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

2019-06-12 20:54

Hah, I'll certainly take you at your word for those five missing boxes.

As for the other 245, I do have a few thoughts on your general approach to this challenge. Throughout the set there are a number of inconsistencies in your approach to drawing each individual box, with considerably fewer towards the end, which certainly shows progress.

• The first thing that catches my eye is that you're perhaps a little rushed. Your main lines are generally drawn decently most of the time, with a few appearing to be more sloppy, but your hatching lines are pretty much always done in a haphazard manner, and it definitely speaks to your overall state of mind. Regardless of how integral (or not) a line is to your overall drawing, you should still never allow yourself to draw a line in a sloppy manner. Make sure your hatching stretches all the way from edge to edge, rather than letting it float arbitrarily in the middle. The reason is that it impacts your outlook on all your linework, and is the reason that you're a little more inclined to allow for sloppier marks where they count.

• You've demonstrated a great deal of patience in applying the line extensions, although you may not have taken enough time to really consider what those extensions were telling you about how your sets of parallel lines were converging. The key here is to extend the lines of all the boxes on a freshly completed page, and then think about how you can alter your approach to drawing the boxes to yield better results on the next one.

So the trick is that when you're drawing a given line as part of a box, you want to focus entirely on the other lines that are going to be running parallel to it - including those that haven't yet been drawn. Some students will think to focus on the lines that share a corner, or the lines that form a plane, but these are distractions. Only concern yourself with the lines that converge to the same vanishing point, and focus on getting them to converge consistently, and everything else will begin to fall into place.

At the same time, when thinking about how those lines converge, you can also think about the angles between the lines as they leave the vanishing point. Lines with a relatively small angle between them will converge so little once they reach the actual box (especially if the VP is far away), that you can often effectively treat these as being parallel to each other. This is a very useful relationship to keep in mind, as it'll help keep such lines from converging too quickly. I explain this further in these notes.

Before I mark this challenge as complete, I'd like you to do 30 more boxes, applying what I've covered here.

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

2019-06-12 19:39

Your work here is phenomenal. By the end, the accuracy of your convergences is really fantastic. That isn't to say that there aren't a few little hiccups here and there, and there are a few tendencies that I'll address, but by and large you're really demonstrating an excellent sense of 3D space that is continually developing in the right direction.

With the few little issues you have on occasion, they're generally minor, but they do tend to follow a certain trend. Generally what I recommend to most students here may apply to you as well, although you're already likely doing it to a considerable degree, and just have to have the concept reiterated.

When you're drawing a given line as part of a box, it isn't always clear what lines you should be paying attention to to figure out what its orientation should be. You can't focus on every line, as that's too much to balance in one's mind, so picking the specific lines to focus on is key.

Some students will look at the lines that share a corner with the one they're looking to draw, or they'll focus on the one plane as a whole. Instead, what's critical is to focus only on the lines that run parallel to the one they're drawing - including those that haven't yet been drawn - as the only principle we're trying to maintain is that consistent convergence towards the far off vanishing point. Things meeting at the right corner and all will fall into place if the convergences are consistent and correct.

Furthermore, as we think about how the lines converge towards that VP, we can think about the angles that sit between the lines as they meet there. Often times you'll find pairs of lines with very small angles between them (usually the two middle lines, though not always). This small angle, by the time it reaches the box (especially if the VP is far away) will result in a convergence that is so negligible that we can say the two lines run virtually parallel to one another. This is an important relationship to keep in mind, as knowing that two lines should be running parallel can keep us from avoiding situations where they end up converging far too early in our drawing. I explain this further in these notes.

Anyway, keep up the great work! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2019-06-11 18:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2019-06-11 17:49

So! To start with, your first section is looking pretty good. Your ellipses are confidently drawn, and as such are evenly shaped and generally maintaining their integrity rather than getting distortion or overly stiff. I'm also pleased with your attention to the "true" minor axes of each ellipse, which can be especially tricky when faced with an existing minor axis that you tried to hit in the first place. Taking the time to look closely and identify where you're deviating from it is difficult, but you definitely invested the time appropriately.

One minor point I did notice was that while you're doing a great job with the degree shift from one end to the other, the overall size of your ellipses remains pretty much the same. Try and push your far end to be just a little smaller (in terms of overall scale) than the closer end in order to show some very slight foreshortening, rather than staying so close to being isometric.

For the second half of the challenge - the cylinders in boxes - I can see that you're overall doing a good job of working through the steps of construction, of first being fairly mindful of the convergences of your boxes' sets of parallel lines. There is certainly room for improvement in terms of the alignment of your ellipses' contact lines and minor axes but this is definitely a challenging thing to tackle.

It's worth mentioning that this challenge can be done anywhere between the completion of lesson 2 and the start of lesson 6 - so you definitely got it out of the way early on, without the extent of mileage many other students may have already had. So these kinds of issues are entirely normal, and to be expected. Hell, they're expected even for students who are working through this closer to the end of that recommended period.

One point that does stand out to me however is that your linework does trend a little more towards the seemingly rushed. Your lines are still straight, and fluid, and reasonably precise, but overall I get the impression that you were moving through this section with considerable gusto, rather than necessarily analyzing your results as carefully and focusing on each individual line as much as you could have. This comes through more in the tendency for your lines to fade out a great deal past the midpoint of a given stroke. Additionally, closer to the end of the set, your boxes start to suffer somewhat, with their convergences becoming less consistent. We know you're entirely capable of pushing through with the appropriate degree of patience and focus, but it definitely wanes around this point. Again, understandable as you probably want this hell and torment to be over with, but it is one of those things we need to work towards wrangling. If we start to rush, if we lose focus, it's best to take a step back and come back after a bit of a break.

Anyway! Overall you are absolutely on the right track, and are doing a good job of moving forwards on the core aspects of this exercise. Keep at it, and feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-06-09 23:24

Oddly enough, it's not an issue I come across often at all, but somehow you were not the only person I critiqued yesterday who made that same mistake.

Anyway! These are looking much, much better, and you're showing considerable improvement even over this limited set. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2019-06-09 23:22

To start with, your arrows are generally coming along well, though always remember to try and compress the spacing as we go farther back into space. As the lengths of the arrows zigzag back into space, the actual amount of room between them will, just like the arrow itself, get smaller and smaller the further away we look - so this is going to help sell the idea that it's plunging into the depths of the scene.

Your arrows are looking good. Similarly they have a decent sense of flow, though I do believe this could be improved upon. When drawing leaves, always remember that while the leaf itself is a physical object that starts and ends at concrete locations, the energy that drives that leaf to move and flow through space itself continues on. Like the arrows, think of the leaf as being representative of a greater force and don't be afraid to really push that flow with more energy and enthusiasm.

Your branches are moving in the right direction, though I am seeing a little bit of stiffness to them - generally a little visible hitch around each ellipse. Remember that the main focus here is to maintain a smooth, consistent flow from ellipse to ellipse, segment to segment, giving the impression that the compound edge is really just a single stroke.

Two things may help with that - first off, space our your ellipses more. Remember why we're practicing this - we want to be able to take difficult, complex edges that we can't easily nail in one go and break them up into pieces. This means that each segment can be as long as you can reasonably and confidently manage. Secondly, I'm noticing that you're only extending each edge just a little ways past a given ellipse. You should be extending it halfway to the next one, giving yourself a good deal of runway for the next segment. Make sure the following stroke goes right over the 'runway' created by the previous one, so they flow smoothly from one to the next. I've actually seen some cases (like in the pitcher plant later on) where you don't overlap at all, and instead start your next segment where the previous one ends. That is not the correct use of the technique.

Now, all that said, the rest of your constructions are very well done. Your petals flow quite nicely (still room for improvement but they're coming along well), your constructions are generally quite solid, your use of texture and detail is really well done too. I'm quite pleased with that cactus, where you've started conveying the little nubs on its surface with "C" type marks (you're drawing the crescents of the cast shadows rather than outlining each nub completely - this can also be applied to the pebbles/gravel along the ground around its base. You're also demonstrating a good deal of care with your linework, and generally not being too wasteful.

I did notice that on the mangos though, your contour lines were kind of half... well, they were halved. I was going to say that they were half-assed, but they're not - as far as they're drawn, they're not badly done, but you stop halfway through for a reason I can't identify.

Anyway, all in all you are doing well - the biggest thing you need to focus on is the use of the overlapping segments to create longer, more complex lines that feel like they're a single stroke. That is something you can certainly continue to practice as you move forwards.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 4.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-09 22:57

You've got a number of strong points demonstrated here, but there are a few issues I want to address. More than anything else, you're exhibiting strong overall skills, but a lack of patience when it comes to reading through the instructions carefully and following them to the letter. That kind of care and focus will definitely save you time and help you use that time more effectively as you continue to move through the lessons, so strive to be more mindful in the future.

