Uncomfortable in the post "Did a demonstration of constructional drawing as applied to a donkey for a student today, figured you guys would benefit from it as well"

2019-05-05 18:57

That's pretty awesome. How do the students respond to the approach?

Uncomfortable in the post "Did a demonstration of constructional drawing as applied to a donkey for a student today, figured you guys would benefit from it as well"

2019-05-05 18:14

Someone further below asked the same. The concepts apply similarly to the human body, though it tends to be considerably more complex in how they're applied. As such, it's beyond the scope of what Drawabox offers, and won't be something I get into for the forseable future.

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

2019-05-05 17:10

I was having trouble of how to break down my critique here, since I've already covered quite a bit in past critiques - so I decided to just list my raw observations. So prepare yourself - they're rough. There's a little more hope and a path forward at the end.

Your first drawing:

• Honestly, you picked a fairly complicated subject matter.

• The reference photo has some fairly dramatic foreshortening (because we're looking right up at a fairly large object), but your drawing doesn't capture this. If we look at the ellipses you laid down along the trunk of the tree, you seem to place it in an entirely different orientation. Rather than having the viewer be at around ground level (so the smallest-degree ellipse should be around the base of the tree, closest to the viewer), you've got that smallest-degree sitting about halfway through.

• In the previous submission, you demonstrated that you were capable of drawing branches that maintained a consistent width through their length, that flowed smoothly, etc. In this tree, your branches' widths pinch and swell all over the place, which severely undermines the illusion of solidity.

• Because you're struggling with the outer silhouette of these forms (and keeping their widths more consistent), you attempt to compensate by covering your form in contour lines in order to regain the solidity that has already been lost. It doesn't really work this way, and overusing contour lines isn't going to accomplish much. With each additional contour line, we see diminishing returns. You generally only need a couple, and they will have the strongest impact - the more you add, the less they do, and the more rigid and mechanical your drawing ends up looking.

• You also attempted to add form shading to your drawing to compensate for these construction issues, which we simply don't do in the drawabox lessons.

Second drawing:

• You definitely went to town on this one with unnecessary contour lines as well, though the underlying forms (at least the major ones) were much simpler, and therefore maintained their illusion of solidity a bit better. The contour lines still weren't largely accomplishing anything, and were mostly detrimental. The smaller forms along the tops did not come out looking very solid either, as from the beginning, your cylinders were not well constructed.

• My initial assumption upon looking at this was that the lines you drew for the spines coming off the surface of the cacti were actually just representing those spines as you'd done before. Upon closer examination of the reference though, it looks more like you did actually try to capture the shadows those spines were casting (which is a step in the right direction!). I do still want to stress the importance of treating these as shapes rather than lines. Lines lack dimension, whereas shapes can start out a little thicker at the base of the spine, and taper off as they move away from it.

I think you shot yourself in the foot a little bit from the beginning - you picked particularly difficult reference images. In addition to this, you still are exhibiting a bit of rushing - you're faced with a complex, overwhelming image and your reaction is the same that many students have. You panic, and try to put lines down without thinking them through entirely. There is some thought, but because the particular subject matter is so complex, there's still a lot of panic-driven marks that are put down in hopes that they make sense.

When I looked at your drawings initially, I thought you were just ignoring most of what I'd been saying, because there are a lot of mistakes that just come up again and again. Upon closer examination however, I'm starting to realize that this isn't entirely the case. You are trying to follow my instructions, but you're frequently biting off more than you can chew.

I also have to ask - are you continuing to practice the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of your regular warmup routine? I'm noticing areas where these earlier skills are getting a little rusty - especially when you're forced to draw lines and ellipses in a much smaller space.

I'm going to set out some assigned work that will have you work through some of the earlier stuff, building up key skills that are relevant to this lesson, and allowing you to focus on them in isolation. Then I'm going to assign specific plants that I want you to draw, picking the reference images myself so you don't bite off more than you can chew.

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves. Take your time, read through the notes and watch the video before starting on it - you may remember the instructions, but I don't want you to trust in your memory.

• 1 page of texture analyses. Your observational skills, especially when it comes to details and texture, is lagging behind. You still have a tendency to draw symbols, or just drop down a few random lines in the hopes that it'll look like something more. This, more than anything else, requires patience and care. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but one trick that may help is that when you're drawing the texture of something, don't think in terms of the names of things. Like if you see a bump, don't think "bump" and go draw a bump. This will cause you to draw what you remember a bump to look like, rather than that specific bump present in your reference image. This does mean that you'll only be able to hold a very small amount - maybe one or two marks, or a simple shape - in your mind as you transfer it to your drawing, but that's entirely normal. You will have to go back to your reference image frequently as you transfer the whole thing. And again, focus on every mark you put down being a shadow-shape rather than a line. You need to ask yourself about the form that casts each mark you put down.

• 1 page of dissections. Same deal applies.

• A study of this plant. Take the time to observe it carefully. On a separate page, you can even try doing a rough sketch (in whatever tool you prefer, even pencil) just to familiarize yourself with what's there, before attempting to use construction. Remember that you're not drawing a loose collection of lines - you're constructing solid forms in 3D space.

