms end up being pushed upwards in a sort of standing position, due to each others' weight.

Moving onto some of your earlier constructions, proportion is definitely something to keep an eye on here. I'm noticing that the wolf's head was drawn a little small. You're generally doing a good job of adding the additional masses along the back such that they wrap convincingly around the main torso sausage, but it's worth pointing out that the one along the underbelly doesn't feel as natural. There's actually a good reason for this.

You'll notice that on the first page of this lesson, I explain that I add a sag into the torso sausage itself, rather than sagging the belly separately. This is because the additional masses feel believable in how we depict their interaction with gravity and the forms around them. For the underbelly, gravity no longer can be applied as effectively, since it's hanging upside down. Therefore building it in as part of the underlying form to begin with allows us to sidestep this issue, and instead focus those additional forms where they can be drawn more successfully.

Through much of this lesson's work, I do notice case where you put your marks down a little timidly. It's not always the case, but in drawings like this horse head and this tiger head you're clearly showing hesitation when you put your marks down. In the tiger, we can see gaps along the ears, tufts of fur and eye sockets. In the horse, we can similarly see gaps throughout the drawing. Especially in the horse head, you're relying more on purely observational drawing techniques, rather than constructing solid, confident and complete forms and building them up bit by bit. There's definitely a sketchier approach here.

Now, the horse head still does look very good, but that isn't really what we're focusing on here - we're not here to draw things that look nice at the end, but rather to employ each drawing as an exercise in developing our understanding of 3D space and of constructional drawing techniques.

That brings us to a related point. While I see it in other areas as well, the back leg closer to us of this wolf is the best example. Take a look at its calf area. Here we can see that you've put down a sausage quite well, but afterwards you've cut back into that shape to taper it towards the lower joint. This kind of manipulation of your forms is something you've done entirely within two dimensions - you've looked at the form as it exists as a shape on the page, and then cut that shape. This serves to flatten out the drawing and break the illusion that what you're drawing is actually 3D.

Generally speaking, I prefer students to work additively as much as possible. That is, starting out with skinnier forms and then building up masses rather than starting out big and attempting to cut back into them. Subtractive construction (cutting back in) is a valid approach, but it's something that students tend to do as you've done here, which is incorrect.

Working additively helps develop that belief that you're creating strong, solid, three dimensional forms in a 3D world and that these forms have to be respected as we wrap other forms on top of them. It's this belief in the lie that we're telling the viewer that makes the difference - someone who believes in it completely will find themselves unable to perceive the flat shapes they've put down as they exist on the page. They'll only see and understand the solid 3D forms, and as such, will only be able to cut into them in a way that further reinforces that illusion. So for the time being, focus on working additively wherever possible.

Now, your last few drawings (from the 7th onwards) do convey a much stronger grasp of constructional drawing than the previous ones. Your fish also convey a very well developing understanding of 3D space as a whole. You're clearly moving in the right direction, and have learned a lot from this process. Just don't forget about the idea of these lessons being exercises, and that while we may be more inclined to take steps that will yield a prettier drawing at the end, that will diminish the effectiveness of the exercise itself.

Oh, and don't forget to draw through your ellipses. I'm noticing a lot of places where you don't. You should be drawing through each and every one you draw for my lessons without exception.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-20 04:45

It seems you've forgotten that students may only submit once every 14 days. You'll have to hold onto your lesson 5 work and submit it no earlier than September 1st.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-26 18:42

So just to keep things consistent, I'll start out by quoting the partial review I gave to your deleted submission:

• Over the set, I definitely see meaningful progress, especially with the dogs and wolves towards the end.

• The most critical thing to keep in mind when constructing things is that you need to define how your forms actually intersect in 3D space. If you look at the dog on the bottom of this page, it's generally constructed very well along its back, but the extension of its belly is actually just a flat shape with no three dimensional relationship to the main torso forms. Conversely, along the back we can start to see how these forms are wrapping around the underlying form (not super well done, but definitely in the right direction). You can read about how to wrap the forms around one another here. Also, the underbelly is particularly tricky because we can no longer take advantage of how gravity would cause forms to wrap around those beneath them (since here our form is hanging). As such, I usually try and avoid building the belly with an additional form, and instead build it into the original sag of the torso sausage, as shown here.

Overall you're totally headed in the right direction, but you're drawing a little small (making it harder for your brain to sort through the spatial problems), and you're often a bit vague in terms of the shapes and forms you're drawing, or even just in following the instructions to the letter. I'd recommend reviewing the first page of notes and trying to be more mindful of each and every mark you put down. When we get overwhelmed and stressed over a topic it's easy to lose track of things and draw more from instinct, but that is when we need to take a step back and think about every mark we put down most of all.

Instead of more text, I've decided to do the rest of this critique as redline notes directly on top of your work: https://i.imgur.com/bBXpdRR.png

Here are some links to notes relevant to the points I raised (some are repeats from the previous critique):

• Major Masses (you sometimes drew the ribcage too small

• Torso as a sausage form (you sometimes forget to sag the torso sausage downwards)

• Additional masses - it's important that when you add any form to your construction, you think about how that form is going to wrap around those that already exist, and how they all interact with gravity (like the organic intersections exercise). These relationships need to be clearly defined in your drawing. If you don't think about it, you will just end up piling shapes on top of shapes, making those areas look flat.

• The sausage method. Apply this more directly, and don't half-ass it. Defining the intersections between sausages with a single contour curve is going to be infinitely more effective than adding a dozen contour lines along the length of the sausages.

• Fur - fur is not a bunch of scribbly lines, it should be drawn as individual, carefully designed tufts. Generally drawing less of this rather than more is going to be more effective, so don't respond to frustration or uncertainty by drawing more. Take a step back and assess the situation.

• More on fur.

I'd like you to do 4 more animal drawings, taking everything I've said here into consideration. Do not get into any kind of detail or texture - focus only on construction, and draw larger. I'm noticing that you have a tendency not to use all the space that is available to you, which results in a lot of areas of that construction being crammed into a smaller space, where your brain is not able to think through the spatial problems. You may want to shift to doing one drawing per page.

Uncomfortable

2019-09-04 18:17

There's definitely a lot of strengths here, although I can see a few issues I would definitely like to address. The issues I'm seeing all come down to what you're focusing on as the goal of your work with this lesson. From what I can see, you have a tendency at times - not all the time, but definitely frequently enough - to focus overmuch on the end result and not enough on the actual process used to get there. You make choices and use approaches that focus on creating a prettier drawing at the end, rather than focusing on each of these drawings as being an exercise in learning how to apply construction to better understand how these complex objects are made up of a series of simple forms that relate to one another in a particular fashion.

Now, I'll give credit where it is due - you're not all the way on that end of the spectrum, and in fact you've got a great deal of construction here where you're drawing through a lot of your forms, and working towards applying what is covered in the lessons. As you move further along however, and as your overall confidence with this material improves, you tend to get somewhat sloppy. You're definitely showing improvement over the set, but it's being counteracted by a quickened pace and a need to get things done quicker than you are currently capable.