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely through space, although for some of them, I'm noticing that as we look farther and farther away, the zigzagging lengths of the arrow's ribbon-section don't quite get closer together. Instead, some of these maintain the same spacing. Remember that due to perspective, just like the ribbon itself gets narrower, the space around it will also compress, as explained here. Also be more mindful when drawing those arrow heads - I mean, I don't care that much about how they're drawn, but you definitely went out of your way to change how they were drawn relative to the instructions, which isn't a great sign.

You're demonstrating the main points of the organic forms with contour ellipses quite well - the ellipses are fitting snugly within the silhouette of each form, and you are in many cases (though not all) demonstrating a solid grasp of how those ellipses' degrees shift over the course of the form. The one major point you missed was that the sausages should be simple - basically like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. as shown in this diagram. The reason for this is that sausages become a pretty fundamental form in later construction, and focusing on keeping our basic components simple allows us to focus on making them feel solid and three dimensional. The more complexity we add (like variable sizes and so on) the more difficult it is to maintain that illusion at the most basic levels.

Aside from that issue, your contour lines are also looking good, generally wrapping nicely around the forms.

Your textural work on the texture analyses and the dissections is all fantastic. You're demonstrating an excellent understanding of the use of solid cast shadow shapes instead of outlines to create fluid, flexible textures that can be used effectively to convey the surface texture of an object without having to draw every little detail and end up with an overly noisy result. I can also see that you're doing a good job of wrapping those textures around your forms, and in general, you're demonstrating pretty solid, well developing observational skills.

With the form intersections, I primarily look for two things - first and foremost, I want to see if the student is able to draw many forms together within the same space, such that they feel consistent and cohesive, rather than like they've been cut out and pasted on top of one another. The secondary point I look for are the intersections themselves - these are by no means expected to be entirely successful. All I look for is that students are giving them a shot. I can see that you focused on the first point in your first few pages (which is frankly not a bad idea), and then delved a little bit into the intersections afterwards on that last page.

That's entirely fine. It is worth mentioning that your intersections were generally not correct, but they're a good start. The most important thing to keep in mind - and it may not sink in initially - is that the intersection line sits on the surface of both forms simultaneously. I'm not sure how much you remember of high school mathematics, but it's like how the intersection between two lines is the single point in space that sits on both simultaneously. I explain this in this section of the lesson though I fully understand that it may not necessarily be easy to absorb the first time around, as it is a very complicated thing to wrap one's head around.

Lastly, your organic intersections are mostly coming along well, although the last page shows the kind of thing we're trying to avoid. That is, despite the name the exercise is really all about avoiding actual intersection of forms, and instead focusing on how these forms would lay on top of one another, avoiding interpenetration but instead deforming to slump and sag over each other to find a state of equilibrium. Overall, I do feel you understand that, and have otherwise demonstrated it reasonably well, but it's worth pointing out that in this case, those two forms in the center should not be cutting into each other, but instead the top one should be actively bumping up and over the one beneath it.

Anyway! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There are certainly a lot of areas where you need to read the instructions more carefully, but by and large you're doing a good job. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-06-08 23:59

To start with, congratulations on pushing through and completing all 250 boxes. It definitely is a laudible achievement, and one that demonstrates great patience and care.

Looking over your work, I have noticed that throughout the set, you seem to have been focusing primarily on keeping your lines parallel to one another, focusing on extremely shallow foreshortening where the vanishing points are all at infinity. Early on you did have some convergences, where the foreshortening was still shallow, but we could see that there were far off vanishing points - but after your first fifty or so, you seem to shift to focusing almost entirely on being able to keep your lines running parallel to one another.

While this is an important skill to have, in pursuing it you seem to have shifted away from the core of the exercise. In this section of the notes, I do specifically say that you should be practicing both shallow and dramatic foreshortening, dealing with situations where your vanishing points are both very close, and farther away. In both of these situations, you still want to be able to think about a vanishing point that exists somewhere.

I feel that as you worked on this challenge, you allowed yourself to get quite distracted and pulled away from the explicit instructions, instead pursuing your own ends. This isn't uncommon, but it is something you need to keep an eye on. Revisiting the instructions to make sure you're on track is certainly something you may need to do.

Now, when you draw a given line as part of a box, you need to focus entirely on how that line converges with the lines to which it runs parallel in 3D space. You're doing the opposite - you've been focusing on how it fails to converge. We want to think about how their orientations allow them to converge together at a single point, somewhere - be it close by or almost infinitely far away. Either way, there should be in your mind some point that exists where those lines finally touch.

With that, we can consider the angles that sit between the lines at the vanishing point itself. This is where we start thinking about lines that may be effectively parallel - we consider which lines have very small angles between them, and if the distance to this vanishing point suggests that by the time we reach the box, there may be no significant convergence between them. Most often we see this in between the two middle lines of a given set of 4, but it isn't always a given. Certain factors come into play, from the proximity of that vanishing point to that actual angle between them at the VP. I explain this concept further in these notes.

Now, as you missed a pretty important aspect of the challenge, I want you to draw another 30 boxes to apply what I've explained here. Once you submit them to me, I'll mark this challenge as complete.

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

2019-06-08 23:43

Congratulations on working through all 250 boxes. I do have a few thoughts on how you approached them however that should help as you continue to move forwards.

• From what I can see, almost all of the boxes where you applied the line extensions had relatively shallow foreshortening - that is to say that you placed your vanishing points very far away from the box, resulting in lines with little to no convergence. You'll notice that in this section of the notes I specifically say that you should play with both shallow and dramatic foreshortening. What you've done here doesn't really do much as far as testing your ability to have lines converge consistently towards each other, and more focuses on achieving lines that run parallel in 2D space. That's definitely an important skill to have, but you ended up missing a pretty important component of this exercise. I would have definitely wanted to see more pages like this one, where you definitely started focusing more on a variety of kinds of foreshortening, with a much greater focus on convergence.

• I definitely agree that your boxes had a tendency of being very small. These box drawing exercises are all about spatial reasoning. Our brains will generally do better when we give ourselves more room to think, so try and draw your boxes (and anything that comes up in the future) bigger, rather than squeezing them into cramped areas of each page. Additionally, this will also help you in engaging the use of your whole arm, and drawing from the shoulder more consistently.

Now, had it not been for the one page where you did explore more convergence, I would ask you to do more boxes. Instead, I am going to mark this challenge as complete and ask you to move forwards - but I want you to integrate these freely rotated boxes with the line extensions as a major part of your warmups.

With that, I will leave you with one major piece of advice to apply while you draw these boxes. When drawing a given line as part of a box, it's pretty common to think about the lines that share a corner with the one you're drawing, or the lines that share a plane with it. These are all distractions, however.

Instead, I want you to focus only on the lines that run parallel (in 3D space) to the one that you're drawing, including those that haven't yet been drawn. Focus on how they're meant to converge towards a point - even if that point is very far away. As you consider this, think as well about the angles that sit between the lines themselves at the vanishing point, paying special attention to those that have small angles between them. Often we see this with the middle lines. Smaller angles, as we make our way back to the box, can result in lines that can be drawn as effectively parallel to one another, which is an important relationship to keep in mind. Still, it all comes back to the fact that they are converging, just very slowly. I explain this further in these notes.

So. Feel free to move onto lesson 2, but make sure to continue practicing this kind of stuff as explained here as part of your warmups.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-07 22:24

It appears that whatever payment method you had setup was declined when patreon attempted to charge it at the beginning of the month. Until you get that sorted out, I will not be able to critique your homework.

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

2019-06-07 21:07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2019-06-07 20:26

These are certainly looking better. I'm seeing improvement on those branches, and your ability to get the lines to flow together more consistently. Keep working on maintaining a consistent width throughout and maintaining the flow of the overall compound edges, but you're headed in the right direction.

Your plant constructions are also looking better, with a more solid, believable use of form. One thing to keep an eye on however is what's happened on the bottom right of this page. Remember that every single mark you put down represents a solid three dimensional form that now exists within your scene. We add these forms to the world and then build on top of them - so we cannot ever allow ourselves to draw something and then draw on top of it as though it isn't present. What we draw on top must acknowledge the presence of the form underneath, either wrapping around it or building off of it in a manner that respects how everything you've drawn occupies space. In that particular example, the underlying ball that you constructed seems like a ghost - like something that is present, but ignored by everything else.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're headed in the right direction, and will be able to continue building upon these skills in lesson 4.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-06 22:39

Form Intersections

For the form intersections, I look for two things primarily. Firstly and mainly, I want to check if the student is able to draw different forms together within the same space, such that they feel cohesive and consistent. You're doing a reasonably good job of this. Your boxes are definitely far from perfect - your parallel lines still don't converge that consistently towards their shared vanishing points, so you've got plenty of freely-rotated-boxes to practice in your warmups (and be sure to apply the box challenge's line extension technique to identify your mistakes) - but for the most part your foreshortening is fairly consistent.

It's worth mentioning that your page of cylinders appears to be an ode to not following my instructions, in that all of these cylinders go against what I mention in the last paragraph of this first section. Keep your forms equilateral, meaning roughly the same size in all three dimensions. No long tubes.