• A study of this plant. Same deal - do a rough sketch on a different page beforehand to familiarize yourself with what is actually there in the reference. Be patient and work through it step by step.

This assignment will take a lot of time, so to ensure that you give it all the time it needs, I don't want to receive your submission until after May 20th.

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

2019-05-05 16:24

Overall you've done a pretty good job. I do have a few comments to share however. Before we get into that though, I do want to commend you for your patience and conscientiousness. You've taken great care in applying the line extension techniques to each cylinder, and I can certainly see signs that you are thinking about what this analysis is telling you, and attempting to act upon it to develop your spatial skills further. Cylinders in particular, especially when drawn inside of and aligned to existing boxes, are very difficult. With the 250 box challenge, it's normal to see some pretty significant growth over the course of the full set. It is on the flipside entirely normal for the growth seen over the cylinder challenge to be less stark, so don't let that discourage you at all. Your cylinders are already pretty good, what we're working on right now are the subtler characteristics of the form that aren't as easily identified with the naked eye. The growth is definitely there.

So there are a couple things I noticed that you'll want to keep in mind:

• I noticed that you mixed up the cylinders-around-minor-axis and the cylinders in boxes, doing a few of each per page as you progressed through the set. It would have been better had you stuck to the order in which they were presented in the instructions - first doing the 150 around the arbitrary minor axis, followed by the 100 in boxes. Reason being, the first set is intended to focus purely on aligning your ellipses to the minor axis, and really hammering that out. Then when you move onto the second set, you wouldn't need to expend as much focus on that particular area, instead targeting the challenges specific to constructing cylinders in boxes.

• On occasion, I noticed some of your linework got doubled up, suggesting that you may have attempted to correct mistakes by automatically reinforcing the lines. You don't do it too much, but it is still very much worth pointing out. Correcting mistakes is a bad habit - once the mark is down, whether it's correct or not, it's best to leave it be and work around it. Make one mark for every line you put down.

Anyway, all in all you've done well. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "Did a demonstration of constructional drawing as applied to a donkey for a student today, figured you guys would benefit from it as well"

2019-05-04 21:26

Hard pass.

Uncomfortable in the post "Did a demonstration of constructional drawing as applied to a donkey for a student today, figured you guys would benefit from it as well"

2019-05-04 21:13

Figure drawing isn't a topic drawabox covers. A lot of similar concepts do apply, but it's not something I'm going to get into any time soon.

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

2019-05-04 20:01

You are moving in the right direction, but there are still a number of issues I'd like to address. Whereas last time I spent roughly an hour writing out my observations, this time I'll be pointing them out on the drawing itself (I've specifically decided to focus on the donkey), as well as doing a separate demo.

Here are the notes on your drawing. I'll also expand on a few things here:

1. Often times with certain animals the legs can appear to be quite straight, though there's usually a slight arc one way or the other, and choosing to exaggerate a little them as you did is a good call. The only mistake here is that the slight arc in the reference image was actually going in the opposite direction.

2. You complained in your follow-up commentary about the sausage method looking flat to your eyes, and the reason for this is that you neglected to apply the methodology in its entirety. As demonstrated in the lesson 4 diagram I linked previously, and as outlined in the critique itself (I discussed there being a few very basic elements to the technique, specifically the second one): the actual intersection between the two sausage forms needs to be reinforced with a single contour curve (or even a contour ellipse). It is this definition of the relationship between the two sausages that gives them the impression of being solid and three dimensional, rather than just simple shapes. It does so effectively enough that any further contour curves become unnecessary. This relates back to the point you mentioned about how previously I would generally keep the legs to be somewhat flatter. 2D shapes convey gesture a lot more effectively than 3D forms because often times when we focus on that 3D illusion, we end up bogging the linework down with contour lines and other tricks, which in turn impedes the sense of rhythm and gesture. Drawabox is a continually evolving set of lessons, and over the last year or so I started to integrate this 'sausage' technique as a solution to that problem, where we can have our cake and eat it too, since that single contour curve at the joint is all the reinforcement of form we really need, without causing the legs to appear rigid and lifeless.

3. If you have a three dimensional form (like the large torso sausage), and then add to it a flat shape, this will serve to flatten the drawing. When adding additional forms, it's important that you do so with full respect of how the forms that exist in the drawing sit in space. This is what happened along the underbelly of your donkey. I actually mention in the lesson that the initial torso sausage should sag slightly, which would have made this particular addition unnecessary.

4. You have other added forms that are a little better than the underbelly, but they still need to be pushed in terms of how they interact with the other forms that are present. This technique is very similar to the organic intersections of lesson 2 (which is why they're included at the beginning of this lesson as well). I realized just now that this was an issue I mentioned in my previous critique. You have already demonstrated that you are entirely capable of this based on your work in the organic intersections, so it's not that the skill is not there, but that you're not yet able to draw the connection between the two processes. You are however working towards it - there is a hint here and there that you're trying to wrap some of these forms around the rest of the construction. You may not yet believe in the solidity of the initial torso sausage however (if you recall, back in lesson 2 we discuss the importance of believing in the illusion we're creating), so addressing the issues with it may in turn help here.