So, let's look at some specific issues:

• From the beginning, you don't seem to use the sausage method when constructing your legs. Experimenting with different techniques and approaches is great, but you should still be familiarizing yourself with the techniques provided in the instructions first, so you understand what you should be aiming for. The sausage technique is extremely effective in its ability to convey both gesture alongside the solidity of form.

• From the looks of it, you jump ahead into texture and detail way too quickly, and show the same signs as other students who have their minds looking ahead to all the detail they're going to add when they should be focusing on the construction they're working out at that moment.

• As you push through the set, I can see you relying more on more on a separation between construction and your "final" drawing, where the underlying construction has been drawn more faintly, with you coming back afterwards to draw your detailed version on top of it in a darker hand. There are a number of reasons why I discourage students from doing this as they work through these lessons, the biggest of which is that it causes students to focus more on tracing over the lines of the drawing as it exists on the page - as collection of 2D lines - without focusing on how the actual edges they're drawing exist in three dimensions.

• On this horse you've stopped drawing through your forms altogether, instead shifting back to drawing more from observation certain parts (like the legs) from observation. Remember that the end result is irrelevant - the focus is on how you apply constructional techniques. I have had students who produced beautiful drawings for this lesson, but who did so largely using pure observation. They were asked to redo the lesson.

• From the looks of your heads, I think you have a habit of drawing the cranial ball too large. Making it somewhat smaller should help you keep the face from getting smushed against it.

Now, all that said, you are demonstrating a well developing grasp of 3D space, and where you've cut corners you have still held things together reasonably well because of that underlying understanding. While this is not the place nor time to demonstrate that to me, it is commendable none the less.

There are just two other things I wanted to touch upon:

• You need to work on how you think about and draw the forms you add to your construction in order to build out additional masses. Right now while I can see signs that you're moving in the right direction, you're still not conveying a strong enough impression of how one form wraps around the form underneath it, as explained in these notes.

• Your texture and detail can definitely get rather erratic and scribbly. You have some cases where you do much better, but drawings like this show a much more haphazard approach to conveying fur. I can see that you're moving towards thinking in terms of clumps of fur, but you're not putting a any time into designing the individual tufts, and as such they just look spiky. You did a great job on the monkey on the right, though again the fur of the one on the left is very haphazard. In general, you're just not putting enough time into observing your reference carefully and thinking through each individual stroke you put down. Don't let your arm or subconscious automate the process - draw with clear intent for every stroke.

As you've cut corners here, I'm going to ask you to do 5 more animal drawings, this time with no detail or texture whatsoever, instead focusing on taking the construction as far as you possibly can.

Uncomfortable

2019-09-08 18:06

I'm glad you've been getting such longevity out of our pens! We definitely found that the pain wears out as well - it's too bad, though fortunate that it's our only issue.

So, moving onto your work, you've clearly invested a great deal of time and effort into these - not only in drawing, but also in following the instructions and reading through them thoroughly. As such, there's definitely a lot of improvement over the set, along with a few things that still need work. Overall however, you are demonstrating a well developing grasp of constructional drawing and how it can be applied to animals.

Starting with your organic intersections, these are very well done. You're doing a great job of wrapping those forms around one another, and conveying a sense that they exist in three dimensions, as a growing pile rather than just a bunch of flat shapes pasted one over the other on a page.

The first thing that jumps out at me is a definite struggle with proportions. This is actually pretty normal, and it's the sort of thing that one improves on with time, as you have done here. Still, one area where it does continue to throw you off is with your head constructions. To start with, you have a tendency of drawing your initial cranial masses too large (or as the case may be, the forms that follow too small in relation to it). This results in the muzzle feeling awkwardly flat against it, especially in your attempts to follow along with the tiger demo.

You also tend to draw your eye sockets much too small, and the edges you use to define those eye sockets feel more as lines along the flat page, rather than marks resting along the surface of the cranial ball. Remember that everything we're drawing exists in 3D space, and we need to constantly push ourselves to hold onto a belief in that lie in order to convince others of it. Think of it as though you're cutting along that sphere with a scalpel, rather than drawing on a page with a pen. The same thing applies when wrapping the eyelids around the eyeballs - you're getting some success here, but it varies.

Earlier on in the set, I can see you trying to make use of the sausage method, specifically when following along with the wolf demo, though your use of it does fall away as you move through the set. When you do attempt to apply it, I can see a few issues:

On this page:

• Here you're not properly overlapping the ends of the sausages - they're kind of misaligned, and you've "enveloped" them in a flat shape to cover the gap. Don't use flat shapes - instead, if you want to add mass where there isn't any, you should be doing so by adding additional forms to your construction. You also didn't draw a contour line here to clearly define how those two forms intersect and relate to one another, leaving this more as two flat shapes rather than solid 3D forms.

• Here you've reinforced that intersection, but if you look closely the actual "ends" of the sausages aren't well defined at all. You need to put more care into each and every mark or shape you put down on the page, making sure you're clearly aware of what you're trying to achieve with it.

While I'm not against students straying from the sausage method when constructing their legs, I do want to see them demonstrate a clear understanding of how to apply it and its particular advantages first. One of the great things about the sausage method is that it pushes the importance of keeping our base constructional components simple, which keeps our forms solid. One example of this is how the sausages maintain a consistent width through their lengths, not tapering, pinching or swelling through their midsections. If you look at this section of this page you'll see that this back leg tapers through its midsection, which undermines the illusion that it is a solid form. The foreleg is actually very well done, but there's an inconsistency in your approach that makes your legs hit-and-miss, so I think you should continue to apply the sausage method more stringently to all of your constructions without deviating until you understand it better.

Another issue I wanted to touch upon was that of adding additional forms to build out muscle masses and other volumes in your construction. Early on you do a good job of thinking about how those forms are going to wrap around the forms beneath them (like on this page, at the neck/shoulder and the rump. Later on however, you stop thinking about how the forms are actually fitting together, and instead just dropping basic round shapes onto your construction, as you do here.

Even towards the beginning however, your 'additional masses' still feel fairly flat, and fail to maintain their own volumes. If you look at the notes on this subject from the lesson, you'll see how in the demonstration, we're actually imbuing those masses with clear volume, both using contour lines and through how their silhouettes are shaped. Again, it comes back to the importance of understanding how these things we draw are all solid, three dimensional forms. Right now you're still, at least to a point, thinking in terms of putting marks on a page to fool someone else into thinking it's three dimensional. That you're using tricks. Tricks only get us so far, and as explained back in lesson 2, we only really succeed once we fully believe in the lie ourselves. You are almost there, and you've got a lot of excellent constructions here that are moving further towards that end, but it's these little things that give it away.