Now the other point I look for isn't something I expect students to be able to nail just yet, but I do expect to see the beginnings of attempts. That is, the actual intersections themselves. In the lesson, I explain how the intersection lines are essentially lines that exist on the surfaces of both forms simultaneously. I'm not sure how much high school math you recall, but it is very similar to the idea of the intersection between two lines being the single point that sits on both lines at the same time. The point that both lines pass through.

Now, I do see some odd red lines on your drawings, but with these marks you're effectively just going back over the lines you've already drawn. If these are the attempts at the intersections, I do commend you for giving it a shot, but you definitely need to reread the instructions/notes on this subject, as you are going in the wrong direction. It's generally easiest to start tackling this with a page full of intersecting boxes, as you did initially there. Hell, start with just two boxes occupying some of the same space, and try and draw a line where they meet.

Organic Intersections

Conceptually these are not wrong. You have sausage forms that are piled up on top of one another, and there is a degree of understanding of how those forms are slumping against one another. It is however a far cry from how the exercise was tackled in the instructions, in terms of how they're laid out. The line quality is also still stiff at times, and quite lacking in confidence. All things considered, all the qualities as far as spatial understanding are present. So in that regard, you've done a good job. That said, they do stand very much as a symbol of how far you stray from the actual instructions in the lesson. It feels more as though you vaguely recall what the exercise was about, and then attempt to work from what you recall, rather than rereading the material - and that on its own is disconcerting (and also explains much of the rest of the lesson's work).

Conclusion

Overall, you've a lot of room to improve, and I think while part of it has to do with how you're putting your marks down (drawing from the wrist, executing slowly and carefully with wobbly results, etc.), the vast majority of your struggles have to do with how you're actually approaching the information that is set out in front of you. You absolutely need to read the instructions, watch the videos, read my critiques, etc. for a given exercise immediately before attempting it - even if that means going through the same material a dozen times before you're done.

I want you to do one page of each exercise in this lesson and submit them to me, showing me that you understand what I've listed here in this critique, as well as what is contained in the lesson material.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-06 22:39

There is certainly a lot to comment upon. Overall, I get the impression that you have difficulty keeping concepts covered in earlier lessons in mind when tackling new things, causing you to take one step forward and two steps back, so to speak.

Organic Arrows

Starting with your organic arrows, many of these actually flow quite nicely through space especially on the first page, but your linework is very unsteady. It looks to me like you might be drawing those lines more from your wrist, or rather slowly - or more likely a mixture of both. In many cases your arrows tend to be a lot more erratic than the ones I demonstrated in the lesson, which in turn tells me that you're easily forgetting those instructions as you work through the exercise, but not taking the time to go through them again.

If you look at the demonstration from the lesson you'll see that the two edges that make up the 'ribbon' part of a given arrow are very simple. It just goes back and forth, flowing smoothly. Sometimes, especially on the second page, yours get quite complex, like here and near the head on this one. There is really no need to introduce your own complexities here - it's a matter of following the instructions to the letter.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

For your organic forms with contour lines, conceptually you are demonstrating a few points I look for:

• You're keeping the ellipses pinched snugly between the edges of each form

• The forms are generally fairly simple (though always remember that we're aiming for what is essentially two balls connected by a tube of consistent width, like what's demonstrated here. The only bit that's off is that you have a tendency to stretch the "roundedness" of the balls on either end out to occupy more of the overall length

• Your contour curves wrap nicely around the form

• You're demonstrating a shift in degree over the length of each form

The biggest issue however is that your linework is very stiff, especially in the contour ellipses. As discussed in lesson 1, the single biggest priority with any markmaking is achieving smooth, confident strokes that maintain a consistent trajectory. That is at the very core of the use of the ghosting method, which should be applied to every single stroke.

The ghosting method is more than just ghosting before you put the mark down - it's about splitting the process up into three distinct phases.

1. First we identify the nature of the mark we want to make, the behaviour it needs to exhibit and the specific purpose it serves in your drawing. We put down starting/end points if they apply, identify the space it needs to occupy, and find a comfortable angle from which to approach it.

2. Then we ghost through the motion, getting our muscles familiar with what we are going to be asking of them. It's like your arm is learning its orders, or its script, going through it over and over until it feels familiar and comfortable.

3. This last stage is the simplest - we repeat the motion just as confidently to put the mark down on the page. We do not hesitate, we do not second guess ourselves, the second that pen touches the page we push through without any conscious thought or consideration.

If your resulting mark is not accurate, it is not because you messed up step 3 - it's because something went wrong in steps 1 or 2. Step's 3 only responsibility is to keep the stroke smooth and consistent, so if it wobbles or comes out stiff, then it was not done correctly.

One other point I wanted to mention was in regards to the little circles/ellipses you add at one end of each sausage form. This technique is great, but they feel disconnected from the rest of the contour lines. It's important to understand that these ellipses are contour lines just like anything else. All the contour lines run along the surface of the form - these just happen to sit right at the tip of the sausage form, where things get much smaller. Its positioning and degree should sell the idea that it's at the tip - and often times you miss the mark on that.

Texture Analyses/Dissections

Your texture analyses give me the impression that you may not have absorbed much of what was covered in the notes regarding texture, as there are a number of important concepts that aren't really being demonstrated here.

• Your first texture study (that is, the first square in each row) shows signs that you're attempting to draw what you see, and it's a good start. I also see this in the third one, to an even greater degree. Your second however seems to rely very much on identifying a pattern and then going to town on applying that pattern. When drawing from observation, that means avoiding any situation that results in you drawing more than one or two marks at a time. You need to be looking at your reference almost constantly, and the details you transfer should be actual features that are specifically present in your reference. A good rule of thumb is that if you can describe what you're trying to add to your drawing in words, then it's oversimplified. For example, if you see scales on a picture of a fish and go draw a bunch of scales on your drawing, that's too simple. Instead, you need to look at the specific nature of each individual scale, the specific shadows they cast, and the way they all interact on an individual basis. You're not drawing "scales" in general, you're drawing very specific individual scales, one by one.

• Your studies focus entirely on the use of line, rather than thinking in terms of shadow as described here. Line is a very useful tool that we use to define the borders between forms. They do not, however, actually exist. They're imaginary, and as with all tools, they do not fit every situation. When we think in terms of line, we end up having a habit of enclosing every little form that sits along the surface of our object, because we're outlining them, defining where they exist and where they don't. This tells the viewer that we intend to draw every single form that is present there, and if we haven't drawn something, it doesn't exist. It doesn't leave any room for implying the presence of features we haven't explicitly drawn. Working in shadow however is very different - rather than drawing the little forms themselves, we draw the shadows they cast on their surroundings. We imply their presence not by drawing them, but by drawing around them, creating hints as to the fact that they're there. This is considerably more flexible, because the weight of those shadows is in our control. We can plunge our object into large areas of solid black, where the shadows are so heavy that they merge together, or we can blast those shadows away like an overexposed photograph, where the only shadows that remain are those in the deepest cracks where no light can penetrate. These options do not change what is actually present in the texture, but they do change what kinds of marks are used to communicate the surface quality of our object.

This critique ended up exceeding reddit's 10,000 character limit, so I'm continuing in a reply to this comment.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-06 17:52

These are looking better, especially the second page. Where the first one feels like the sausages are physically stiff (not in terms of the linework being stiff, but rather that there's not a lot of flex in the forms, so they lay rather straight), the second one starts to give the impression that they're able to sag a little more as they wrap around each other.

You'll certainly continue to improve with practice, but you're headed in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-06-06 01:22

These are definitely vastly better. Still a few cases where you've got one of the middle lines veering off on its own, or lines converging in pairs rather than all together, but by and large this is a huge step up. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2019-06-06 01:05

Really solid work here. To start with, your arrows are looking much more dynamic, pushing into all three dimensions of space with considerable confidence. Your leaves exercises delve into construction nicely, as you establish aspects of the leaves in a step-by-step manner, solving one problem at a time. You start with the overall flow, then construct out the footprint/shape of the leaf, and finally tackle edge detail while adhering to the decisions that were made beforehand. I am noticing that the overall flow is a little hit-and-miss, with some being a little stiffer than others. When establishing the flow of your leaves, always think back to those arrows, and the idea that while the lines have a starting and ending to them, they're representing a force that extends well beyond that.

I can see what you mentioned with your branches, in having trouble get the lines to flow smoothly from one to the next, though most students do struggle with this. You're not doing too badly, and I'm glad to see that you're extending those segments a good half way to the next ellipse. The one point you're missing is that the next segment is meant to use the previous one as a sort of runway - here you're ignoring that extended section and going back to the ellipse itself, allowing the next stroke to follow its own path. Instead, draw directly over the remainder of the previous line, following whatever trajectory it established, even if it's not perfect.

Your constructions are quite well done, for the most part, although they do tend to be a little on the small side. I'm not sure how big the actual sketchbook you're using is, but try and take up the whole page with a single drawing. Construction is inherently a spatial problem, and spatial problems benefit greatly from being given more room to think. This also helps us to engage our whole arm so we can draw from the shoulder and achieve smoother strokes. Drawing bigger will also help with areas like the flower pots in your first few pages - I can see you attempting to establish the rim along the outside of the pots, but these tend to get quite cluttered, resulting in something of a mess. Still, I am pleased to see you constructing those pots around a central minor axis line.