5. I noticed that the initial sausage you drew for the torso was pinched through its midsection. Again, the diagram on the sausage technique from lesson 4 talks about avoiding any pinching, tapering, bulging, etc. and sticking to the basic form of two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This is critical in creating that illusion that the sausage form is solid and three dimensional, coming back to the importance of each component being simple, as complexity has a tendency to undermine our efforts.

In your response, you asked me to point out demonstrations where the sausage technique is employed. You can see it employed in this step of the wolf demo.

Here's a full, detailed demo for how I would approach drawing the same donkey. I'm hoping you didn't work from the same image you provided, as it was extremely low resolution. I was able to find this one which was considerably larger.

At this point I've spent almost three hours on this critique (between the overdrawing, the notes and the demo), but I have a couple additional things to mention in regards to your other drawings, since I've primarily focused on your donkey.

Fruit Bat: I'm noticing that your construction phase ended somewhat early. There's a lot of forms that seem to be lacking. When working on these, try and ask yourself questions about how it all fits together. For example, how do the wings connect to the body? As there's a lot of power behind those wings, it's likely that there's going to be some manner of muscle structure that drives them, so shoulder muscles, masses along the pectoral region, etc.

Owl: Don't forget to clearly define where the head/neck connects to the torso, and in general, how various forms connect and intersect with one another. Defining these intersections helps us to clarify the relationships between the forms, and in turn helps solidify the illusion that all of these forms are three dimensional, and not just a series of ellipses on a page.

It just occurred to me that you seem to have drawn each animal twice. What I had asked for was drawing each one up to the end of the "construction phase" (and taking photos of the drawings), then returning to each one and taking it to detail. The purpose of this was for you to take a drawing as far as you could with construction (note that I don't get into detail on my donkey demo until the very last step, the rest of that is all construction), and to push past this tendency I see where you jump into detail/texture much too early.

After you've had a chance to fully digest my critique and the demonstration, I would like you to do the following:

• Draw along with the demo, stopping just before the last step where I add detail. You can add a bit of line weight, but leave any fur/texture out.

• Draw the adult bear in this photograph, applying the same principles. Take a photograph at the end of your construction phase, then add fur/detail.

• Draw this wolf, again, with the same principles. You can also follow along with the wolf demo, and you may want to look up other reference to fill in the missing feet.

Beyond what I have already, I'm only going to say this about your response: I critique based on what I see. I certainly make mistakes, but more frequently than that over the last few years of reviewing students' homework, I've been able to see aspects of how they've approached things, and how they think about drawing and 3D space that they themselves were not aware of. Reading my critiques with an inclination to disprove or contradict what I'm saying is only going to do yourself a disservice. Set aside what you feel you know and focus on what I am pointing out. As I've already shown here, there were critical elements of my initial critique that you missed - whether that was because you were on the defensive or not, we cannot know, but you have nothing to lose by simply opening yourself up to my advice.

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

2019-05-03 18:46

Honestly, you may have had trouble with certain parts, but frankly I think your work here is spectacular. And that's saying a lot, especially considering that this isn't really the recommended time to tackle this exercise. You're certainly allowed to - you're allowed to complete the cylinder challenge any time after lesson 2 and before lesson 6 - but it's generally recommended that students do it on the later end of that spectrum. The reason for this is that it is a difficult task.

The first section isn't too difficult, and you did a solid job of it. Your lines were drawn with clear use of the ghosting method, and your ellipses maintained an even, smooth shape. You did a pretty good job of aligning them to the minor axis lines, and did an even better job of going back and identifying where there were slight deviations - this is by nature tricky when you've already got a line there asserting itself as the minor axis, even if it's a bit off. So great work there.

The true challenge in this exercise however is the second part - it leverages what students learn in the 250 box challenge as a foundation (something that while most students have developed well, have plenty of room to keep developing). This means that the underlying foundation isn't as reliable as we'd like - mess up the box, and the resulting cylinder will suffer for it.

All the same, you did a fantastic job. It's true that you did take some time to get used to how those ellipses would fit into the planes, but you picked up on this reasonably quickly, and also were able to get the proportions of your boxes pretty close to having two paired squares on either side (which helps to avoid cylinders that feel more squashed).

Your further error checking was as thorough and conscientious as before. You clearly took your time and thought about the relationships between the various lines, and used this information to help develop your approach further as you pushed through.

To put it simply, I have no issues to raise - you've done a fantastic job, have exhibited the qualities I want to see in my students, and have clearly learned and grown from the challenge. Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-05-02 19:55

Great work to start on your arrows- they're flowing very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and I can see a lot of dynamism in how they're moving. Generally here I look to see whether the student is demonstrating an understanding of how space itself compresses as you look farther and farther away - I can obviously see you shrinking the width of the arrow-ribbon as we look farther, though here it's a little difficult to tell whether you understand that the distance between the zig-zagging lengths would shrink as well. As such, I figure I'd call it out anyway, just in case. I explain this concept in this section. It's just something to keep in mind, and is a minor point.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are solid - you're doing a good job at generally sticking to fairly simple sausage forms, your ellipses are pretty smooth and even, and you're doing a pretty good job of keeping the ellipses snug within the confines of the sausage's silhouette. Continue to keep an eye on the alignment of your ellipses to the central minor axis line - you're very close, but there are slight deviations here and there. Additionally, I can see some minor shifting of the degrees of your ellipse but often times they're remaining pretty consistent. Give these notes on why the degree of the ellipses should widen/narrow over the course of the form's length a read.

