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Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-25 04:24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-25 03:44

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-24 19:39

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-23 22:17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-23 16:14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox Pens are back! Round 2 sold out fast, so this time we've ordered 3 times as many. A pack of 10 high-quality fineliners, all 0.5mm, for $16.50 USD (free shipping in the US)."

2019-08-20 23:43

I miss blick...

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-20 20:58

Ohhh, that makes sense. No, that was specifically so I could highlight the main focus of that demonstration to the student. If you look at the other major demonstrations, you'll see that my linework is purposely dark (I use a brush that replicates a very rich fineliner and actually cannot make the marks faint at all).

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-20 20:20

Starting with your arrows, these generally flow very confidently through space. I am mildly concerned about two things however:

Moving onto your leaves, these are very well done. They convey a good sense of flow as they move through the space they occupy, rather than becoming stiff and static as can sometimes happen when a student transitions into drawing objects that are less abstract than we've been handling thus far. You're also generally applying constructional drawing techniques very well - when adding complex edge definition you're adhering to previous phases of construction so as to avoid any contradictory marks.

There are a couple minor issues that I should mention:

Your branches exercises are similarly well done, and you've done a pretty good job of drawing individual segments that flow smoothly into one another. They're not perfectly seamless, and there are actually some issues in how you're handling the bridging between segments, but you've still managed to pull things off well.

The main issue is that you don't really allow the segments to overlap very much. In the instructions, you're told to extend a segment halfway towards the next ellipse - you often fall short of that. For the next segment, you're meant to draw starting from the previous ellipse, directly overlapping the end of the previous segment, treating it like a runway to ensure that the strokes flow together as one. You're doing a great job of matching the general flow, but there's still a visible hitch because you're not allowing them to run together long enough.

Moving onto your plant constructions, these are very well done. Again, there are a few issues to point out, but they're minor in nature and overall you're demonstrating a solid grasp of form and construction. You're also making good use of texture as shown in your mushroom (though on the daisy, I think we're slipping back into being a little less attentive, and also mistaking rendering/shading for texture, which it is not).

Aside from those points, you've done very well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 4.

I do have to ask though:

At the beginning of the course, you talk about quitting school and drawing a little for fun.

What do you mean by "quitting school" ? Do you mean setting aside the focus on learning and allowing yourself to just relax and enjoy drawing for what it is, in order to avoid burnout and build a healthier relationship with drawing as a whole? My guess is that there might be a slight language barrier here but "quitting school" spooked me a little bit :P

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox Pens are back! Round 2 sold out fast, so this time we've ordered 3 times as many. A pack of 10 high-quality fineliners, all 0.5mm, for $16.50 USD (free shipping in the US)."

2019-08-20 13:34

It's always great to hear of students in areas with a lot of access to supplies. If you don't mind me asking, what kinds of pens do you usually purchase, and how much do they generally cost?

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-20 13:33

Unfortunately you're posting this too early! Your last submission was three days ago - we require students to wait a full 14 days between homework submissions, as explained on the patreon tiers themselves. As your last submission was on August 17th, you'll have to hold onto this and resubmit it on August 31st.

This rule exists for a few reasons - to avoid us getting overwhelmed by submissions, to ensure that students have a substantial enough period to complete the work with no reason to rush through it, and ultimately to keep students from completing a bunch of work ahead of time and then rapidly submitting it all soon after pledging.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

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 in the post "Drawabox Pens are back! Round 2 sold out fast, so this time we've ordered 3 times as many. A pack of 10 high-quality fineliners, all 0.5mm, for $16.50 USD (free shipping in the US)."

2019-08-19 21:05

As a Canadian myself, I feel your pain. What kinds of pens do you usually use, and how much do you get them for? In my experience, the prices we're subject to are insane.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-19 20:39

Here's a quick example of how I'd build up the horn - putting down the main tube and then piling on additional forms to flesh out the other protrusions, including the fork at the end. The same principles apply to the treehopper, but you can learn more about them in this section of lesson 5. That's what I was alluding to in the critique. The key is to build up these collections of forms such that the relationships between them is clearly defined (with one form wrapping around another).