One last point that I want to make does relate to this - and it's the fact that when constructing your animals' torsos, you generally have the sausage flow straight across, rather than incorporating the belly sag as explained here. Unfortunately, incorporating the belly sag as an additional mass after the fact doesn't work quite as well - the illusion of those masses works best when we can work with gravity, thinking about how those forms are going to rest on top of those beneath them. With the underbelly, we don't have the benefit of gravity, and end up having to work against it, which weakens the illusion as a whole. As such, it's better to incorporate those sections into the original form, at least to an extent.

All in all, I think you're making excellent progress, and despite the issues I pointed out, I really like this deer. The chameleon was also very well done, and your hybrid actually demonstrates an overall solid understanding of 3D form and space. Where you're falling behind however is I think in a tendency to read through the notes thoroughly, apply them initially, and then start straying more loosely from them, finding your own way along rather than applying the techniques and methodologies that have been described here to the letter.

You're absolutely ready to move onto the next lesson, but have a lot more room to grow as far as organic construction goes, so be sure to continue practicing this on your own. I think the lesson 6 will help you continue to develop your grasp of 3D space and that whole illusion we're creating as well, but before that you'll have to complete the 250 cylinder challenge. So that's your next stop.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work.

Uncomfortable

2019-09-17 19:12

Focusing on details (difficult as they may be) is an common distraction that keeps one from paying due attention to the underlying structure and construction of what they are drawing. The awareness that you're going to get into detail and texture often causes us to look ahead to it instead of focusing on what we're doing at this very moment (ie: constructing our objects from simple forms).

As far as distractions go, your work has many. You're preoccupied with detail, you're frequently getting caught up in adding elements to entertain yourself (speech bubbles, drawing scenes instead of individual animals, etc). While drawing for fun is an important part of one's development, it should not be fixed with the concrete exercises that are assigned here. That's one of the major reasons why it's encouraged as something separate - to ensure that while you are working on drawabox material that you're giving it your full focus and not allowing your mind to drift. Every drawing should be the result of you focusing fully on applying the instructions, rereading them as needed in order to make sure that you're approaching them correctly.

Starting with your organic intersections, these are alright, but there are a few key issues. Firstly, towards the left side you have a few forms that get somewhat "wiggly" through their midsection. This makes the form itself more complex than it ought to be, breaking the basic principles of the organic forms with contour lines. When drawing your sausage forms for this exercise, they should be flexible enough to wrap around the forms beneath them, but not so limp that they convey no sense of their own weight. Think of a filled waterballoon, rather than a balloon only half-filled with air.

Secondly, you do on occasion leave gaps between your forms which further undermines the illusion that they're solid and have weight to them. With each form you add, you need to think about how it rests firmly on the form(s) beneath it, how it presses down upon them.

When you last submitted this exercise as part of lesson 2, there was room for improvement, but it was considerably better. All the evidence points to this being because you were distracted, unfocused, and likely rushing this time around.

Moving onto your animal constructions, you do a pretty good job when following along with some of the demonstrations (like the wolf on the top left of this page), but I can see a number of places where you altogether skip steps and ignore instructions. For example, with the kangaroo you entirely skipped the step of drawing the torso sausage, and didn't apply the sausage method at all to its limbs. I can see in a number of places throughout the submission that you apply techniques partially, but cutting a lot of corners. Additionally, looking at this lion, it looks like you were more interested in drawing all the tufts of fur of the mane than constructing the head out of actual forms using the techniques covered in the tiger head demo.

Ultimately, you haven't really put in your best into this submission. Looking back on your work for lesson 4, where you demonstrated a solid grasp of form and space, this is not a representation of what you can do, and so critiquing it any further wouldn't make any sense. I also can't help but notice that you submitted as soon as the 2 weeks between submissions was up, which along with everything else, suggests that you were inclined to rush.

I'd like you to try the full lesson again. Take your time, read through the instructions and notes carefully and don't be afraid to read through them again whenever you need to. Apply the techniques and processes outlined in the demonstrations completely, don't cut corners and skip steps. If I don't see what you are fully capable of, then my critiques are a waste of both mine time and yours.

Uncomfortable

2019-09-24 20:45

This is definitely an improvement. You're showing a much greater mindfulness towards the particular concepts we're exploring here. I'm especially pleased with how well you've followed the donkey demo. There are a couple things I want to point out however:

• Since your drawings tend to get very cluttered with a lot of different forms (which is by no means a mistake or a problem - in fact, it's fantastic), coming back over top of it to add additional line weight in key areas to help clarify how different forms overlap would be a good use of your time. I actually believe I mentioned this in my previous critique as well.

• Your whale construction definitely is the weakest of the bunch - comparing it to the dinosaur, where everything is very clearly defined in relation to its neighbouring forms, most of the whale ends up feeling vague and ill-defined. This is understandable, since they're pretty far off from the kinds of animals we tackle throughout the lesson and demonstrations.

• I'm very pleased to see that you're defining the intersections between many of your forms - I did notice however that in your gorilla, many of those contour curves at the joints ended up being somewhat shallow, rather than properly capturing how it would hook back around and wrap around the other side. For example, we can see this here. These contour lines carry a lot of weight, and can make your forms feel solid and three dimensional, but can equally make them appear flat if they're not used correctly.

Anyway! I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-02 17:59

To start with, this you're demonstrating a lot more patience and focus here than you did previously, so that's a big step in the right direction. You're also demonstrating a much better grasp of 3D space overall, but are still skipping steps when it comes to defining the relationships between forms in space.

I'm going to focus my critique on two main drawings, as I've done some redline notes for both.

First is the lorikeet. You were definitely starting to think of it more in terms of how to build it out from individual components, though your drawing did still maintain a somewhat flatter appearance especially towards the head. Here are my notes on this one. One of the key things that is missing is what's pointed out at point #4 - you're not properly wrapping your forms around one another, so they can easily be taken for flat shapes pasted one on top of the other. It's important to always think about how the forms interconnect - that's the greatest strength of contour lines as a whole, in placing one at a joint between two forms can define the relationship between them and thus communicate to the viewer that both exist in 3D space, rather than as shapes or lines on a page. You'll also find there other tips on how I would approach the neck in particular.

Second is your first ox. I actually felt that the head, though you clearly skipped steps in its construction, demonstrates an improving grasp of how it exists in three dimensions. It has to do with the subtleties of how the silhouette itself is shaped. That said, these kinds of small successes will continue to be hit-and-miss until you're able to pin it down to a specific process of how you think about it. In order to do that, we have to adhere to every step of the constructional method.

Here are my notes for this drawing. What stood out most was how you employed the additional forms - the one along the top of the shoulder had some effort placed towards how it wraps around the forms beneath it, but still ended up feeling quite flat. Note how you can use a contour line to convey the volume of that form (specifically how it's got thickness towards where it meets the torso). The flap coming down from the ox's throat however came out entirely flat, because there's no clear relationship in three dimensions between it and the rest of the body. While some parts of an animal are certainly going to be flatter than others (especially loose, hanging skin like this), nothing is truly paper-thin, and so you still need to define those relationships in order to make them feel plausible.