Your contour curves are quite similar - generally very well done, and you're wrapping them around the form in a convincing manner, but keep an eye on the degree shift and the alignment to the minor axis.

You've done some fantastic work on your texture analyses. A lot of careful attention to detail, excellent demonstration of your observation skills, and you've also shown a keen understanding of how texture relies on the use of cast shadow rather than actually drawing the individual forms themselves. You've got a lot of great variety here, and you applied what you learned from studying each texture to great effect when transferring it to the density gradient. This also was carried over nicely into your dissections. You handled the spatial challenge of wrapping those textures around the 3D form well, and I can see you pushing into breaking the silhouette a little with your details. You could probably stand to take more advantage of the silhouette, but you're absolutely headed in the right direction here.

Your form intersections were generally quite well done. For the most part you're demonstrating a well developing grasp of 3D space and how these forms relate to one another, though I did feel that, especially earlier on in the exercise, you did have a tendency to apply more dramatic foreshortening to your forms than you perhaps should have. As explained in lesson 1, foreshortening can imply the scale of an object (dramatic foreshortening suggesting large scale and shallow foreshortening suggesting something smaller and more relatable to the viewer). When you have a lot of forms together, leaning on shallower foreshortening helps to make the objects feel more consistent and cohesive. All the same, you are doing fairly well, and the intersections themselves suggest a spatial awareness that is developing nicely.

Your organic intersections are also fairly well done, and I can see a grasp of how these forms occupy the same space, how they interact with one another, slumping and sagging as they find a state of equilibrium without violating each others' volumes. One thing that would help with the overall presentation as well as with the sense of solidity, is playing more with line weight to clarify overlaps. Right now you stuck to fairly uniform lines and cast shadows, but there's not much in between to suggest where one form sits in front of the other.

Anyway, 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)"

2019-05-01 21:03

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2019-05-01 20:30

Your leaves are showing improvement - they're flowing much better through space, and you're not showing as much fear with having them twist and fold over each other. The linework isn't great, admittedly - there's a lot of gaps between lines which undermines the overall solidity and cohesiveness of the forms, but it's still a step in the right direction. You are still applying the ghosting method to each and every mark you put down, right?

The branches are considerably improved. A lot of these are flowing much better, and the various segments come together much more seamlessly. There's a few hiccups here and there, and you've got some that have some more jerking, sudden turns (we want to keep these branches flowing smoothly), but by and large these are much better.

Your first plant construction is okay. You've approached each leaf methodically, you're not afraid to let them overlap completely, and you're still drawing through each one individually which is great to see. The leaves are a bit rigid, but in a way that makes me think that your reference image was just like that, rather than an actual issue with your drawing.

I am noticing though that when you attempt to add little ripples to the edges of your leaves, you try to get those added lines to come off the original linework of the earlier phase of construction and then return to it, which is good - but when you do, you seem to miss slightly resulting in a visible break. For example, this one. Notice how the line doesn't actually end on the simple leaf construction? It's instead just kind of floating there. This kind of thing is going to hurt the end result of your drawings.

Your last drawing wasn't that great - the forms themselves don't really feel well constructed. Remember that construction comes from building up from the simplest possible forms (because these are the ones we can make solid most easily), and then compounding on them until we reach our more complex goal. In this case, it looks like you went thinking in terms of drawing a series of separate lines, rather than thinking in terms of each individual form you were laying down.

In addition to this, when it comes to the detail you added (both on the cacti and on the ground), you seem to have ignored the critique I gave previously, where I address this exact issue:

For the little nodes along the cactus' surface though, I want you to refer back to this section from lesson 2's texture analysis exercise. When it comes to texture, it's true that texture is made up of many individual forms that exist along the surface of an object, but we do not draw those forms. Instead, we draw the shadows they cast on the surface around them. Same goes for the pebbles at the base of the cactus.

I'd like you to do two more plant constructions, with at least one of them showing me that you understand the use of cast shadows when adding detail and texture to a drawing. And make sure that when you add that detail, that you don't draw symbols from memory, but instead that you transfer specific visual information piece by piece into your drawing. Think about the little forms that make up each little detail instead of actual concrete objects you can name.

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

2019-05-01 20:17

Overall you've done a pretty good job, though I do have a few things I'd like to point out:

To start out with a good point, you demonstrated an incredible degree of patience and care with applying your line extensions to analyze your results and identify patterns of mistakes. You did a great job identifying minor axes, for instance, which isn't easy when there's already a line present that you were trying to match. It requires you to ignore what is right there in order to find the true minor axis. Well done.