Your leaves and petals definitely do a good job of maintaining a fluid movement through space. You're not afraid to twist and bend them, and when it comes to additional detail you're still mindful of how the bigger, simpler leaf shape flows through space while modifying its edges.

In regards to this cactus, I noticed that you have a tendency of outlining any small textural forms in their entirety - that includes the little nodes on the cactus itself, as well as the dirt/gravel at its base. Remember back to lesson 2 - we don't want to enclose each little feature in line, because this implies to the viewer that we intend to draw each and every little detail that is present. Instead, we set line aside and imply the presence of these forms by drawing the shadows they cast. These shadows are flexible - we can plunge a texture into darkness with large areas of solid black, where all the shadows merge together, or we can overexpose the image with direct light, blasting away those shadows and leaving them only in those deepest cracks where the light cannot penetrate. This approach does not tell the viewer that there are no forms present in those areas of solid black or solid white, but instead implies their presence through the few features and marks that are actually drawn.

You definitely handle these cast shadows better with your mushrooms, though you've definitely more room to grow in this area.

All in all, you're doing a great job, and are demonstrating an overall strong grasp of the concepts covered in this lesson. I'll go ahead and mark it as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 4.

As for your questions/issues:

• It is indeed easier to draw a stroke through 3 or 4 ellipses in the branches, but the purpose of the exercise is to teach you how to blend those segments together, so you can handle situations where you cannot tackle something in one stroke. Remember that what's easiest is not often relevant - it's about what you're meant to learn. The things we have to practice are often what is harder for us to accomplish.

• Remember that the flow of your lines is always your first priority - meaning that it is what we need to sort out first, before anything else. So focus on getting those lines to flow smoothly first, before worrying about having them touch the ellipses. That's not to say that having them touch the ellipses is unimportant - just that we focus on solving one problem at a time. At the end of the day, it all comes back to the ghosting method - separating the process of mark making into several stages, where the execution focuses only on achieving a smooth stroke, is what allows us to balance accuracy and control against confidence and flow.

• Again, all the more reason to practice drawing those smaller ellipses from your shoulder. Ask yourself if the mark you're drawing requires a smooth, even flow. If it does, draw it from the shoulder. You'll find that just about every kind of mark involved in constructional drawing will fall into this category. The only things that don't are usually more to do with texture.

• About texture hiding mistakes - if a mistake is minor enough to be hidden by texture, it's probably not as big of a deal as you might think. In fact, it usually goes the opposite way - students will attempt to hide their mistakes with texture and detail, but those mistakes will always show through, because they are the foundation of the drawing. If your detail hides mistakes, it's because your overall understanding of what you were drawing and how it sits in 3D space was strong enough that you continued to wrap that detail around the forms in a believable manner, which reinforced the illusion you were creating rather than working against it.

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

2019-06-06 00:42

Starting with your leaves, these are looking like a good start. There was one there in the bottom left corner that bent a little unnaturally (as shown here you've got it stretching on one side and compressing on the other, that's not how the material they're made of behaves), but all in all they're flowing quite well.

Your branches have a few issues.

• I'm noticing that the degree on those ellipses are pretty much the same all throughout. As we encountered with the organic forms with contour ellipses, the degree of your cross-sections will change as we look at different points along the form. This is because the orientation of each slice is a little different in relation to the viewer, causing some slices to be more turned either more or less towards them than the others. Leaving them all at the same degree will make things look unnatural.

• You definitely need to work on getting those individual segments to flow more smoothly into one another. There are some places where you're having more success where they come closer, and others where you seem to be entirely haphazard. Always remember that your second segment is going to start using the previous one line a runway - you want them to flow directly from one to the other as though it's a seamless transition. The end goal is for a complex, continuous edge that feels like it's made from a single stroke. This is necessary in order to maintain the illusion that the branch form itself is solid.

When we get into your plant instructions, there are a few things I notice.

• Your leaves tend to be much more stiff here than they were previously. This usually happens because a student drawing free leaves on their own can think about how those leaves flow, pushing them through and imagining how the forces that run through them continue on beyond the end of the leaf. When drawing something from reference, we end up focusing too much on how that leaf starts in one place and ends at another. We focus on it as a static object with clearly defined bounds - not the fact that it is an object that moves through space, that is driven by wind currents and other forces. Pushing through that initial flow line with that kind of energy, of thinking it like an arrow, is critical. It helps you give life to an otherwise still drawing.

• In this drawing, with those wavy edged leaves, you're leaving the principles of construction behind. Construction is all about building things up from simple to complex. A wavy edged leaf is not simple. Instead, it attempts to answer multiple questions simultaneously. First, how does the leaf flow through space? Second, what kind of area does this leaf cover in terms of its size/shape? Third, what kind of deviation is there along the edges in terms of rippling, fraying, etc. You combined two steps into one, and in doing so, you ended up not doing a very good job answering either question. You did this on this page as well.

• Looking at this one, you're definitely straying away from the notion of drawing individual, enclosed forms. What you've got here is more an assortment of individual lines - many of which don't connect. This undermines any illusion of solidity we may be striving for. When drawing, I want you to follow this process: look at your reference image, studying it closely. Try to identify the underlying simple forms that exist there, based on what the lesson covers. Once you identify a specific simple form, construct that in your drawing as a single entity, not as a loose assortment of lines.

• This daisy is a good example of the point I raised in regards to your leaves exercise. You've got a few here where one side gets stretched and the other compresses. Keep an eye on that.

• For all intents and purposes, this mushroom isn't badly done. It isn't without its flaws. Your ellipses aren't completely even, but they're close. The gills under the mushroom's cap show observation of your reference image, although they're still all focusing on line rather than shadow as explored in lesson 2. All in all, lots of room to improve, but the right direction.

• The flow of your petals in your hibiscus is definitely looking better. Not really sure what happened with that one petal with the dark, heavy lines around the edges. It looks like you attempted to cut back into the leaf to add edge detail, but ended up getting self-conscious about the construction lines, and went back over it. Never forget that our goal here is NOT about making pretty drawings. If you focus on that, you're wasting time and energy. These drawings are all exercises focused on building your understanding of 3D space and construction as a whole.

I think I've written plenty as it stands. The rest of your drawings are again moving in the right direction - the leaves flow a little better, the linework is a little more cohesive, although they're still somewhat haphazard in places. Before I mark this lesson as complete, here's what I'd like you to do:

• 4 pages of branches exercises. FILL those pages. Your one page here had plenty of empty space. Focus on getting those edges to flow smoothly together, reread the notes and rewatch the video as needed.

• 2 pages of texture analyses from lesson 2. You're quickly forgetting what was covered there, in terms of drawing texture by using cast shadows to imply the little forms that exist along the surface of your objects, rather than trying to enclose them in line.

• 4 plant drawings. Draw each one in its entirety - I notice that your drawings have a tendency of establishing the basics, but they don't get pushed too much farther than that. Focus on the individual forms, make them solid, and then build them up.

Take your time. Do not rush.

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

2019-06-05 21:24

No worries, I got a notification in my email. I'll take a look at your homework submission in a couple of hours when I get home.

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

2019-06-05 20:41

Congrats on getting it done! You've definitely demonstrated a great deal of patience, and while it's too bad you didn't apply the line extension method in that last leg of the challenge, you did hold through a great deal of it.

It is worth discussing what exactly the line extensions are all about. In simple terms, they show us how our sets of parallel lines converge towards their shared vanishing point. This is critical because as we analyze exactly how they're converging, we can identify where our lines are going off track, and more importantly how we need to change what we think about while actually drawing the lines.

It's fairly normal for students, as they draw a given line, to think about the other lines it shares a corner with, or those with which it shares a plane. These don't tell us anything about how it relates to its vanishing point however, so instead it's better to focus entirely on the other lines it runs parallel to - including those that have not yet been drawn, ignoring all others. Focusing on how it converges with these lines allows you to focus entirely on maintaining that appropriate trajectory, rather than guessing and hoping for the best.

Furthermore, we can think about the actual angles between the lines as they leave the vanishing point, as explained here. Often you'll find that the two middle lines of a given set will have a fairly small angle between them, often running virtually parallel to one another by the time they reach the box itself. Being aware of these kinds of relationships can give you some useful hints to apply, as once you know two lines are going to be virtually parallel, it's easier to draw them correctly.

A few minor points to mention - for the most part your line quality is pretty good, though I do see a little bit of arcing here and there, a few wobbly ones, and some cases where you correct mistakes with a second stroke to follow the first. Correcting mistakes and any kind of reflexive drawing is a bad habit to get into, so try fighting the urge to do that. I'm pleased that they were fairly limited overall. As for the line quality, keep pushing the ghosting method, focusing on separating the mark making process into three independent stages (planning, preparing and execution), with the last being focused on achieving a confident, smooth stroke.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. You're headed in the right direction, though you do have to work on those convergences, so be sure to integrate some freely rotated boxes into your regular warmups (alongside the exercises from lesson 1).