As for the challenges, the cylinder challenge is a required prerequisite of lesson 6, so generally once a student completes lesson 5, if they haven't done the challenge yet I point them there instead of lesson 6. The texture challenge is more for you to do whenever (if you choose to), ideally in parallel with the other lessons rather than grinding it out before progressing onward. Texture is not a core focus of drawabox however, so students are allowed not to worry about it and focus instead on construction if they wish.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox Pens are back! Round 2 sold out fast, so this time we've ordered 3 times as many. A pack of 10 high-quality fineliners, all 0.5mm, for $16.50 USD (free shipping in the US)."

2019-08-19 18:51

Fineliners are a hell of a lot less forgiving than a mechanical pencil, or even a ballpoint pen, so that weirdness is pretty normal.

It's also a big part of why I recommend them for these lessons specifically. They complement the concepts being taught, forcing the student to get used to drawing confidently and thinking through each mark before they actually put it down on the page.

Keep in mind that the focus here is less about how well your end result for each exercise is - it's about what the exercise and how you execute it teaches you.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-19 17:47

Very nice work overall! I think by and large you're demonstrating a pretty solid grasp of the concepts covered in the lesson. There are a few things I want to point out, but most are a bit nitpicky.

Starting on your arrows, you've done a great job here. You're exploring all three dimensions of space with these, and I'm pleased to see how the gaps between the zigzagging lengths of your arrows shrink as we look farther back in space, rather than remaining consistent and evenly spaced. This does a great job of conveying the full depth of the scene.

Your leaves carry the same kind of energetic flow as your arrows, so you're definitely not getting caught up in the fact that you're drawing a physical object with a clear start and end point. You're conveying a sense of how those leaves move through that space, pushed by the force of wind and air currents, rather than simply how they exist within it.

I'm also pleased with how you generally adhere to the underlying scaffolding when adding more complex edge detail. Sometimes you do stray from it a bit, but you're still for the most part sticking to how that footprint moves through space, allowing your complex problems to be separated into manageable stages.

One area where you didn't quite approach things correctly was with the leaf in the bottom right of the page. This one's clearly got a lot of complex arms, and as explained here, it'd be better to follow the spirit of the leaf construction method rather than trying to apply it directly. Each individual arm can be broken down into its own "leaf-form", which can then be merged together.

I've also got another demo on how to tackle maple leafs here, as they're a pretty common example of this kind of issue. Remember that every technique you're being shown is less about how to tackle a very specific problem, but how to tackle a certain kind of problem. Think about how they can be applied beyond the bounds of the example itself.

Your branches are coming along quite nicely, but I noticed just a couple things:

Moving onto your plant constructions, these are generally very well done. You're doing a great job of capturing the flow of your leaves and petals, and constructing forms that feel solid and three dimensional. There are a couple things I want to point out:

All in all, very well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 4.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-19 17:32

There's definitely progress here, specifically with the second and fourth drawings. The first ends up feeling kind of clumsy (overuse of contour curves, and I suspect the drawing itself is very small (make sure you're taking advantage of all the room that is afforded to you on the page), but either way it doesn't feel nearly as three dimensional and believable as the other two pages I mentioned.

On your third page, I can see some difficulty you're having with drawing very long, skinny sausages. This is pretty normal, and usually suggests that the student may not be engaging their shoulder as much as they ought to. Additionally, from the looks of it you're forgetting to define the intersections between the sausage forms, as explained in these notes. This is something you seem to be missing across the board, so I encourage you to reread the notes rather than rushing straight into the additional drawings.

Your last drawing is by far the most successful, and does convey a better grasp of form as a whole. Here you seem to be putting more time into each individual contour line, rather than drawing a bunch of them to compensate. The relationships between your forms are more believable as well, and so they reinforce the illusion that your drawing is three dimensional.