I definitely noticed that for the first section of this exercise, you didn't really vary the orientation of your cylinders at all. All those pages basically look like they're close to the same. A lot of the value in these kinds of exercise comes from being sure to change the orientations up, try different angles, shallow/dramatic foreshortening, etc.

All in all, your cylinders-in-boxes are coming along well. It's a difficult thing to tackle, and there's plenty of room for growth and improvement here, but you are trundling down the right path. Often times I see students here with boxes that are sorely out of whack, but yours generally do seem to be coming along fairly well. Your convergences are pretty consistent, so you're giving yourself a pretty solid basis for those cylinders. Similarly to how you're drawing your boxes with an awareness of how those lines need to converge towards their vanishing points, the same is going to be necessary with the ellipses (although this is obviously a lot harder, because it's not as easy to visualize the various elements of the ellipses. Thinking about where you want the ellipse to touch its bounding plane and even marking that out with tiny points may help.

It's also worth mentioning that you have a lot more variety with the cylinders in boxes than your first section, so it's good to see that the problem didn't bleed over into here.

Keep up the good work, and consider this challenge complete. Be sure to keep doing some of these as part of your warmups every now and then however, so you continue to develop these skills and keep them sharp.

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

2019-05-01 19:43

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for your questions:

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

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

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

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

2019-04-30 19:05

This is definitely a move in the right direction. Just a few things to keep in mind:

• Keep your sausage forms simple. The sausages, as shown here from a later lesson, are basically just two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Don't let your ends differ in size, or your sausage taper/pinch through its midsection. Keeping the form simple will help reinforce its solidity.

• Your form intersections definitely convey a stronger grasp of 3D space. Keep an eye on your linework though - keep working on tightening up your ellipses (make sure you're drawing from your shoulder, engaging your whole arm and drawing with confidence), and I also noticed that some of your straight lines started to get a little disjointed and broken at times, where what would generally be captured with a single stroke ended up being made up of several. This suggests to me that you may not be using the ghosting method as consistently as you should. Remember that it should be used for each and every mark you put down, without exception.

• Your organic intersections are considerably better than they were before, though again your linework is at times a little sloppy and rushed, and a couple forms there ended up coming out entirely flat due to the contour curves themselves not being wrapped around the rounded forms properly. I know you're capable of doing that correctly, as you've demonstrated it in the previous exercise, so make sure you're showing me the absolute best you are capable of at this moment.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but make sure you're more mindful of your mark making as you continue to move forwards.

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

2019-04-29 20:03

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2019-04-29 03:55

Above all else, texture relies heavily on knowing what you're looking at. Being able to identify those little, subtle surface variations/forms that exist, and being able to separate their shadows from the local colour of the surface. The reference image you used for that flower was, as you identified, primarily local colour (information that is irrelevant to us). It was also not high resolution enough for us to really identify more than that. I mean, the vein pattern was probably following actual veins under the surface, so we could surmise that a texture something like this might exist there with each vein creating a slight bulge in the surface, and little shadows being cast on either side of it. We would not outline those veins fully however, because we're only drawing the shadows - not outlining the veins (or whatever form might be present in a texture).

If we were to draw every single little form that existed on the surface of an object, it would quickly become overwhelming and difficult to look at, due to the sheer contrast of it. So instead, when tackling texture we are forced to find another path - one that still accomplishes our goal of communicating information about the object to our viewer, but does so by leaning more on implying what is there. That is ultimately what shadows allow us to do - unlike individual lines, shadows can merge together into large shapes, keeping contrast at a minimum and avoiding the creation of unintentional focal points.

Furthermore, shadows can be controlled. These drawings are fully within our control - we're visually describing an object to the viewer, but the lighting that is applied to that object is up to us. We can plunge certain areas into darkness (making the shadows so big they start engulfing each other) or we can overexpose others to make the linework sparse (just little hints of shadows here and there, leaving the viewer's brain to fill in the rest).

But again - it starts from observation, from knowing what is present there. So when tackling texture and detail, it's very important that your reference image be high resolution enough for you to be able to identify what is actually there. Only then can you start thinking about how to actually convey it.

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

2019-04-28 23:03

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2019-04-28 22:42

Whew! Okay. So to start with, your arrows are pretty much flowing well - don't forget to compress the space farther away from the viewer (decreasing the distance between zigzagging lengths of ribbon) to push into the idea that it's going farther in space, rather than staying relatively close to the surface of the page.

Your page of leaves is definitely very rushed - something that has been a problem for you in the past. Notice the wealth of blank space on that page? That's a sign that you haven't made very much of an attempt. I can certainly understand some exercises being a lot less interesting than you'd like, but you ultimately need to decide whether you're going to follow this particular route (with all of its boring exercises), or not. And if you take that route, then you gotta commit to it all the way through, because you trust that practicing these things will help you develop important skills. There's no half-measures here.

For what you have drawn here, you're experimenting with the flowing shapes of the leaves reasonably well, though the detail (which isn't really necessary) is more scribbly and haphazard. In general, it's not a great idea to draw detail without looking at specific reference, as your visual library is not going to be developed enough.