Lastly, look carefully at your reference. There's a lot of muscular structure that you're missing. Even the big shoulder muscle that I pointed out in my redline notes would have helped you a great deal when executing the bump along the back, because it'd give it something clear to wrap around and integrate with. These 3D constructions can be thought of as puzzles where all the pieces fit together.

Another thing I noticed throughout a lot of your quadrupedal animals was that you had a tendency to build the torso sausage to be quite straight, and then add the sag of its belly separately. I actually talk about this in the notes (second paragraph of that section). Adding additional masses is a lot easier when you're working with gravity - that is, conveying how those masses wrap around the forms underneath them due to how they're being pushed down by that natural force. Hanging masses are considerably more difficult however, so I find it easier to sell that illusion by building the sag into the torso sausage itself (adding a bit more of a curve to it), and then building up along its back/spine with additional masses.

Lastly, you definitely get into detail a lot, and I think that to a degree this may be distracting you from just how much more you can push construction (in terms of those muscle masses/structures you're neglecting. Remember that you should not be thinking about detail or texture at all until you've taken construction as far as it can possibly go.

So, I want you to do 4 more animal drawings with no detail/texture whatsoever for me, demonstrating your understanding of what I've outlined here. You've definitely improved a great deal since your last submission, but there are a few things I want to nail down before I send you onwards.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-03 17:15

No worries- it seems the payment's gone through before I was even able to sit down to respond to your submission, though I was planning on taking care of it anyway. I only wait when there's reason to be unsure about a student, and your track record is solid.

So starting with your question about #5 in those notes, I was referring to the shoulder muscle that was missing. Take a look at this quick doodle on top of a picture of an ox. Because you're generally drawing these animals from the side, you're largely ignoring the fact that they have masses on them that make them physically broader (like big shoulder muscles that bulge out). Remember that these animals are not flat, and that being aware of these muscle structures will help you interlock other masses together, making the whole structure more believable. For another example, look at just how broad these guys are.

Now, admittedly I always get a little concerned when a student comes back with revision work in less than 24 hours after getting a critique. This is largely because it tells me that the student didn't necessarily have the opportunity to think and ruminate over the critique they were given. Our brains don't just work through things as we draw - the time in between drawing also helps us digest what we've read. It also helps a great deal to take the critique and reread parts of the lesson to try and see where they line up.

That said, there is some improvement here, though a few issues as well. Here are some notes. Your wolf was generally well done, though its body was simple enough not to require too much in the way of additional forms. In your tiger, and in those on the other pages, you had a tendency to try and use one additional mass that extends from one end of the body to the other. This contradicts the fundamental principle of construction - that is, building things up from simple forms, and developing complexity through the addition of more simple components and through their interactions. Here you tried to accomplish too much with one form, and that ended up falling flat.

Breaking them down into smaller groups will help sell the illusion you're creating, as you'll be able to focus on how each one wraps around those muscle groups beneath it, creating a puzzle with many pieces rather than just consisting of a few.

Now, what I want you to do next will likely introduce a lot more difficulty to the problem, so you're going to have to take your time. I want you to do 6 drawings of animals where they are not seen from the side. I want you to draw them at an angle more similar to the ox references I linked earlier, where you can see both the length and breadth of their bodies. This is specifically to help you pay more attention to all of the muscle forms that are present.

I don't want you to do more than one of these in a day. This is to ensure that you take as much time as is needed with each one, as there is going to be a lot of difficulty in thinking of how those same constructional concepts work as the forms are turned towards you.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-04 20:54

Very nice work! I think overall you're done conveys a well developing grasp of how your forms can fit together and be built up to create convincing, three dimensional creatures that exist in space in a believable manner. As far as critique goes, there are a few specific things I want to pick at, but they're mostly nitpicking, or touching upon issues that aren't always present throughout your drawings, but where you may be somewhat inconsistent in how you handle them.

I figured rather than typing it all out, writing it alongside the images would be more effective, so I've done so here.

Starting with your camel:

• I noticed that you had a form that stuck out amongst the rest, seeming like an artifact that had been abandoned. In general when it comes to construction, once a form has been placed in the world, we can't erase it or ignore it - so we have to build off it even if this leads us down a path that does not entirely match our reference image. Our goal is ultimately to have a drawing that feels believable and tangible, not necessarily to match the reference perfectly. This also relates back to the idea that our drawings are very much like lies - how every mark we put down is an assertion, and the more of those marks that start to contradict each other, the more we erode the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

• I did notice that the hooves were a little sloppy, in that the way those forms existed in 3D space and how they related to one another was a bit vague. Some smaller forms, like feet/hooves won't have as much room as elsewhere to get into fully developed construction, so one thing you can do is consider how your silhouette implies the presence of different planes (front/side/top/etc). This usually means taking a form we might rough in with a curve, and carving it with more straight segments instead. This is something we delve into much deeper in lesson 6, as explained here.

I noticed that your elephant had a bit of a tendency to be very heavily outlined in a manner that flattened the drawing out somewhat. This tends to happen when we get too focused on how we're tracing over the lines themselves as they exist on the page, rather than following along the edges of the forms in 3D space. This can simplify the silhouette and eliminate important nuances that help sell the illusion. Additionally, I pointed to the particularly thick weight near the belly/back leg, saying that you should treat it more as a cast shadow. The difference is that line weight by its nature is always going to adhere to the form itself, whereas cast shadows are projected onto the forms surrounding it. This is explained further here.

For the antelope, don't forget that the shoulder muscle is generally quite bulky. If you think of the torso of these animals as a puzzle of muscles, the shoulder is one that often gets overlooked when drawn from the side, and plays an important role in how the muscles along the back integrate with the rest of the body. Where in your drawing that back muscle cut further down and didn't quite wrap around, it would have come out better if there had been greater awareness of the shoulder's presence.

A bit more nitpicking on the last antelopes - they're actually very well drawn and generally capture an excellent sense of form, for the most part:

• I didn't actually mention this one in the drawing itself, but along the standing one's back, you've got some additional muscle forms that overlap one another without actually interacting - instead of getting one piling up on top of the other, it's stamped on top of it, which somewhat undermines the sense of form here.

• For the sleeping one, that form closer to its rump that is pointed out ends up a little too flush with the underlying torso's structure along its left side. The forms have volume, as though you're placing lumps of putty on top of your construction. Even if this doesn't line up with your reference entirely, for the sake of making things believable, we need to respect how these different forms will interact in space.

• Of course, always draw through your forms (rather than allowing their edges to stop when they're overlapped by another), and don't jump too far ahead when it comes to constructing more complex forms. They always require an underlying structure to support them, and if that's missing, they will end up coming out more flat - at least for now, as you continue to get used to applying these principles. Eventually you'll be able to do more of this in your head, but I want students to go through all the steps fully as they work through these lessons.