You are definitely making strides forward, and while there is plenty of room for improvement, I think you should be good to move onto the next lesson and continue working on your use of construction with a new subject matter. Remember that these same principles - like the use of sausage forms for your legs, reinforcing the intersections between forms to define their relationships in space, etc. are still going to play a big role.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox Pens are back! Round 2 sold out fast, so this time we've ordered 3 times as many. A pack of 10 high-quality fineliners, all 0.5mm, for $16.50 USD (free shipping in the US)."

2019-08-19 16:19

Our first two rounds got an amazing response - and in the interest of shrinking down restocking times, we've reinvested most of the revenue to get three times as many pens this time around.

/u/ScyllaStew has been livestreaming the lessons and has so far been able to get through all of lesson 1 on a single pen - and it's still going strong. The pen's taking a break for now as she tests out twenty-something different pen brands through the box challenge (she's posting those short reviews to YouTube), but she'll be back to pushing that pen to its limits once she's done with her boxes.

If any of you have purchased the pens in the past and want to offer your experiences/opinions on the quality and price point, feel free to do so in the comments!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-18 18:44

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-18 17:55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-18 16:27

Your use of construction here, (aside from a bit of the corgi which I'll touch on in a second) is fantastic. You're conveying a good grasp of how the different forms come together to create complex, solid, three dimensional objects.

With the corgi, the only issue I have is how you tackled the large chunk of fur coming down along the left side, along its neck down to its chest. Here you've repeated the issue I mentioned previously, enveloping your 3D forms in a flat shape. You should be utilizing the additional-mass techniques here, where you actually define how the added masses connect against the rest of the construction, rather than trying to wrap it up.

Admittedly this particular use is not awful, and I even use it in some cases myself, but that is largely driven by the fact that in my mind's eye I do see how the forms connect, and as I draw it, I am thinking about how everything sits in 3D space. That is something that will come with continued practice of drawing every connection and relationship right on the page. Aside from that however, you are using the additional mass technique very effectively across all the other drawings, as well as in other parts of the corgi. Very well done.

One thing that stands out most to me is actually how you're putting your marks down. There are a lot of marks here across the submission (both in your animal constructions and in your organic intersections) where you've purposely tried to make your underlying strokes much fainter and more timid, rather than putting every single mark down with full confidence as you should. As you can see from all of my demonstrations, I do not attempt to hide things. That's a waste of cognitive processing, where your brain power could instead be put more fully towards the confidence of your strokes and understanding the relationships between your forms.

I want every single mark you put down for these exercises to be drawn with confidence, with no attempt to hide them. We are not here to draw a clean, pristine end result - we're here to work through these drawings as exercises, intended to help develop our understanding of 3D space and improve our use of constructional techniques. After the fact, we can come back with subtle line weight to clarify overlaps and build a hierarchy of our linework. You actually do apply line weight quite well in some areas, but often there is a visible shift from the faint, overly timid strokes to the weight you add after the fact (especially in the organic intersections). Had you drawn each mark with the same confidence from the beginning, there would have been less of a shift. Also, your later drawings start falling more into the trap of line weight serving as a full replacement and clean-up pass, which is not what we're after here. You should only be adding line weight to key areas where overlaps need to made clearer - NOT over the whole thing to separate your "underdrawing" from your "final". There should be no such binary division.

Lastly, your proportions are still an area of weakness, but it's a minor concern. Your constructions still feel believable and tangible, as though you're drawing animals with dwarfism. Usually this comes from drawing the heads too big.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're doing well, just watch out for how you put your lines down. Above all else, remember that all of these drawings are exercises, and that no decision should be made that puts the end result above the process.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-18 16:05

Yes, I think that's conveying a pretty well developing grasp of construction as a whole. You're combining different simple forms and staying within the bounds of the decisions you've made during earlier phases of construction, rather than contradicting yourself with new assertions. Keep it up.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-17 23:44

Looks like both links are dead, though it doesn't really matter. It's been so long that they're not going to be of any use in terms of assessing your strengths/weaknesses.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-17 20:19

Think of it less in terms of "deserving", and more in terms of us making sure you get practice where you need it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-17 20:06

Honestly, when you'd increased your (previously dormant) pledge to $10, I was a little worried, given that your submission for lesson 2 was from over three years ago. The fair assumption would be that you'd gotten rusty, and even if not, the lessons from back then were a far cry from what they are now (with a lot of different requirements, different standards, and an instructor a lot less certain of the material he was teaching). So I was preparing to have to tell you that maybe jumping back into lesson 3 would be a bad idea.