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

2019-06-05 20:33

A quick reminder - the patreon tier you're currently at ($5/month) covers critiques for Lesson 1 and 2 as well as the box challenge. Lessons 3 and up are reserved for the $10 tier and higher.

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

2019-06-05 01:12

Well, to start with, congratulations on completing the challenge. You pushed through with a great deal of patience and I'm pleased to see that you applied the line extensions throughout.

Now, it is worth mentioning that when we extend our lines, in order to get the most out of this process, we need to think about what those extensions are actually telling us. Based on the rules of perspective, if a set of lines are parallel to one another, when drawn going off into the distance away from the viewer, they must converge consistently towards the same point.

With this in mind, a fairly consistent trend becomes clear in your boxes: much more often than not, the lines are diverging. As they move away from the viewer, they are growing farther apart, rather than coming together at a single point.

There are several potential reasons for this:

• The first thing that comes to mind is, are you doing things backwards? Is it possible that you're applying hatching lines to one of the BACK faces, and then extending the lines in the wrong direction? Looking at some of your boxes, this seems possible, though not a likely explanation for all of them. For example, the very bottom right of this page would be far more successful if it were reversed, but the bottom left of this last page clearly shows lines converging dramatically as they should be.

• When drawing a line, you aren't thinking about how it is meant to converge with the other members of its set at that moment - you're treating it like an afterthought, to see how it turned out afterwards. When drawing each line of a given box, you need to think about how it converges with its fellow parallel lines (including those that haven't yet been drawn), ignoring all others. Think about how they are all oriented towards a single far-off point. You can also consider the angles between them as they leave the vanishing point, as explained here, to identify which lines should be running close to parallel with one another, and which should be converging more dramatically.

It's worth mentioning that the vast majority of your boxes all used extremely shallow perspective. In this section of the 250 box challenge instructions, I do mention that you should have a healthier balance of boxes with more dramatic foreshortening (where the vanishing points are closer), and those with shallower foreshortening. I imagine this may also have helped you to focus more on the convergences.

As much as I want to mark this challenge as complete - as you did put a great deal of work into it, and that deserves praise - I want you to do 25 more boxes, applying what I've explained here. Show me that you do understand that these lines must converge, rather than diverge.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-05 00:24

Nicely done overall. There are a few points I want to mention, but you're doing a pretty good job of demonstrating your understanding of the concepts covered in the lesson.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that while your arrows do flow quite smoothly across the page, one thing that's holding them back is that you have a tendency to keep the spacing between the zigzagging lengths fairly consistent. Just as perspective will compress the size of your arrows as they move away from the viewer, so too will the space between those lengths grow smaller. This will help sell the illusion that they're plunging into the depth of the scene.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking quite good. The ellipses are very even and confidently drawn, the steady shift in degree across the length of the forms demonstrates a good grasp of how they flow through space, and you're doing a reasonable job of keeping the ellipses properly aligned (though you can probably improve on this front). One minor thing to mention is to remember that the sausages are meant to be like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You're very, very close, and generally are doing this well, but there are a few places where you've got the roundedness at the ends stretched a little too far. This is generally likely not intentional, but rather coming from getting used to drawing that kind of form without getting hesitant, so it's just something to keep in mind as you move forwards.

Now, it is worth mentioning that when you hit your contour curves, you do get a little sloppy. They're certainly still confidently drawn, but you're a lot less consistent in getting the curves to fit snugly within the silhouette of the forms. Remember that the illusion we're creating here is for the lines to feel as though they're running along the surface of the forms. If we don't keep them snugly pinched between the edges of the form, then we lose the effectiveness of this illusion. What I mentioned before about ensuring that your sausages are simple (two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width) applies here as well. I'm noticing that you're definitely leaning more into forms with different sized ends, and more complexity in that regard. Try to refrain from doing that as part of this exercise.

Moving onto the texture analyses, I generally don't read students' notes - those are largely for you as you process what you see. For all intents and purposes though, I can read some french (though my nine years of immersion has mostly evaporated). The one point I want to mention here is that you're definitely making a move into focusing more on the shadows being cast by the forms that exist along the surface of your objects, but as it stands you're still very much trapping yourself in a realm of line.

Line is a very useful tool to help establish the boundaries between forms, but they don't truly exist. They're something we add to help understand what we're drawing. When it comes to drawing texture, it's very easy to try and capture all of the forms that are present, delineating them with those borders and boundaries. This unfortunately asserts that we're intending to draw every single little element that is present, and from this the viewer gleans that anything we have not drawn is simply not present. If we leave an area blank, it's because there is nothing there.

This obviously doesn't work well for us, and so we need to apply a different tactic. You've definitely been making progress towards moving more towards shadow, but as it stands you are still trying to combine the two. Instead, as you move forwards, I want you to set line aside when it comes to texture. Don't first outline your major elements and then apply shadow. Establish each form by capturing the shadows it casts on its surrounding area, with no lines at all. This will allow considerably more flexibility, allowing us to really push our textures into darkness (with large swathes of solid black) or blast it out with light, leaving it overexposed with the only shadows remaining those caught in the deepest cracks where light cannot penetrate. This tactic convinces the viewer that there are indeed elements where we have not drawn them, and that entire areas of blank white or solid black can contain any number of features, merely suggested by the way the edges of those areas are carved.

You are definitely making further headway in your dissections, and I can see you thinking more in terms of those shadows, though you'll continue to improve on that as well with time and practice.

Your form intersections are coming along fairly well, though there is something about your approach to linework that causes the forms to feel a little less solid. There is definitely a lot of confidence to those lines, but at the same time the way they feather off into nothing before reaching the next corner does make them feel just a little less substantial. It's important to find a balance between achieving smooth, confident lines, but still having them go all the way to their destination. Some slight tapering to your strokes gives them a sense of liveliness, but too much makes them feel too wispy and ungrounded.

Also, I'm very pleased with your attempts at the intersections, and you've done well in some places, though there is definitely room for improvement here. This is fairly normal, as I don't expect students to fully grasp how these forms would intersect and relate to one another just yet. That said, keep in mind the idea that an intersection is essentially the line that sits on the surface of both forms simultaneously. It's where those surfaces meet. There are some intersections you've attempted where that isn't quite true.

For example, the cone-and-cylinder towards the bottom left of this page. The line runs nicely along the length of the cylinder, but cuts straight through the cone rather than running along its surface.

Lastly, your organic intersections are excellent. You're doing a great job of demonstrating how these forms sag and slump against one another, attempting to find a state of equilibrium without cutting into one another or violating each others' volumes.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-06-05 00:08

Alright, I'm going to mark this as complete. You're moving in the right direction, but you do have a ways to go. A couple things to keep in mind:

• DRAW BIGGER. That last insect took up about 60% of the page, leaving you with a lot of unused real estate. Construction is a spatial problem and demands room for your brain to think, and to fully engage your arm.

• When adding additional masses to the ends of your sausage segments, draw an entire ball at the end - don't just tack onto it like it's a flat shape. Again, this is demonstrated somewhat in this step of the wasp demo.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-04 23:57

Your work here is quite well done. There are a couple things to keep in mind, but by and large you're doing a good job of applying the concepts covered in the lesson.

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely across the page. One thing to keep in mind is that just as the arrows get smaller as we look farther away, the space in between them will also compress, as explained here.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are hitting all my major points. You're keeping the sausages simple, you're clearly mindful of the shift in degree across the length of the organic form (although sometimes you make some bigger jumps that don't quite follow the pattern of the other contour ellipses in a given form), and you're keeping those ellipses snugly within the silhouette of the forms.

Your contour curves are coming along well, though I'm noticing here that your degrees are generally more consistent here (rather than shifting as they ought to. Your curves also tend to stiffen up a little, and you're less accurate when it comes to getting them to fit snugly between the edges of the forms. You're not far off, but this is definitely visibly more difficult for you than the organic contour lines. Try and loosen up and focus on applying the ghosting method - planning and preparing before a smooth, consistent, confident stroke.

Your texture analyses are fantastic. Excellent observational skills, good transitions from dense to sparse. The only thing I want to mention is that when doing these kinds of texture studies, try and stay away from hatching (like you did on your first one). Hatching is like a generic filler that people use instead of studying the actual textures that are present, and while you did demonstrate a much more careful and attentive eye later on, it's very easy to fall into picking something generic and focusing on shading - which, as explained here, is not what we're doing.

You've got some more excellent work on your dissections - great use of linework, and excellent control over focal areas. The leather definitely gets a little busy, but by and large you're pretty good at controlling where you allow detail to get dense and where to leave it sparse.The only other recommendation I have is to be a little bolder in terms of allowing your textures to drop into full shadow, even using something like a brush pen. Pushing those full blacks (and eliminating all the little specks of white) really pushes a texture to the next level, as it forces you to control the impression of what's contained within that solid area purely through how its edges are carved.