Anyway! All in all you're doing a great job, and are more than ready to move on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next step - which it seems will be the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-04 21:40

I get a lot of homework submissions that have work that is quite similar to how you started out here. Work where the student is clearly trying to apply the lessons, but has some issues with proportions, sometimes is a little too loose or vague, but is definitely trying. And while they'll show improvement over the set, the core issues will still remain until I point them out.

In your case however, what you've done here is... pretty remarkable. You've improved immensely over the course of this set, and from the looks of the dates on each drawing, in a matter of only a couple weeks.

From the looks of it, your biggest shift happened immediately after going through the organic intersections exercise (which were done very well, and captured a great sense of how those forms pile up over one another as a set of 3D forms, rather than as a bunch of flat shapes stamped on top of one another).

The concepts you seem to have reinforced in doing those exercises (which admittedly should have been done at the beginning, but maybe being able to work through some of the animals first helped you put the organic intersections to better use) really had a major impact. For example, if we look at the kiwi, the way you built that mass wrapping along its back with clear, confident volume to it was fantastic. Admittedly the bird head to the right of it was much more vague and much looser than it ought to have been, but it too conveyed a much better grasp of how forms fit together in 3D space.

Onwards from that point you do still display a great deal of loose and vague marks rather than solidly constructed forms - for example, the bear head on this page has a lot of open gaps in the forms which make it feel a lot more flimsy. That said, the relationships between the forms are being established well. It just doesn't carry any weight.

Once you start hitting your camels, you start making your constructions a lot more sturdy - drawing lines to completion, not being as vague (although your head studies on the right sides of these pages are still much sketchier, and suffer for it).

Jumping ahead to the hybrid, this is something I'll usually use as a test to establish just whether or not a student really understands how their drawings exist in three dimensions. It really pushes one's capacity to leverage reference images, and even students who can do stellar replications from photographs struggle with it immensely unless they properly grasp construction.

Yours here however was very well done. The body itself is very believable and tangible, and well constructed as a whole. Admittedly there are smaller elements of sloppiness - for example:

• The additional forms used to pad the joints of the legs, they're a bit more 2D rather than wrapping around the main segments of the forms

• You're using stretched ellipses for the legs rather than following the sausage method. Stretched ellipses tend to be much stiffer and less malleable, which limits the amount of gesture that can be conveyed there.

• The head - specifically the eye socket and all - is a bit lazily constructed. Remember how the head should be thought of as a 3D puzzle. Notice how in this stage of the tiger head demo the parts start to fit into one another, from the muzzle to the eye socket to the brow ridge, etc.

So all in all, you've improved by huge leaps and bounds over the course of the last two weeks, though I think slowing down just a little bit as you execute your marks, thinking about what each form is meant to accomplish (especially the small ones) and how they're meant to relate to those around them, and being more assertive with your lines to keep the shapes closed will help a great deal. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next step, which will be the 250 cylinder challenge as that a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-12 19:53

You've definitely developed quite a bit throughout this lesson! You're clearly working hard to employ the concepts covered in the lesson, and have a number of important successes. Overall your grasp of space and form is coming along well, and while there are some things I want to point out to you, you're moving in the right direction.

Starting with your organic intersections, these are generally coming along well. You're doing a pretty good job of capturing just how they slump and sag over one another. My only concern is when you've got forms that start to lose their sense of solidity, in cases like this one on the first page, you allow the sausage form to get quite wiggly, undermining the solidity and weight of its form. When drawing these forms, think of them as being filled waterballoons, and always remember that they have weight. In this particular case yours seems to be floating somewhat.

As you mentioned about your shadows, there is definitely room for improvement here - they're not awful, but there are places where they're sticking too much to the form that casts them, rather than being able to wrap around the forms they're projected upon as explained here.

There are just a few major issues in your animals that I want to point out. The first and foremost of these is how you handle the additional forms. Right now you're not really treating them as though they have their own volume - they flatten out very easily to conform to the object they're being added to, rather than bringing something of their own to it. It's a very similar concept to the organic intersections - each one is an independent form, and you're not melding them together like putty - you're stacking them together in a way that allows one to wrap around the other without losing its own independent characteristics.

So, if you look at this fox and compare the mass added to its back to the ones shown in this section of the lesson, you'll see how where yours lays flat, mine pushes past the silhouette of the original form and actually creates a sort of mountain/valley configuration of bumps going up and coming back down. This comes from each form having its own volume, and how they stack up over one another.

As as side note, this is usually a lot more successful when we pile the additional forms on top of the torso sausage, largely because we work with gravity. Conversely, configurations like your capybara's belly tend to be a lot more difficult because it works against gravity. For this reason I'll usually sag the torso sausage to include the belly and mainly focus building up on the back where possible.

Coming back to the comparison between your fox and my demonstration, another key thing to look at is how in my diagram I show the contour curves as they near the edge hooking around to give the impression of thickness. This is another key component that is missing from yours.

Something in your work that is often present but not always consistent is establishing the relationships between 3D forms you've put down. A big example of this is your barn owl - notice how its cranial mass and torso mass float somewhat independently of one another? They never have any clear relationship being established between them, which leaves us in the limbo of uncertainty as to whether we're looking at 3D forms or flat shapes. Now, usually this is fairly straight forward because all we have to do for overlapping/intersecting shapes is to define the joint/intersection between them with a single well drawn contour line, [as shown here](https://i.imgur.com/VIJp769.png. This is immensely effective, much moreso than any contour line sitting on the length of a single form, at establishing the illusion that these forms are three dimensional. Being shared as a defined relationship between two forms is very powerful, and a useful tool to establishing our forms as 3D.

That said, the cranial and torso masses here are not intersecting - this suggests to us that there is a missing element - the neck. Instead, you ended up enveloping the whole of the bird in a complex shape which itself did not have any real structure to it, and the result was that this flattened out the drawing. This kind of "enveloping" in a more complex shape should generally be avoided - instead, think in terms of the individual forms and masses that would exist underneath, which help convey the volume and mass of those sections.

I see similar things with some of your legs, like the bump added at the back of this markhor's foreleg. There's no actual form with clear 3D relationships being established here, just a two dimensional bump being added to the silhouette. Throughout all of these drawing exercises, it's critical that you always build things up as they exist in 3D, rather than treating them as though they're 2D drawings where liberties and shortcuts can presumably be taken.

The last thing I wanted to mention was that while your texture and detail is coming along very well, I do feel that you may have a tendency to be distracted by your eagerness to get to it. This is common, especially in this lesson since drawing wonderfully detailed animals is a lot of fun - but you need to make sure that when you work on the underlying construction, that you focus on it completely. Don't let your brain look ahead to what you will do - set yourself to what you're doing now. Something that can help with this is breaking the detail/texture phase away from the construction altogether and doing them in different sittings. For example, get the construction done in a bunch of animals, then come back to add detail. This way you'll be able to focus on whether or not your construction is ultimately able to stand on its own before deciding to move onto detail.