Here are some notes on how you're handling twists. Always focus on that central flow line, drive it forwards and put a little arrow head on the end to remind yourself of how it represents the forces being applied to that leaf as it flows through space (like air currents and wind). Don't get trapped into thinking of the leaf as a static object that has a clear start and end - while the leaf does indeed have these things, the forces that drive it extend far beyond its physical surface.

You're moving in the right direction with your branches, but as is pretty normal at this point, you'll have to continue working on getting those segments to flow more smoothly into one another. Right now you've got a lot of obvious 'tails' where the segments separate. The whole technique is built around the idea of being able to take a smooth, flowing, complex line and build it up using individual segments with the end result being seamless enough to appear to still be a single line. Remember that in order to achieve this, when you draw one segment, it needs to overlap the previous one rather than setting out on a completely different path.

I can see you playing with your ellipses' degrees here and there to capture how the branch turns through space, which is good to see. As you do this, try to keep the shift in degree a little more gradual (you've got some pretty quick jumps from a narrow degree to a much wider one), and don't forget about keeping your ellipses aligned to the central minor axis line.

Jumping ahead to your plant constructions, your daisy's a good start though as shown here you seem to be a little afraid to let your petals fold over themselves. Remember that you cannot stretch a petal like it's made of rubber. As they fold back over themselves, they have limitations, and cannot elongate or shrink along either side.

I quite liked your mushroom/cactus constructions on the next page - you approached their constructions very well, and established decent forms with a good sense of volume. There were aspects that were a little bit rushed and would have been better had you invested a little more time into the markmaking process itself, but by and large it's still well done.

For the little nodes along the cactus' surface though, I want you to refer back to this section from lesson 2's texture analysis exercise. When it comes to texture, it's true that texture is made up of many individual forms that exist along the surface of an object, but we do not draw those forms. Instead, we draw the shadows they cast on the surface around them. Same goes for the pebbles at the base of the cactus.

I felt that in your hibiscus, your petals flowed a lot better than they had previously - there's a strong sense of confidence behind those lines, and they've come out quite a bit smoother than in the past. When adding the little bits of edge variation and detail, I can see that you paid more attention to having that information come off the underlying construction, rather than ignoring it or treating it like a suggestion. That's great to see. When doing so, keep thinking about how that petal's surface sits in space, and make sure that the little addition you make is in line with what has already been declared. Remember that, as explained here, our drawings are lies that we are telling, with every line being an individual statement. We need to make sure all of our statements line up, that they don't contradict or undermine one another. In this sense, adding additional marks to a drawing can either reinforce the lie, or serve to negate it, which in turn confuses the viewer and breaks the illusion.

On the following page, one thing stands out more than anything else - these drawings are extremely small. Constructional drawing is a spatial problem, and our brains deal best with spatial problems when we're given lots of room to work through. In addition to this, it allows us to engage our full arm and shoulder more effectively, rather than drawing in cramped, stiff fashion from the wrist. On subsequent pages, you do start focusing on just drawing one plant per page (which is totally fine), though even in those cases you still refrain from taking full advantage of all the space afforded to you.

I've got one point I want to mention about this drawing, and it relates specifically to the vein texture you've added. As I mentioned before, texture and detail is drawn not by thinking in terms of lines or outlines, but by focusing on the forms that exist along the surface of an object, and the shadows those forms cast. The veins along the surface of those petals don't exist as lines as you've drawn them. Instead, they are actual physical bumps along the surface, and they cast slight shadows on their surroundings. What you perceive to be the vein 'lines' are a combination of the shadows they cast, and likely some local colour of the veins themselves. As we're not drawing colour, and are instead treating our subject matter like it's a solid colour, that point becomes moot - and all we have to focus on are the cast shadows. I also expand on this here.

The last bit of critique I want to offer pertains to this cactus. Aside from being small, there are many aspects of this construction that I like. You were mindful of the minor axis that runs through the main trunk of the cactus as well as the flower pot, and you attempted to construct several concentric ellipses for the pot to establish the thickness of its rim.

The only point I wanted to mention was that where the branching arms of the cactus connect to the main trunk, you haven't actually defined how they connect. There's no intersection there - you've gotten the two dimensional, flat shapes of the drawing to connect, but without establishing the three dimensional intersection of forms, the result is a flattening of the drawing at that area.

By and large you're definitely moving in the right direction, though I think you've certainly got areas you can improve on. You're close to being cleared to move onto the next lesson, but I do have a few things I'd like you to do first.

• Two pages of leaves, filled completely.

• One page of branches.

• Two more pages of plant drawings, taking advantage of the space on the page.

Do. Not. Rush. You're naturally impatient, and it's something that has come through in the past, as well as with certain parts of these exercises, though I think I can see signs that you're fighting against it. Keep at it, and make sure that you put as much time as you need to in order to do each exercise to the best of your current ability. Think through every stroke, apply the ghosting method, and prepare as much as you need. You're doing better, but I know you're not showing me your best.