Thankfully, my worries were unwarranted. I can't actually see the full lesson submissions from back then, since you seem to have deleted them, but I did see a little snapshot I'd taken for one of my critiques - and compared to that, your overall line confidence has improved a great deal since then.

Starting with your arrows exercise, these are very well done. They flow very confidently across the page, and through the three dimensional space of the scene. The only issue I'd like to mention here is that the spacing between the zigzagging lengths of arrow should generally compress as we look farther away (based on the principles of perspective). In your case, they tend to be either consistent, or somewhat arbitrary. So keep that in mind - as they move farther away from us, the consistent distance between two objects will appear smaller and smaller to the viewer.

Your leaves demonstrate a solid grasp of the constructional process introduced here - you're not afraid to break your leaves down into successive steps, and you focus on the purpose of each individual phase without getting distracted by what you're planning on doing next. There are cases here where I feel that your flow lines are a little rigid. You have good flow towards the upper right corner, but many of these are a little on the stiffer side. Adding a little arrow head on the end of your flow lines and trying to imagine how these lines flow through space in an abstract representation of force (like the wind and air that governs the movement of these leaves) can help bridge over that fluidity and confidence from your arrow exercise.

Your branches are generally well done, with a few little hitches that you are well on your way to resolving. Your lines flow very smoothly and confidently, and when you're able to nail the seamless transition from one stroke to another, you're able to maintain the illusion that it's a single stroke. Of course, the issue is that you're not always able to nail that transition without visible tails or a visible change in line weight. You're pretty close, and you're definitely getting better, but it's still something to work on.

Here's three things to keep in mind:

All in all, your plant constructions are very well done. Your leaves flow smoothly and confidently (definitely improved over the leaves exercise), and you're applying the constructional method quite well.

One thing that does stand out however is the use of those large ellipses to define the bounds of your petals early on when constructing a flower. These are in all honesty not really necessary, at least in the way that you're using them. If you're going to put those bounds down, try to respect them more directly, as every single mark we put down is an assertion of some form. Asserting that "my petals will reach this far" and then making no effort to actually follow through with that does undermine the illusion we're creating for the viewer, though perhaps not as egregiously as other ways this kind of problem can manifest.

Honestly, aside from that, the only other piece of advice that I can offer is a serious nitpick - but in some of your flower pots on this page, you've got these little arcing lines along the cylindrical form, which I'd imagine is a sort of texture of the pot itself. The issue here is that you're drawing them as line - when dealing with texture, we don't want to use line at all. As explained here, line is a tool that is extremely useful in many cases (especially construction and defining the boundaries between forms and volumes), but when it comes to conveying the little textural forms that exist along the surface of an object, it becomes less effective.

Instead, we have to think of every mark we put down (in regards to conveying texture) as being a shadow cast by some other form. If we can identify the nature of that form, we can think about how its shadow would be cast, and usually this does not result in a uniform line (as you've drawn there), but as a line with a bit of variance in where it gets thicker or narrower. When dealing with anything textural, try to think in those terms, and make sure that whenever you see a detail, that you think about what is producing the shadow you perceive, before transferring it to your drawing.

Aside from that, you're doing great. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 4. Keep in mind that since you haven't completed the 250 box challenge (which is usually a prerequisite for lesson 2), that is still something you'll have to complete before lesson 6, along with the cylinder challenge. Those are a ways off, but definitely something to keep in mind as you continue to move forwards.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-17 19:14

All we can ask is that you do your best. Overall you've put in a solid effort, and while there are some issues I'll address, you're moving in the right direction. As long as it is your best work, the critique I can give will be useful, and will help push you along.

Starting with the arrows, these are generally pretty well done, although definitely smaller than they should be, resulting in a lot of empty space on the page. Giving yourself more room for your brain to think through spatial problems helps a great deal in both exercises like these, and general construction, so definitely avoid making anything particularly cramped or small when it doesn't need to be.