One last thing - On this wolf you've fallen back to using stretched ellipses for your leg segments rather than sausages as defined here. The sausage method is really important for being able to construct solid, well structured legs that can still maintain a sense of flow and gesture to them. While it's not always obvious how they can be applied to each and every leg, if you think of them as an armature upon which you'll add whatever additional forms that are needed to bulk up in the appropriate places, you'll yield much more successful results.

It's worth mentioning that one of the biggest tests of whether or not a student understands the core principles of construction and how their forms exist in 3D space is how their hybrids worked out, since they require us to jump through certain mental hoops to stitch something from one reference onto another. Yours turned out great, so I'm confident that you understand the core of this lesson - there are still issues to iron out, but I'm more than happy to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-14 17:26

I don't really think drawing on top is really necessary in this case, because you've got a clear example where you invested a great deal of time analyzing and breaking down a subject, took your time working through the steps of construction, and achieved a pretty solid drawing as a result. That is, of course, the goat.

Here your construction is quite solid, with clear relationships between the forms and a good sense of how those additional masses wrap around one another.

There are just a few issues with it that are worth pointing out:

• The main one is that the legs are of entirely varying lengths. Something that helps is to establish where the ground is (either with two perpendicular lines establishing the x/z axes of the ground plane or with a polygon drawn to define the ground under the animal's torso).

• You're still forgetting just how big the shoulder and thigh muscles are as part of the legs. To steal a phrase from an ex-olympic weight lifter we have as a client at work, these are your "big engines". When looking for them, don't just focus on the smaller landmarks - assume they're gonna be big, and find the wider landmarks that line up with that expectation.

• Make sure the different sections of the head fit together like a puzzle - the muzzle, the eye sockets, etc. Don't let them float arbitrarily

I actually lied, here's some redlining.

Your other drawings were not nearly at the level of the ram, because they didn't exhibit anywhere near the same amount of attention, observation and analysis. This is what you should essentially be doing for every animal you draw. Many of these drawings were also quite small and cramped, resulting in much clumsier construction and a harder time working through spatial reasoning. Lastly, you also had a tendency to completely neglect the feet.

All in all, the ram is the only one that really demonstrated the limits if what you're currently capable of - you pushed yourself, did your absolute best, and didn't rush. That's what I want to see, and so give me another 5 drawings like that.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-15 22:43

Starting with your organic intersections, there are two main issues I'm noticing. First and foremost, on your second page specifically you've got a few sausage forms that jut out with nothing supporting their weight from below, and yet they still hold their position rather than sagging over. This suggests to me that you're not necessarily thinking in terms of how these forms exist, with weight and solidity to them, and so they're not behaving in a manner that would be natural or realistic.

The other issue is with the shadows those forms cast. Yours tend to stick to the form casting them, rather than wrapping around the surface upon which they are projected, as explained here.

Moving onto your animal constructions, you've got a variety of results here, and I'm especially pleased with aspects of this horse - it conveys a strong grasp of how the whole construction exists in three dimensions, which is impressive considering that having the animal half-facing the viewer can be quite tough to pull off.

There are a few significant issues with how you're approaching things however:

First and foremost, the way you're applying the additional masses is not quite correct. As you can see here, when you draw those additional forms, you tend to draw the silhouette as though it cuts right across the structure onto which it is being appended. Sometimes you add a bit of curvature, but because we don't get any kind of an impression that the form is really gripping the structure, it doesn't build any sort of a convincing relationship between two three dimensional forms. Instead we get more of an impression that they're just flat shapes being piled on top of one another.

Now, you're clearly aware of this to an extent, because you attempt to resolve it by adding more contour lines on top to reinforce the idea that these shapes you've drawn are in fact three dimensional - unfortunately contour lines don't really work to add volume where there was none to begin with. It merely helps us to emphasize what already exists.

As a last point on these additional masses, notice how in this diagram, the contour lines I've drawn over those forms hook around sharply as they reach the edge to give the impression that these masses have thickness to them. This will also help - it's like taking a big mass of flesh and piling it on top of your structure. You're not melding clay into it to the point that the clay fuses perfectly and seamlessly - you're adding new volumes that, while adhering to the underlying structure, still maintains its own independence.

The other issue I wanted to point out has to do with how you draw your legs. It seems that for the most part, you've not been using the sausage method which was introduced in the last lesson, to construct your leg structures and have largely instead just done whatever felt appropriate. This specific method is important because it allows us to construct an armature for our limbs that both conveys a sense of gesture and flow, while also maintaining an impression of solidity by purely focusing very few contour lines on the intersections between forms, where they can be the most effective. It's not that these sausages need to be a perfect representation of the leg, but rather that they give us something to build upon while maintaining both solidity and gesture.

In some cases you apply something similar to the sausage method but you don't stick to simple sausages that match the characteristics of two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width as explained here. As such, it does not end up being nearly as effective as it could be.

An area you're definitely seeing a lot of progress is with your animal heads - you've clearly taken to heart the concept of the heads being like three dimensional puzzles (and I can see that to a point you're applying the same concept to how the additional masses are used in bodies, like with your chicken drawing). This is great to see, and is helping you develop heads (and in some cases bodies) that do feel solid and three dimensional.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see another four pages of animal drawings. This time, I'd like you to leave detail out altogether (no fur for example). Focus entirely on construction and apply the techniques as covered in the lesson rather than trying to find your own particular solutions. You'll find that at least with a number of these kinds of animals (mainly quadrupeds), the demonstrations can be applied to get you 80% of the way.

Additionally, before you get started on those extra 4 pages, I'd like you to follow through the donkey demonstration, drawing along with it without any deviation.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-17 02:35

This critique's going to be a bit tricky, largely because it's hard to make things out under all the ink you put down with your brush pen - it obscures a lot of the construction underneath, which was in a way the intent here. It's fairly common for students who haven't quite been able to establish strong underlying structure to try and compensate with detail, shadows, or other tricks. The unfortunate truth of it is that when a drawing is lacking proper structure, detail simply falls flat.

Starting with your organic intersections, these are okay, though the key issue is that the sausage forms themselves aren't quite holding to the simple characteristics they ought to. Especially as we get into construction, it's very important that we get used to capturing forms as simple as possible, only conveying complexity by adding more simple forms rather than making those base forms themselves more complex.

Among these forms, you've got several that pinch through their midsection, rather than maintaining a consistent width. I also noticed some forms that remained fairly straight even when their midsection is not supported by something underneath. In these cases, those forms should definitely be sagging.

Lastly, the liberal use of line weight has definitely served to flatten things out a great deal. Line weight itself should never be heavy - it should be a subtle addition used to clarify how different forms overlap, applied only in specific areas rather than along the entire length of a line. You're trying to communicate with the viewer's subconscious, which can pick up slight changes in weight. You're not shouting at their conscious brain. There's also a distinction between line weight and the shadows these forms cast upon each other - as explained here you're largely keeping your shadows stuck to the forms that cast them, rather than allowing them to wrap around the forms upon which they are projected.