Your form intersections are nicely done. Your boxes aren't always consistent in terms of the convergences of your sets of parallel lines, but all the same the resulting forms do feel solid, and your use of line weight is coming along well. You're also constructing these forms such that they feel consistent within the same space, and are demonstrating a good grasp of the relationships between them, for the most part, through the intersections.

Lastly, you're doing a great job of expressing your understanding of how the organic forms in your organic intersections interact within space, how they slump and sag against gravity and against one another as they struggle to find a state of equilibrium without interpenetrating or violating each others' volumes.

Keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-06-03 21:28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-03 18:44

This is actually the first time I've seen that particular issue with the gaps - so I suspect that you may have simply misunderstood the exercise. If I see it come up more often, I will add it to the common mistakes.

You're definitely doing much better here, though I have a few things to point out:

• I'm noticing that the little contour ellipses at the ends are often drawn a little strangely. Try and position these right at the end of the form (they seem a little off center at times), and keep in mind how its degree should reflect its orientation relative to the viewer. You're doing a good job with the degrees of the other contour curves, but these individual contour ellipses have a tendency to be wider than they should, making it seem like the end suddenly twists to face the viewer more directly.

• Try to keep all of your sausages around the same size, rather than having big ones and small ones.

• Keep the sausages relatively short in length (most of yours are fine in this regard, but I saw one at the bottom left of the first page that was snaking around).

• Keep trying to think of this as though you're dumping one form at a time onto a pile, and think about how gravity is going to play a role. The smaller forms you added to the bottom of the first page wouldn't really make sense, because there's no logical way for them to stay where they are, if gravity is being applied. This exercise is very much about thinking about how physics would be applied to all of these forms as they come together.

Try and apply these points when working on the last two pages.

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

2019-06-03 18:29

This is definitely a step in the right direction, though you're not quite applying the sausage method in its entirety.

To start with, your actual sausage forms are starting to look better. They can stand to be a little smoother (there tends to be a bit of a wobble in some of them, though many are quite well done).

As shown in the sausage diagram, what you're missing is the last step of actually reinforcing the intersection between the two sausages with a contour curve that, similarly to the form intersections, falls on the surface of both sausages simultaneously, and in doing so, defines how and where they connect to one another.

Pay special attention to just how much they intersect - they're not just touching tips, they're more solidly rooted within each other. Looking at your spider, while the sausage forms themselves were well drawn, they were often lacking enough overlap to create a convincing and solid intersection.

So here's what I want:

• Fill one page with chains of sausages, just as shown in the diagram. Chains of three sausages each would be best. Focus on drawing them larger, engaging your whole arm as you draw (drawing from the shoulder, that is). Get them to overlap enough to suggest a solid intersection, and define that intersection clearly with a contour line at each joint.

• One more insect drawing, demonstrating the use of the sausage technique again.

As for your question, there is certainly benefit in venting frustrations, but I think there's something to be said about finding an appropriate time and place to do it. It's one thing to feel frustration over your results, but while you are drawing, you need to set that aside. You need to focus not on judging your own results - as that's my job, not yours - but on doing your best to complete the task at hand. Your best may be terrible, and that's perfectly fine. But if you're distracting yourself with venting, then you're using focus and mental capacity that could otherwise be used to help follow the instructions more carefully. I expect this is part of why you're missing things - because your focus is split between what you feel you should be achieving, and actually applying what you're learning.

As far as these submissions are concerned, leave the venting out of it, and while it's never easy, try to focus purely on the instructions that you're following - not on how you expect it all to come out.

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

2019-06-02 18:08

Great stuff! I was a little worried with how you started out - you were kind of haphazard in terms of properly applying the line extension technique, and seemed to be going about it in your own fashion. After a few pages though, you started to fall in line and follow the instructions more carefully. From then on, you demonstrated a great deal of patience and care in how you worked through the challenge, and a truly conscientious use of the line extension technique.

By the end, you had improved quite a bit, with your boxes feeling considerably more confident and more solid. I was very pleased with the line weights you were applying from 128-158, though overall your construction and convergences continued to improve all the way to the end.

One suggestion I have is to try and be aware of how the lines of a given set leave the vanishing point, and the angles that fall between them, while you are actually drawing those marks. I'm noticing places where the two middle lines of a given set tend to diverge from one another, with one of them in particular falling out of sync with the other three of the overall set. By being mindful of the angles at which these lines leave their vanishing point, you can identify cases where the two middle lines have a very small angle between them to begin with - something that results in them running virtually parallel to one another once they reach the box, especially when that vanishing point is a good distance away. I explain this concept further in these notes.

Taking advantage of this requires you to think specifically about how the lines of a given set (including those that haven't yet been drawn) converge, as you're drawing. Don't worry about the lines that aren't running parallel to the one you're drawing at that moment - just focus on the ones that share a vanishing point.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-01 19:23

Overall you're doing pretty well, though there are a few things I'd like to point out:

• For your arrows, you're generally applying the notion of perspective where the arrows get smaller as they move farther away fairly well. What you're missing however is the fact that the space between the zigzagging lengths of those arrows will also compress as we look farther away, as demonstrated here. This will help push the idea that your arrows are flowing into the depth of the scene, not just across the two dimensions of the page.

• In regards to your organic forms with contour lines, I mention in this step of the instructions that you need to stick to very simple sausage forms. That is, think of them as being two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. These kinds of forms become even more relevant as we move through the lessons, where having them as simple, basic starting blocks is critical. The simpler a form is, the easier it is to make it feel solid - we can then build upon it with more simple forms to create greater complexity while maintaining that solidity throughout.

• For the most part, it seems that you're not entirely aware of how the degree of your ellipses should be shifting over the length of your sausage form, so give these notes a read.

• Your ellipses are also a little stiff/uneven, so keep pushing yourself to use the ghosting method and execute the marks with a confident, persistent pace from your shoulder. This does improve over the set however, which is a good sign.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are coming along well, though I strongly urge you to overshoot your curves slightly as shown here to ensure that they curve properly as they reach the edge of the form.

• Fantastic work on both the texture analyses and the dissections. You've done a great job of utilizing the cast shadows to gain a more fluid, flexible control over the small textural forms that exist along the surface of your object. You definitely did show greater control of that sort in the texture analyses than the dissections (where there wasn't much gradation in terms of dense to sparse on the dissections) but both were still done very well.

• Your form intersections also demonstrate a good grasp of 3D space. While your hatching lines on those rounded surfaces did not go particularly well (generally that's something I avoid - if I have to, I run my hatching lines lengthwise so they can stay straight rather than trying to wrap them around a rounded surface, though usually I'll just leave them out if they're not serving any purpose), you did a good job of capturing these forms in a consistent, cohesive manner within the same scene.

• Your organic intersections also did a good job of demonstrating how these forms relate to one another without cutting into each others' volumes, instead being forced to slump and sag over one another to find a state of equilibrium. The second page was definitely much clearer and more successful of course, but it's understandably difficult at first to negotiate so many different forms being drawn in their entirety.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-01 18:58

Overall you're doing pretty well, though there are a few points I'd like to address.

To start with, your arrows flow very nicely both across the page and through the depths of 3D space. You're applying perspective effectively here both to the arrows themselves, as well as the space between the zigzagging lengths, ensuring that the farther back we look, the more that space compresses.

Your organic forms with contour lines are a good start, though I noticed a couple issues:

• I'd generally recommend drawing these a little larger on the page. As spatial problems, our brains benefit from being given more room to think through this sort of thing, and it also allows us to engage our entire arm more easily.

• I'm pleased to see that you're adding a little ellipse on one end, but you're actually using this incorrectly. This is intended to sit on an end of the sausage that faces towards us. You have pretty consistently placed it one the other end (based on what the degrees of the contour ellipses is telling us).

• This kind of small contour ellipse on the end of the sausage that points towards the viewer is also very useful when working with contour curves. Contour curves are essentially the same as contour ellipses, except part of them is hidden. You can think of it in terms of drawing or not drawing through a box - when we draw through the sausage, we're drawing the entire contour ellipse. In the case of this smaller one on the end, that entire surface is oriented towards the viewer, so we're able to see the whole ellipse rather than just a partial curve.

In your texture analyses, I noticed a heavy reliance on line. Prior to applying any of the cast shadows I discuss in the lesson, you lay down all of the elements of your texture in line. This unfortunately isn't an approach that works very well. Line itself doesn't actually exist - it's a construct that is quite useful when defining the clear boundaries between different forms. This doesn't work terribly well when dealing with texture.

When we attempt to outline each and every little form that exists on the surface of an object, what we're telling the viewer is that we are drawing everything that exists here. Anything we have not drawn does not exist. And therefore we don't leave any room for detail or forms to be implied - we're very explicit about everything that we include. If, therefore we have a very complex, busy texture with a lot going on, we're forced to draw a lot of little marks, which alongside being extremely tedious, also ends up looking pretty terrible. All the resulting contrast draws the viewer's attention to an unintended focal point.