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

2019-04-27 17:32

The other issue with your approach to fur is that you tend to draw a lot more of it, but also tend to do so a little more sloppily (due to the sheer amount you're looking to put down). When it comes to texture and detail, less is more.

One of the most important things I can tell you here is that your goal is not to reproduce your reference image. It's to communicate what you see. There's an immense amount of information there, but you can distill it into its major points. When it comes to conveying the idea that an object is furry, you can add a few tufts along the silhouette, and the viewer's brain will be able to tell from there that the whole surface is furry. I can already see you making attempts to push in that direction (while you tend to draw a lot of it, you do focus on the silhouette, and don't push it nearly as far as some students have). So you're aware of this, but you do need to really lean on the whole less-is-more principle a lot harder.

As I did with the wolf demo, I limited the number of tufts I added, I was perfectly okay with certain areas remaining smoother, and with the tufts I did draw, I took the time to design each one in an intentional manner. Every single mark you put down should be designed and thought out - even if that means you can only feasibly put down 10% of the fur you would have wanted to, if that 10% is designed intentionally, then it will be vastly more effective.

Additionally, remember that when you're breaking the silhouette, you're extending its shape. Don't think purely in terms of lines being added - think about the actual shapes that are being appended to the silhouette. It's okay to leave a couple individual fly-away lines, but most of your fur should be concrete, designed shapes that come out and return to the silhouette.

Now you're pretty far along, but I know that with some adjustment you are fully capable of doing much better. So in order to apply this critique, I'd like you to do the following:

• Draw 3 more animal drawings, with NO detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on their construction, taking them as far as that construction will take them.

• Take photos of those drawings and set them aside.

• Once all three are done and recorded, add your detail, texture, fur, etc.

Submit to me all six photographs - three without detail, construction only, and three with detail.

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

2019-04-27 17:32

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

Your demo follow-alongs

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

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

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

Skipping some steps

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

Drawing basic construction too lightly

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

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

'Replacing' linework

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

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

The sausage method for legs

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

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

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

Ribcages

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

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

Adding additional masses

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

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

Fur

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

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

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

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

2019-04-27 04:53

Old thread got locked, those of you eligible for private critiques can post your work here.

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

2019-04-26 18:31

Hmm... I'm pretty surprised that it's an A4 sketchbook. Well, dedicating one drawing per page should help you take advantage of the space better, at least, and the loose paper should help somewhat. We'll see how it turns out and work from there.

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

2019-04-26 17:41

I think the biggest issue is that, like most people at this stage, you're not really particularly well equipped to self-critique. Despite that, you're going pretty hard on it, identifying issues that are not nearly as significant as you might think, and ultimately weighing down your own confidence.

On that note, I'm going to attempt to critique your work without your own assessment colouring what I decide is worth remarking upon.

To start with, your leaves exercise is fairly well done. A few of these remain fairly flat, but most contort and twist through 3D space in a manner that makes them feel more three dimensional. One point I do want to make about how you're adding detail is that while you're generally doing a pretty decent job, always remember that when adding complexity to the edge of the underlying construction, ensure that you adhere to that original edge. I explain this in greater detail here. Basically you don't want to create a new edge to replace your old one - you want the new edge to incorporate that previous simpler edge by having little bits that come off of it, and then return to it. At the moment, you tend to zigzag around it - you clearly are aware of the edge, but you don't really adhere to it as closely as you should.

Now, your branches are moving in the right direction, but there are a couple issues:

• One of the major points of this exercise is to get used to drawing a long, complex edge using several smaller segments and having them flow seamlessly from one to the next. You've got a good start on this, but there are a couple of issues. Firstly, when overshooting the second ellipse, you should do so much farther - halfway to the third ellipse is ideal - so you have more of a runway for the next segment to overlap with. Secondly, you currently do have a pretty visible bend of the branch at many of your ellipses, which impedes the general flow of the overall branch. Keep in mind that just like all of our line exercises in lesson 1, we want our branch to flow smoothly and confidently.

• Your ellipses do appear to be a little stiff at the moment. Some of your photos suggest that you're working in a smaller sketchbook (though I'm not 100% sure of this), and drawing smaller can often result in a student stiffening up, drawing from their wrist, etc. Don't forget to apply all the same principles to these ellipses. Apply the ghosting method, draw from your shoulder, and draw through your ellipse two full times before lifting your pen, focusing always on achieving a smooth, even ellipse.

• These branches in particular do have a tendency to flow across the page rather than through all three dimensions of space, so that's something to work on. As you lay out your ellipses, think about what the degrees of those ellipses suggests about the trajectory of the path you're laying out. Take a look at these notes on the topic.

As far as your plant constructions go, I quite liked many of them. I felt that the flow of your leaves and flower petals was fairly good - you gave the impression that these objects flowed through 3D space, and that they did so fluidly, rather than getting stiff. Despite your own insistence that your daisy was the worst of the set, the bottom right drawing is actually very well done.