Now looking at your animal constructions closely - attempting to look beyond the line weight and detail - many of these are constructed reasonably well. For example, with your ostrich you're doing a good job with the head construction and how the neck connects to the torso form. The torso itself does feel somewhat flat however, as do the legs - using the sausage method here - that is specifically using simpler sausage forms and most importantly reinforcing the joint between them with a specific contour line would help a great deal. Additionally, don't let the feet get cut off - you're welcome to find other reference images to help determine what the feet should look like when they're hidden in your main reference, but don't let them just stop with open edges, as this flattens out the form.

In your foxes, there are a few issues I want to point out:

• The main structure of the torso in this form (that is, under all the fur) is a form that is not particularly solid. Where the torso should be a simple sausage drawn from the ribcage (which is too small) to the pelvis as shown here, you've drawn it such that it gets pinched in towards the center. This makes the form feel less solid and convincing, due to the increase in overall complexity, and in turn makes it feel flat.

• Secondly, the way you've added the mass of the fur also serves to weaken the construction because you are essentially enveloping the forms of the torso/head with flat, two dimensional shapes. You're thinking of how those marks exist on the page, rather than interacting with them as three dimensional forms. The way to do this correctly is to construct three dimensional masses. This means constructing individual forms that wrap around the structures already present. Establishing these three dimensional relationships as well as having the new masses hold their own independent volume/thickness helps build the impression that these forms are all still 3D and solid, and that they carry weight.

• Looking at that fox's legs, we can see that here you've again tried to capture complex shapes rather than building the legs up as a series of simplified forms.

Again, I cannot stress enough how important it is that you get used to applying the sausage method to your leg structures. Even when the legs in your reference don't look like simple sausages, we can use these sausages to create a simple, solid armature to serve as a base. We can then pile on more additional masses to help bulk them out. The critical thing about this sausage technique is that it captures solid forms while also allowing us to capture the gesture and flow of the limb.

Conversely, looking at how you've tackled this cougar's limbs, the contour lines at the joints are at least moving in the right direction, but there are two critical issues with them:

• First off, they're very flat and don't actually convey the impression that they're wrapping around a three dimensional form. Instead they just emphasize the fact that these legs are flat shapes on the page.

• Secondly, you're missing the huge benefit one gets from establishing the relationship in three dimensions between two simpler forms. This whole idea of establishing a relationship is exactly what makes the connection between the neck and torso of your ostrich so effective - the two forms that are now being related to one another reinforce each other, creating a very powerful feedback loop where one makes the other feel 3D, which in turn makes the first feel 3D, and back again.

The last thing I want to say is that your work here is a mixture of two mindsets:

• On one hand, you're very clearly aware of some important parts of the lesson - your cougar's head construction is quite good, for example, and the birds were well done.

• On the other, you're very distracted by the need to make pretty, impressive drawings. What we're doing here are exercises. They are specifically intended to help you develop your understanding of how forms exist in 3D space, how those relationships can be established to sell that illusion, and how those forms can be combined to create solid, believable, complex objects. By instead using your brush pen to try and make things pretty, impressive and artistic, you have missed a great deal of the value in these exercises.

So, in order to get you back on track, I want you to do 5 pages of animal drawings, with no detail or texture whatsoever. Focus on construction alone, and take that construction as far as it can go. Before you do so, reread the first page of lesson 5, and do so carefully. Take note of the diagrams. I'd also like you to do a separate drawing (aside from the 5 pages) where you follow along with the donkey demo, matching the steps as carefully and closely as possible.

After all that harsh critique, I do want to congratulate you on being accepted to FZD! I expect that this application may have played a role in wanting to make your drawings impressive - as far as complementary exercises and such, please don't let yourself get distracted. What you need to do most of all is focus on the lessons that are in front of you, rather than looking ahead or trying to assign yourself something different. You should still be holding to lesson 0's rule of half your time being spent on drawing for fun without the intent on learning or growing (in order to keep yourself well balanced and prepared for the inevitably brutal time you'll have at FZD), but when it comes to the lessons, follow the instructions to the letter.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-20 18:31

Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along reasonably well. You've kept the sausage forms simple, they wrap around one another quite well and your shadows are generally well placed (although not always perfect, they're not sticking to the form casting them which is good). Looking at the second page, it is worth pointing out though that the shadow being cast at the bottom left of the stack suggests a different incline to the ground plane than all the others, so that's something to be aware of. Additionally, the S curving sausage towards the upper right is probably the only one that doesn't quite behave in an entirely believable fashion when it comes to gravity.

Your actual animal constructions have a mix of overall demonstrating a good grasp of how forms come together and relate to one another in 3D space, and some notable mistakes when it comes to applying various techniques that hold you back from what you could be achieving.

To start with, your first bird has a core construction that is quite well built. Looking at how the major masses are laid in, and how you've clearly defined the intersection between the torso and the neck and so on, this s coming along great.

There are a few issues here however that also come u pin other drawings. For example, when laying features into the wing, you're treating the wing as more of a flat shape into which you can cut back. It's important to understand that every single form we put down as part of our construction is itself a solid mass that exists in the world. While the act of drawing allows us full control over how we play with what's put down on the page, we still must adhere to certain rules in order to ensure that what we draw still holds onto the illusion that they're 3D. We're given the freedom to do what we want, and with that comes the freedom to sabotage our viewer's suspension of disbelief.

As such, when adding feathers here, you envisioned the wing as being a shape that you could fill in with feathers. Instead, you need to think of it as a solid structure upon which you are attaching feather forms. The pieces that are not yet covered with feathers still remain peeking through, and so in order to ensure that it is fully covered, you want your feathers to stick out of that initial form's silhouette.

Also worth mentioning, you've drawn these feathers by outlining each individual one. What you should instead be doing is implying their presence by drawing the shadows they cast on their surroundings, as explained here.

Here's a demonstration of what you should/shouldn't do when tackling these wings: https://i.imgur.com/RByw2DS.png

Now, another issue I'm seeing throughout your work conveniently rears its head in your pelican. Elsewhere it's not as bad as this, so this is probably the best example to use to bring it to light. Basically, you're severely overusing contour lines. With every constructional drawing tool we are taught here, it's important to always keep in mind exactly what you're intending to achieve, and then to think about whether another mark is already accomplishing that task, or if a different mark might do it better. Past a certain point, contour lines will no longer be all that effective, and they can even start to hurt a drawing by causing it to feel a little stiff or robotic.

Additionally, I'm noticing a tendency to make your contour curves/ellipses fairly similar in degree as they move along the length of a form, rather than shifting that degree naturally as the orientation of each cross-sectional slice is slightly different relative to the viewer.