Instead, we don't deal in line at all when drawing texture. We focus purely on implying the presence of a form by drawing the shadows it casts. We're drawing around it to imply the fact that it's there. Due to the flexible nature of cast shadows, we can leave a lot more gaps around a form without declaring that the form itself does not exist. In fact, we can go so far as to plunge the texture into darkness, engulfing the majority of it in black while still maintaining the suggestion that forms exist in that area. Similarly, we can overexpose the drawing, blasting away all but the shadows in the deepest cracks where light cannot penetrate, effectively having an area that is mostly blank, but that the viewer can interpret as being full of forms that they simply cannot see.

So, instead of outlining your textural forms with line, I want you to jump right into fleshing them out by drawing the shadows they cast. This same principle applies to your dissections. In addition to this, I can see signs in your dissections that you likely need to spend more time observing your reference images. From what I can see, you may be working more from memory - spending longer periods of time drawing without looking back at your reference. In general, the process is that we study our reference closely and continuously, taking only a moment to draw a mark or two before looking back at the reference. The marks we put down should relate to specific elements we've seen in the texture that we are trying to carry over.

Don't think in terms of "I see a scale, and so I draw a scale". It's very easy to get into drawing symbolic representations of the names we give these details (the scale you draw may not look anything like the scale that was actually there). Instead, focus on the shadows themselves, or other limited features that cannot be assigned a name. Names exist to take large concepts and simplify them - so by avoiding names, we're forced to take little pieces bit by bit.

Your form intersections look to be coming along fairly well for the most part, and I can definitely see an improvement in your spatial reasoning and confidence as you push through the set - though keep in mind that in the instructions, I did state that you should stay away from any particularly long forms (like long cylinders). Try and keep everything roughly equilateral.

Your organic intersections are similarly coming along fairly well, and conveying a good grasp of how these forms slump and sag over one another. I did notice a few places however where you seem to have added line weight to the wrong lines, resulting in parts of forms that should have been behind others showing up as being in front, specifically on this page.

Anyway, overall you're doing a good job. There are things to work on, though there will be ample time to improve on them as you integrate these exercises into your regular warmup routine. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-06-01 18:32

You're definitely moving in the right direction, but there are a number of instructions that you've missed along the way.

• Your arrows flow well across the page, but keep in mind that as you look farther away, the space between the zigzagging lengths of the arrow will shrink. Perspective applies both to the arrow itself, as well as to all of space. It all compresses the farther away we look. This is demonstrated in this step. Bearing this in mind will help you to better capture the impression that the arrows are coming from deep within the depth of the scene (though you are doing a decent job of that already, this will help).

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are a good start. You're doing a good job of keeping the ellipses fairly snug between the edges of the sausage form. I am noticing however that the ellipses are at times a little stiff, so work on applying the ghosting method more conscientiously, specifically in terms of make sure that you execute the mark with a confident, persistent pace. I also noticed that the degrees of your ellipses are all roughly the same. Give these notes a read, as they explain why the degree shifts over the course of the sausage form's length.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are coming along well, though you do tend to have some issues with the alignment of those contour curves. This is for a very specific reason: you neglected to include the central minor axis line, to which all the ellipses must align.

• Most of your texture analyses are pretty good, and demonstrate to me that you're moving in the right direction as far as your observational skills go. I did want to point out however that in this study you decided to cross-hatch, rather than ensuring that each and every mark you'd put down was actually relating to some specific element visible in the reference image. In general, I don't want you to rely on these kinds of automatic patterns, where you identify a criss-cross pattern and then go on to draw that. It goes against the principle of ensuring that we look at our reference carefully and continuously, taking only a moment to make a very specific mark to transfer some element from the reference to our drawing before returning to studying the reference image.

• The rest of your texture studies are considerably better, especially this one.

• Your dissections are coming along fairly well. There is definitely room for improvement in terms of how to organize and apply the information from your reference image, but you're moving in the right direction. I'm also pleased to see that you're mindful of how the surfaces turn away from the viewer along the sides.

• In your form intersections, you've definitely missed the instruction of avoiding any forms that are overly stretched in one dimension (like long cylinders). This is specifically to eliminate additional complexity from an already challenging exercise. While there is certainly more room for improvement in your mental model of 3D space, by and large these are going well. You're for the most part able to capture these different forms as though they fit cohesively within the same scene. This will continue to improve and become more believable with practice, of course, but you're headed in the right direction.

Your organic intersections are the only part of this lesson where you've gone way off the mark. The exercise revolves around the idea of drawing a pile of sausage forms, starting with one form, then dropping another on top of it and figuring out how it's going to rest on top of the form beneath it. Then we repeat this until we've got a stack of sausages slumping and sagging over one another.

What you've drawn here is a number of sausage forms, each completely ignoring the presence of any others. They feel like they were drawn separately and pasted onto the same page. The first and most critical issue here is that there's lots of gaps between them. If they were subject to gravity, the forms would be forced to rest directly on top of one another in three dimensions, wrapping around one another.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to reread the section on the organic intersections exercise (and rewatch the video there), then submit to me 4 fresh pages of organic intersections.

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

2019-05-31 20:51

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-31 17:17

Wow, nice find! Pretty impressive sleuthing.

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

2019-05-31 14:53

You'll have to post it again on the 5th.

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

2019-05-31 14:47

Hey, you're going to have to hold onto this one for a little longer. Based on the 2 weeks between submissions rule, you can submit this on or after June 5th.

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

2019-05-30 18:44

Looks like you're using the wrong account again! I'm going to go ahead and do the critique here anyway so we don't waste any time, but would you like me to transfer the patreon/lesson badges from your other account to this one? I can only have them sitting on one account at a time, but I'm happy to move them over.

Overall you've done a pretty solid job. I can see clear improvement in the consistency of your convergences, and by the end of the set, I can clearly see that when you draw a line, you're not getting distracted by the lines with which it shares a corner, or a plane, but rather you're focusing purely on how it's going to converge with those it runs parallel to. This is an extremely important point that you've picked up quite well, and it helps keep our boxes solid and believable.

Now, that isn't to say that you've still got room to grow in terms of getting those lines to converge towards the same point, but you're doing a great job in moving in the right direction. One thing that may help is that when you're thinking about how all these lines converge together (including the ones you haven't yet drawn), you can think about how they leave the vanishing point itself, and the angles that sit between them.

As shown in these notes, the two middle lines are going to usually have a pretty small angle between them. The smaller that angle gets, the closer to parallel the two lines run - and even moreso when they reach the box. This kind of a relationship is important to keep in mind, because it helps to avoid situations where one of those middle lines veers off on the wrong path. It's also the easiest relationship to maintain, because two lines running close to parallel is something we can achieve without thinking that much about the vanishing point.

One thing I noticed that is going to continue to need work however is your line quality. While you're not that far off from maintaining smooth, consistent lines, there does tend to be a degree of wobbling here and there. More than that, however, is that you have a tendency to automatically reinforce the lines you're drawing, resulting in two, three, and even four strokes sitting where only one should be.

This is a bad habit to get into, and is one you should consciously fight against. Don't worry about correcting mistakes - adding more ink to a problematic area is only going to draw more attention to it. And when you do draw a mark, each and every one should be preceded by the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method, before being executed with a confident stroke. This includes situations where we add line weight - it shouldn't be automatic, it should be planned, and it should still be executed with confidence (rather than trying to draw the additional stroke slowly and carefully to match the underlying line).

Keep that in mind as you continue to move forwards. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Overall you've demonstrated a good deal of persistence and patience, and have grown considerably over the set. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2019-05-30 18:24

Oh! My bad, I usually say that at the end of my critique. Yes, you're welcome to move onto lesson 2 - that is the recommended next step. The cylinder challenge doesn't need to be completed until prior to lesson 6.

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

2019-05-30 18:03

I'm glad you were able to sort out the issue with the direction of your line extensions. Early on, I think what may have initially been the source of the problem was that you were extending the lines in both directions. Eventually you got the right of it and started extending only in one direction... but it happened to be the wrong one. I also noticed that as I looked at the face of each box that you'd shade in, frequently it seemed like the box would look more correct if the opposite face had been shaded in and marked as the side that faces the viewer. Were you shading them in immediately after drawing them, or were you doing it later on, just before applying the line extensions? If it's the latter case, it'd make sense, as you might not be as sure which side was which (since we're drawing through our forms).

Either way, you definitely show improvement over the set, and you're able to get past the whole direction issue. Your overall confidence with your linework and box construction as a whole gets better as well.

There certainly is still room for improvement (largely because of the additional confusion you had to deal with along the way), but I am noticing that you do tend to still have lines that often diverge as they move away from the viewer (albeit subtly), and some sets of lines that are a ways off from converging consistently towards the same point.

I do however have advice that you can employ as you work on this in the future.

So when a student goes to draw a line, they obviously try and think about how the line they're drawing is going to relate to the others on the page. Many will try and think about the lines that share a corner with the one they're drawing, and others will think about the lines with which this one defines a plane. Both these cases are incorrect, and result in focusing on a distraction.