All in all though the arrows do flow pretty nicely through 3D space, and for the most part you're doing a good job of compressing the amount of space between the zigzagging lengths as we look farther away from the viewer.

Looking at your leaves, I do suspect that you may be getting a little distracted by what you want to achieve with each one in terms of detail/texture, to the point where you're not necessarily entirely focused on what you're doing at the given moment. By which I mean, when your focus should be on establishing how a leaf flows through the space it occupies, your brain is at least partially moving ahead to how you're going to add some of the more interesting details to it. That's not to say your leaves don't have a decent sense of flow, but that I think you can probably achieve better by focusing on one thing at a time.

Also, when adding detail - especially with the leaf on the bottom right - never use any kind of hatching line pattern. It is virtually always meant as filler when the person drawing doesn't want to put the time into really observing the textural patterns that are actually present, or when they want to focus on conveying shading information - neither of which we want to be doing.

Moving onto the branches, it's a good start, but there's definitely a visible shift in the flow at every ellipse. The purpose of this exercise is to get used to drawing long, continuous, complex edges in overlapping segments, so we can maintain control while still achieving the illusion of a single stroke. Ensuring that the flow is maintained between them is critical to achieve this.

That said, the main issue I'm seeing is that where the instructions state that a previous segment should continue halfway to the next ellipse, you are only extending it by a minimal amount in many cases. Give the instructions there another read.

In addition to extending those segments further, when drawing the following segment, make sure you have it overlap the last piece of the previous one directly, rather than drawing where it ought to have been. This will help you improve on both ends - on getting the previous stroke to aim more accurately towards the next ellipse, and on compensating for any issues in achieving that goal with the following segment.

One last thing about this exercise - I suspect you may be drawing somewhat from your wrist here, so try and push yourself to draw from the shoulder in order to maintain a more even, flowing execution of your marks. Drawing larger will also help with this.

I am pretty pleased with how you're utilizing your ellipses' degrees to properly convey the orientation of each cross-section in relation to the viewer, so that's pretty good. There definitely is a lot of work to be done on this exercise however.

Moving onto your plant constructions, there's a lot of good here, with a few issues mixed in. The issues are more related to how you approach things, so it's less a question of skill and more a matter of the choices you make.

All in all I think you've got a bit of a mixed bag here. You are capturing a lot of the major points of the lesson, but there are a number of areas that you're still struggling with. So here's what I want you to do before I mark this lesson as complete:

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-15 19:13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have just a couple concerns:

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-14 19:39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-13 20:52

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-13 00:57

Oh wow, that's... peculiar. Poor thing. fetches a torch

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-12 22:33

There's definitely growth here. Your first drawing is definitely my favourite of the set, though one thing that stands out as a negative is the fact that you didn't draw the abdomen in its entirety - you stopped the line when it reaches the thorax section, rather than drawing through the whole form as you should. Drawing through our forms allows us to better understand and define how they relate to one another and how they sit in space.

The segmentation of the abdomen is well done however, as is the use of the sausage form on the legs.

The second drawing is somewhat weaker, largely in that you've tried to use a much more complex form for the thorax region as your base construction. That added complexity is a lot harder to pull off as the underpinnings of your overall drawing - stick to the basic ball type masses covered in the lesson and don't try to stray too much from them. A sausage for the abdomen did make sense, and is still simple, so that was a good call - although I think that if the midsection had been handled better, the contour curves on the abdomen would not have been as necessary.

On your third, some additional line weight to help clarify how different forms overlap would have helped - also some of the sausage segments get a little uneven and uncertain, but generally this is still moving in the right direction.

On the last one, again - your use of the sausage technique is looking much better, though I definitely feel that the proportions you've used here are a bit exaggerated, and if you look closer, there is probably a lot more going on in the spider's face that you ended up overlooking. You even seem to have missed one of the spider's legs (you probably confused the pedipalps in the front with its legs on one side, because you drew the pedipalps way too large.