When it comes to contour lines, where you'll find the most effective point to include them is at the joint between two forms. We can see this as a critical component of the sausage method which we use for constructing legs. The method is so valuable because it allows us to construct an armature that conveys both solidity (by focusing contour curves only at the joints and none through the segments' lengths) and gesture/flow (by using flexible sausage forms). The contour curves at the joints basically produces a repeating effect where it uses the relationship between the forms to make each one in turn feel three dimensional. If one form is 3D, and this is the relationship between them both, then the other form must be 3D, in which case the first one must be 3D, and on and on. Sometimes we are stuck drawing contour lines in the middle of a form and defining no relationship with it, because that's all we've got - but if you can find a joint to reinforce in this manner, it's likely to be effective enough not to even need any more contour curves.

So, if we look at the toucan, the relationship between the cranial sphere and the neck is really solid because of how it's defined there. The relationship between its neck and its torso however is much less so. Also to a similar point, the way the beak form wraps around the cranial sphere helps define this relationship very nicely, and has the same effect. We see similarly strong use of construction when we look at the heads on this drawing and this one.

This does however bring us around to your use of additional masses. I can definitely see attempts being made at having these forms wrap around the underlying structure, but this is definitely something you still need to work on as the way you're having them wrap around is not quite right. Additionally, I noticed several cases where you allow those masses to basically mould their profile/silhouette right into the forms they're being added to. You should not be treating their volume as being so malleable - we're not dealing with clay or putty, but rather it's more like balloons filled with water. They have their own volume, and you can look at it as there being a certain "cost" to each form you add. Each one brings something of itself to the construction, and that has to be somehow resolved while being respected rather than disregarded.

I demonstrate this over a few of your drawings in these redline notes. I also added a few extra points at the end there, touching on the overabundance of contour curves (and their degrees) which I mentioned above, along with how to avoid having your feet feel blobby and non-descript and the fact that you're using stretched ellipses rather than sausages for your leg construction. To this last point, I noticed that you weren't consistently using the sausage method across the board - it's common for students to feel that the sausage method doesn't match their reference, so they'll use another approach entirely. Instead, think of the sausage method as being a way to construct the underlying armature rather than the final form of the leg. You can always add more forms to it to flesh and bulk it out, so it is generally still an excellent starting point, and should be used across the board.

Now, you do have a lot of great construction going on but the points I mentioned here are important, so I want to make sure that you're able to apply them. So I'd like to see four more animal drawings, each of them purely focused on construction with no detail or texture.

Uncomfortable

2019-10-22 20:45

This is defintiely a peculiar submission, in that overall you're demonstrating a strong grasp of 3D space and construction, but there are a number of exercises that came out quite poorly. Generally when those exercises come out as poorly as that, it has a visible impact on your animal constructions, but the correlation seemed to be quite minimal. Very strange.

So, starting out with your organic intersections, these do not really capture the illusion that these are solid, three dimensional forms that are interacting with one another in 3D space. There are definitely pockets and sections that are reasonably well done - for example if we zero in on sections like this, and to a degree, like this, we get a better sense of how gravity is being applied to these forms to have them sag down where their weight is not supported and wrap around the forms beneath them.

Looking down here, the relationship between these smaller sausages and the larger one are as shapes on a flat page - like you drew the shapes themselves without thinking about how they'd be interacting in a 3D world, and then tried to resolve that as an afterthought using contour lines and shadows.

When doing this exercise, there are a few things I want you to adhere to:

• Always stick to simple sausage forms as explained here (you generally did, but the big one on the first page was decidedly more complex).

• Stick to forms that are equal in size, don't make one big one and a bunch of smaller ones.

• Think about where your ground plane is going to be - as gravity is being applied to all of these, they are all resting against something - be it each other, or a flat surface.

I do very much get the impression that you may have rushed through this exercise, to the point that you perhaps may have been thinking more about the next drawings you were going to do, rather than what you were doing at that very moment. It's common and can result in students making mistakes early on in an exercise (like not thinking about how the forms interact as they draw each form's silhouette) and instead having to try and come back afterwards to fix things up. My theory is somewhat bolstered by the fact that your work on this exercise back in lesson 2, while not perfect, was vastly better than this.

Now, moving on, your animal constructions are considerably better, and for the most part, are well done. They convey a strong understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space, and how they can be combined with one another achieve greater complexity while maintaining the underlying solidity.

There are a few issues that I'll touch upon, but by and large you've done a good job.

Firstly, when it comes to where you add additional masses to bulk out your constructions, you're somewhat missing the sense of how those forms wrap around the underlying structure. You do a better job here than you did with your organic intersections, but you're not really selling the illusion all that well when drawing the silhouette of the mass (and instead try to rely very heavily on contour curves after the fact).

When you draw the actual silhouette of the form, you need to think about how it's going to be wrapping around the structure it's attaching to - think about how it's meant to run along the surface of this form, as shown here. If you are thinking about this sort of thing, then you need to exaggerate it much further. You're generally pretty good at contour lines, so you need to be channelling that kind of curvature.

You can also see how I've demonstrated it here on another student's drawing. Also be sure to reread the notes on this from the lesson as the diagram there also shows that need for curvature quite well.

The next thing I want to touch upon is your snake. There are a few important issues:

• First off, your sausage forms are drawn very stiffly, likely from the wrist rather than from your shoulder.

• Secondly, you seem to have then gone onto envelop them in a shape - this isn't really the constructional approach, in that this shape doesn't bear any relationship in 3D space with the underlying sausage structure, and so this can cause one to focus too much on how you're drawing a flat shape rather than a 3D form. In this case, I'd have probably just drawn the sausages to intersect very tightly together, or even just use the branch technique explained in lesson 3. But for other cases where you may be inclined to use a sort of "enveloping" technique, take a look at this diagram. Everything you draw must relate to the other forms in your construction in three dimensional space, not merely as lines on a page.

• Also you seem to have drawn this in a rather chicken-scratchy manner.

• Overall you've gotten a hell of a lot better dealing with detail and texture throughout the set, with the strongest ones coming after your deer (which themselves were very well constructed). With your sharks, alligators, etc. you started to think more in terms of the individual textural forms that were present, rather than trying to create scratchy, arbitrary patterns along the surfaces of your objects. You are also starting to think more in terms of drawing shadow shapes rather than outlining textural forms, though I strongly recommend you reread these notes anyway.

• One thing I did want to point at specifically however was how you approached drawing feathers on your birds' wings. Here for instance, you treat the wing form underneath as more of a loose shape to fill in with feathers. Instead, I want you to construct the wing as a solid form, and then line it with feathers - this means not having little slivers of space between feathers that would be see-through. I drew this diagram for a student who had similar issues, although in this case the wing is closed.

For all intents and purposes I should be considering your lesson as complete as your animal constructions are very solid. I am not however, as I am very concerned about the state of your organic intersections. I want you to go back and do four more pages of that exercise, demonstrating to me that you understand the concepts involved. Be sure to read through that exercise's instructions before doing so.