Instead, I want you to think about the lines that run parallel to the one you're drawing (including those that haven't yet been drawn) - think about how they all converge towards that single, shared vanishing point, and consider how you're going to angle this one to match up.

As you do this, you can also consider the angles between the lines as they leave this theoretical vanishing point (which may or may not be on the page itself). You'll notice that the two middle lines of a given set will usually have a fairly small angle between them - the smaller the angle, the closer to parallel these lines are going to be running, especially once they reach the box itself. This is a useful relationship to keep in mind - anywhere you can get away with drawing two lines as being parallel to one another is easy, because it's something you can gauge right on the box.

I explain this idea further in these notes.

Anyway, you've definitely put a lot of work and patience into completing this challenge, and have definitely shown a good deal of growth, and overall improvement in your understanding of the material. So, I will go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Be sure however to continue incorporating this kind of freely rotated box drawing into your regular warmup routine, mixing them in with exercises from lesson 1, and picking two or three exercises to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting.

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

2019-05-29 20:37

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-29 20:12

You've done a pretty great job and have demonstrated here a really solid understanding of the concepts covered in the lesson. To start with, your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and do a good job of pushing into the depth of the scene, showing that the page is a window into a larger world rather than the boundaries within which you can draw.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are solid. The ellipses are at times a little stiff, where you're definitely being quite mindful of keeping those ellipses snugly pinched between the edges of the form's silhouette. Keep that up, but try to push some more confidence into the ellipses' linework to keep the shapes even and well rounded.

Additionally, for the most part you maintained each organic form as a simple sausage (like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width) though you have a couple spots where an end is smaller than another, or where a midsection pinches slightly. Just things to keep an eye on.

Same goes for the contour curves - they're well drawn, though just a touch stiff (even less so than the ellipses), and keep an eye on the whole simple sausage thing.

Your texture analysis exercises are superb. You're demonstrating an excellent use of observational skills, as well as a thorough understanding of how to focus on using shadow to imply the presence of forms rather than relying on line to define the concrete borders of each. On top of that, they look fantastic. They're well balanced and convey exactly what each texture feels like, and you achieve considerable detail without creating any unnecessary or unintentional focal areas.

Your dissections really show your ability to take those details and really control them - to use them as tools towards your own ends. You're not necessarily always as detailed here, but you're just as effective in communicating the quality and characteristics of each surface, again, controlling those focal areas.

The only one I'd be a bit iffy on is the sushi roll, where you fell into using a sort of pattern that was created more from the specific pattern of actions (criss-crossing lines) rather than each little bit being intent-driven. It didn't come out badly, and you know what you're doing enough to be able to apply this kind of approach fairly well, but in general I try to get students to stay away from any approach that doesn't involve full control over every little bit that comes out of it - at least as far as the drawabox lessons go.

Lastly, your intersections - both form and organic - are very well done. In the form intersections you're demonstrating an excellent grasp of how each form sits in space and how they relate to one another. They feel cohesive and consistent throughout. Your organic intersections convey a similar impression, but instead showing an understanding of the volumes themselves, how they rub up against each other without interpenetrating. You've done a good job of establishing how they are forced to find a state of equilibrium instead.

You're doing great, so I feel very confident in marking this lesson as complete and sending you onward. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-05-29 16:24

The account you've got listed in my records is /u/Wolfcub86 - but more importantly, after receiving your critique for lesson 1, patreon's attempt to charge you at the beginning of April was declined.

Since the payment never went through, I won't be able to give you a critique until that gets resolved. Let me know when you're able to sort it out.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 23:34

I'll be sure to check it out!

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 23:33

Awesome! :D

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 23:32

Hahaha, a drawabox starter pack would be neat, but we're really just focusing on solving the problem of how pens are overpriced.. at least for now. Might look at ellipse guides after that.

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

2019-05-28 20:52

To start, fantastic work on the arrows. They flow very nicely through space and feel very organic and fluid.

Your branches are coming along fairly well, though I am noticing a tendency for your lines to either bulge out or pinch in between each ellipse, rather than flowing smoothly through them. Remember that the focus of this exercise is to get the individual segments to flow together like a single continuous stroke. Keep that in mind as you draw them, being sure to push through each stroke with confidence to maintain a consistent trajectory and avoid this kind of deviation. I can actually see some improvement as you push onto your second page, though there are definitely some areas there where there's still a fair bit of disjointedness. It's hit-and-miss, but by and large you're demonstrating growth, and that you're on the right track.

Your leaf exercises are definitely carrying over the same fluidity of your arrows, which is great to see. They're very energetic and capture the outside forces that are pushing each leaf along and driving their motion through space.

Now, once you start drawing the plant constructions, some issues definitely arise. Looking at your daisies, there's actually a lot of good going on here. You're drawing through them well, you're mindful of your cast shadows to help separate forms, and you're very patient in drawing each and every petal. You've applied construction at its core fairly well.

There are however two main issues:

• Compared to the leaves you drew previously as part of the exercise, these are quite a bit stiffer. There is a very distinct difference - you were previously flowing freely and smoothly, and here your lines are more rigid, as you're getting caught up with precision in matching your reference image. I suspect this is because when you're faced with drawing a specific leaf, you end up focusing primarily on where that leaf begins and ends. You're seeing it as a static object, with clear borders and delineations, rather than as a form that flows and moves through 3D space. Following the reference and drawing what you see is important, but at the end of the day, we're not here to reproduce what is there. We're here to communicate what it is telling us - we're communicating the idea that these leaves flow delicately through space, how they feel to touch and how all the parts relate to one another.

• You added a lot of little lines along the lengths of your petals, which is in the right direction, but I'm noticing that those additional strokes are not necessarily correlating to specific details you're seeing in your reference image. You noticed a pattern, and then moved to reproduce that pattern across all the petals. Patterns are helpful, but in general I want you to make sure that every little bit of detail that you transfer into your reference image, every little suggestion of texture, is something specific. Every mark should represent a little cast shadow that was present there, that you were carrying over to describe a specific deviation in the surface of the form. Additionally, I noticed that these lines had a tendency to stop suddenly rather than tapering off - that's something you'll want to keep an eye on. Shadows of this sort don't stop suddenly, they shrink as the slight fold in the petal that casts it flattens out. We're not, of course, drawing lines, because lines are a construct that we use to help define borders that don't really exist. Every mark we put down in pursuit of a texture is a shadow, and should be treated more as a shape with varying thickness and breadth.

As we push through, your drawings do loosen up somewhat - I can see a little more life in petals and leaves that follow, though that's still something that needs work.

I'm noticing that you have a tendency of leaving your flower pots fairly undefined - simple cylinders and boxes. I can understand why you'd do this, though generally speaking be sure to flesh out everything you decide to include in your drawing with full construction. They don't all need texture and detail, but capturing the thickness of the lip, the level at which the soil sits, and so on is quite important.

Generally you've been very good at drawing through your forms - ensuring that each leaf and petal is drawn in its entirety so you can understand how it sits in space. When drawing your grapes, however, you didn't do this - instead drawing the individual balls more as flat shapes, only drawing them as far as they go before being hidden by another. Definitely would have been much better to draw each sphere, so as to better understand how they all relate to one another.

Now, all in all there are both strengths exhibited here and areas in need of improvement and growth. I am however going to mark this lesson as complete, because I do believe you'll benefit more from moving onto the next step rather than being made to grind through more plants. Keep what i've said here in mind, of course, as there will be plenty of opportunities to apply them in the next lesson, and as many opportunities to apply them when you revisit the material from this one on your own.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 16:42

Yup! I actually am weirdly fond of ultrafine sharpies as a cheap alternative. I mean, they're not great, but they absolutely get the job done. I even mention them in the lesson 0 section on pens. Generally speaking I prefer the ultrafines to the sharpie pens, even though they still have that sharpie smell. The sharpie pens are a little scratchy for my taste (but still will work for the lessons as well).

Since you mentioned you're a patron, make sure you check your patreon inbox as I'll have sent you a message to gather your reddit username and other such information.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 16:17

They're something of a generic brand - basically our supplier also works with other major brands who change up the labelling/branding on the pens. The generic name is "Superior Needle Drawing Pen", and they're comparable to staedtler pigment liners and copic multiliner disposables.

I'm from Canada myself, and the prices for pens here are pretty friggin' ridiculous. Deserres sells staedtler pigment liners for $4.50 each individually, a pack of 8 different sizes at $33. Amazon sells them individually at $8.34 each as an add-on item (which is completely insane) and a pack of 6 assorted sizes at $19. The last one there seems to be your best bet, if you have a use for all the different sizes you get. That's more or less the racket - they pack in a bunch of pens to make it seem like extra value, but you're only likely to use a subset of them.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 15:48

Thanks for taking the time to test it out! It does seem to be app specific, though even there, it depends on your OS. On Android, the reddit app's browser seems to handle it fine, but not on iOS. So for now I'm adding a little warning to the button itself that says "opens in a new tab".

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 15:42

Damn, you might be right about that. I'll try to test that out and see what happens.