Anyway, all in all you're moving in the right direction. There's definitely room for continued growth, and you need to pay more attention to observing your references and identifying all the forms that are at play - not just the major ones - but things are coming along. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-12 14:41

Yes, students do have to wait 14 days between the submission of different lessons/challenges. It's mentioned on the actual patreon pledge tier. Thank you for having waited - I've added this submission to our backlog spreadsheet, so one of the teaching assistants should be out to review your work some time today.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-12 14:31

Your work here is very, very well done overall, but you're submitting way too early. Your last submission (for lesson 2) was 6 days ago - students must wait a full 14 days before submitting the next lesson's work. Please hold onto it until August 19th, and I will critique your work then.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-10 20:09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

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 in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-09 15:05

Okay, that's good to see - and thank you for reading everything thoroughly. I'll extend my critique just a little bit to include your sausage page:

Here's some redline notes drawn directly on the page pointing to the issues I raised above.

I still want an extra page of these (as listed in the revision work in my critique), showing what I've pointed out here.

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2019-08-09 14:37

That's a good idea! I'll have to delay implementing it though until I'm sorted through some things I'm working on now, and once I figure out how to make that work with the way the rest of the system functions now, but I will add that to my todo list.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-08 23:10

I usually prefer students to tackle the cylinder challenge after lesson 5, as it means they'll have had a lot more general mileage, both in drawing the lesson material and doing warmups from older exercises. If you really insist on doing the cylinder challenge now however, I won't stop you.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-08 23:09

Since I've gone over this lesson several times thus far, I'm going to keep my critique short and to the point.

Let's start by talking about a few good things I saw:

Now let's talk about some of the bad:

Now, to end this off, I have another good observations to point out:

All in all, you're impatient, you rush through your drawings, and you don't invest the time you need to just look at what's in front of you. You won't always be this way, if you work at it, but you're climbing up a very steep hill, one step at a time. The more you continue to invest your time in unimportant things - like details, texture, going over your lines over and over for who knows what reason - the less time you'll be investing in actually seeing what is in front of you.

To be completely honest with you, I think you should step back and take another look at lesson 2. So that's what we're going to do.

Once all of that is done, do four more insect drawings. Pick insects you feel confident in - don't pick anything that seems out of the ordinary or intimidating. Focus on things that stick more closely to what's been covered in the demos. Wasps, beetles, etc.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-08 20:54

The flow of your leaves is definitely looking much better. For your branches, remember that I want you to overlap the last bit of the previous segment, treating it as a runway for your pen, rather than drawing where that mark ought to have been.

For the apple itself, remember that construction is all about constructing simple forms in their entirety. Your construction here didn't come out that well because you were stitching it together with pieces of lines, rather than actually adding solid, three dimensional forms inside your 3D world and mushing them together. Starting with a solid sphere would have been a better move, as you could have then added a cylinder, a cone, or any other simple form to create the base. This kind of construction will come into play a great deal more in the next lesson.

All in all you're showing improvement, but you do have plenty of room for growth. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 4.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-07 20:12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-07 19:54

Starting with your arrows, they generally flow quite well through space, but there's one key issue you need to keep an eye on. On a lot of these, the spacing between the zigzagging lengths of ribbon remains consistent even as the arrows move farther back in space. Based on the rules of perspective, that spacing should compress more and more.

Moving onto your leaves, these are fairly well done, with a few things I want to mention:

Moving onto your branches, these are pretty good. You're doing a good job of merging the individual segments into longer, continuous, almost seamless edges. A few things though:

Moving onto your plant constructions, these are generally quite well done. Just a few observations to point out:

All in all you are doing pretty well, with a slight tendency to get a little sloppy in certain places. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, and leave you to continue working on that through lesson 4.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-07 14:07

Hah, well, that's not entirely accurate. I've critiqued thousands of homework submissions over the last four years or so, but it's more in the realm of a hundred submissions per month. Either way, Drawabox is a business after all - I do what I can to keep the tiers accessible (for example, the tiers are priced based on how long it takes to critique a single submission, but I do allow students to submit once every 14 days in order to avoid having them sit and wait for a full month). Everything balances out however, as many of the paying students I currently have don't submit work every month, or don't submit at all. Some people are just signed up to support the project.

I also maintain pretty strict restrictions that students must follow the rules (do the lessons in order, start from lesson 1, only move on once they've been given the OK, use the correct type of pens, etc.) to help diminish the number of variables I need to account for when critiquing work. And of course, I have had teaching assistants helping me for the last few months, who I pay $5 for every lesson 1 or box challenge critique they do. This sometimes results in me taking a loss (paying $5 twice in a month on behalf of a student who's only pledged at $5/month), but again - it still balances out well enough for me to keep doing it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-06 21:15

Starting with your arrows, one thing stands out - I really appreciate that you've drawn so many zigzags, but it highlights the fact that the spacing between your zigzagging lengths of ribbon does not change as we look farther away. Perspective dictates that the same distance seen farther away will appear to be smaller. As such, these arrows actually contradict basic rules of perspective, and undermine the illusion that they're moving back in space. I explain this a little further in these notes.

That said, your leaves are very well done. They flow smoothly through space, and don't show any of the stiffness I sometimes see from students as they transition into drawing concrete, real objects rather than abstract forms. You're still treating these leaves as though they represent the forces of air and wind that apply to each leaf, rather than as something that starts and ends and occupies a specific piece of space. Instead, you're focusing on how this fluid object moves through that space. Very well done.

Your branches are really quite well done. At times it's unclear whether you're actually following the steps correctly (the strokes appear to be quite seamless, with only a few notable breaks and when I look more closely, a few joints where the connection between two segments becomes clearer). That said, I'm noticing that you're only allowing each segment to extend just a little past each ellipse - try and bring it halfway to the next ellipse, and then use the last bit of the segment as a sort of runway for your next stroke. You want that next stroke to overlap the previous one. This will help smooth out the slight breaks in flow that give away the illusion we're creating.

Also, where you play with branches, I'm noticing a few of the 'knots' you add (the spheres) are small enough that they end up falling inside of the branch itself. Try and make these forms a little bigger, like they're really a sphere that is wrapping around the branch at that point. We want to sell the idea that everything we're adding to our construction is a solid, three dimensional form, and we want to clearly define how they relate to one another.

Overall your actual plant constructions are quite well done. With the branch forms there's still some breaks in the flow, but your petals and leaves flow very nicely, and your more solid constructions (like the mushroom) are looking very firm and believable.

Your flower pots are struggling a little - it's great that you're utilizing cylinder-based techniques, like the minor axis to align a series of ellipses, though there is sometimes a lack of symmetry there due to ellipses that are drawn a little unevenly. The cactus' pot was definitely much better than the aspidistra.

There are just two main points I want to address:

All in all, you're doing quite well. You just have a few things to keep in mind. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-05 20:26

Copy the demo, step by step, trying to replicate what I'm doing.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-05 16:21

These are definitely showing an improvement. There are still a couple issues I want to address, but you're doing much better, and I will be marking this lesson as complete. Here are some additional notes to keep in mind as you continue to move forwards. Also, one last point - in your kangaroo's detail shot, you tried to add shading. Remember that as explained back in lesson 2, we don't do any shading-for-the-sake-of-shading. If we add shading, it's to give ourselves to create a transition area from light to dark where we can convey the presence of a texture. This means that any kind of hatching-based shading is something we should not be seeing in your homework for the drawabox lessons (outside of literally textureless, flat surfaces like our basic boxes, or things we may purposely want to flatten out in order to draw attention to other parts of a drawing).

Anyway, as I said - I'll mark this lesson as complete. Looks like your next step is the cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

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:

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-08-05 15:06

The thing about your first point there, is that while the outer structure of the legs may demonstrate further complexity, we use the sausages to establish the underlying construction first. We can then add further forms to them to build up, say, one end of a segment being larger than the other.

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2019-08-05 15:04

Unfortunately, not that I am aware of.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

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:

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):

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:

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2019-08-04 04:23

What did you prefer about it?