When it comes to these constructions, the first thing I want to make very clear is that you're drawing way too small. Like I said before, your sketchbook does look to be a smaller one, and on top of that, you're squeezing four drawings to a page. Construction is a spatial problem, and our brains benefit immensely from being given more room to think through the relationships between forms, and how various objects sit in space. Drawing smaller is a pretty common issue beginners exhibit, and they often do so out of a lack of confidence. There's frequently a subconscious drive to draw smaller so as to hide problems and mistakes, but the opposite often happens - drawing smaller causes us to stiffen up, it makes our linework appear clumsier due to the overall thicker strokes relative to the overall size of the drawing, and generally makes us sloppier. Not to mention the fact that smaller drawings tend to make us forget to engage our shoulder when drawing.

I honestly do believe that the areas where you're struggling to have certain forms flow through all three dimensions of space comes down to this. You do manage in many areas to get your leaves to flow nicely despite it, but there still are indeed cases (like your potato plants which got crammed up against the spine of your sketchbook) where things flattened out a great deal.

The last thing I want to address is your mushroom. There's just a few points I want to raise here:

• Your mushroom here is constructed using a series of ellipses. Your ellipses are definitely looking quite stiff (again, partially due to the size), and you're not always drawing through them in order to engage a confident stroke and full use of your arm, and this rigidity definitely comes through the entire drawing.

• I noticed you used a minor axis for the stem, which is great to see - but you can extend this all the way through into the cap, to help you keep all of them aligned to one another.

• Be mindful of the degree of your ellipses, as I mentioned previously in regards to your branches exercise.

• Your approach to drawing the grass underneath the mushroom was quite erratic and scribbly, something that is firmly discouraged back in lesson 2. I probably wouldn't have bothered drawing them (nothing is forcing you to - we're studying specific objects, and while there's benefit to drawing the ground around it, that grass easily becomes a distraction). If you were to draw the grass however, I wouldn't attempt to capture each blade as an individual line - they are all very similar to leaves, and I would at the very least attempt to capture each one's shape as it flows through space. I'd do so individually. Being intentional with your marks is extremely important, and attempting to rely on randomness always goes badly.

• I'm also seeing a tendency to try and outline all of the little forms that exist along the surface of the mushroom's cap. Remember that texture is only conveyed through the shadows cast by these forms. You're not to try and outline every little thing. Give these notes a read, as well as these. Same goes for the pebbles on the ground.

So, there are issues here, but I think that your self-assessment was somewhat driving you in the wrong direction, and causing you to stress over aspects that yielded little benefit. Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see the following:

• 2 pages of branches

• 2 pages of mushrooms

• 1 potato plant drawing

Draw this on loose printer paper, A4/8.5"x11".

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

2019-04-26 17:02

Very, very well done! Your work here has a couple of minor things that I want to point out, but by and large you've done a great job.

To start with, your arrows are generally flowing fairly well through 3D space. Keep in mind though that while you're playing with the width of the arrow getting smaller as we look farther away, the space in between the zigzagging lengths of the arrow will also compress, as explained here. This will help sell the idea that we're looking farther into a 3D scene, rather than the arrow simply flowing across the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly well done, though at times your ellipses get a little stiff. Always remember to draw these with confidence, following the use of the ghosting method, and draw them from your shoulder. Maintaining the flow and evenness of the shape is your first priority. Also worth mentioning, keep your sausage forms simple. A sausage is basically two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (as shown here). Don't let them get pinched/narrower through the midsection, and keep their ends equal in size.

Your contour curves are similarly looking good, though keep an eye on their alignment to the central minor axis line.

Your texture analyses are looking great. You're demonstrating excellent observational skills, and generally a good sense of how the lines you're putting down are in fact shadows being cast by actual forms. We can see in your first two rows a really nice sense of how the amount of detail being defined diminishes because it's being blasted away by an overexposed lighting scheme, leaving the rest to be implied.

I did notice that in the last one (that is, the last if the page were right side up), with the porous material (I think it says bone?), that you didn't take into consideration the fact that the layers on top would themselves cast shadows onto the layers beneath, and instead outlined the individual layers fairly uniformly.

The texturing carried over nicely into your dissections, where you extended the same principles and added the challenge of wrapping them around already rounded forms. Very well done.

Your form intersections demonstrate a strong grasp of how these forms exist within the same space, and how they relate to one another. You've clearly developed your understanding of 3D space a long way. The only thing I want to mention here is that on your first page of intersections with spheres, ellipses, cones, etc. the additional line weight you've drawn has a tendency to be a little stiffer than your original linework. This suggests to me that you're drawing it with less confidence - always remember that you want to execute each and every mark with the same kind of boldness, applying the steps of the ghosting method. If you hesitate and hold yourself back, then you'll imbue the overall drawing with that sense of rigidity, and undermine the solidity of your construction. The second page with various forms was definitely better on this note.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a great job of conveying how these forms sag and slump against one another, attempting to resolve their position in the pile without cutting into each others' volumes, and ultimately finding a state of equilibrium.

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

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

2019-04-26 16:47

Hahaha, it happens.

To start with, your arrows are looking pretty good, as they flow through space. One thing I do want to emphasize though is that while making the width of the arrow shrink as it moves farther away from the viewer, don't forget that the space between the zigzagging lengths of arrow (like in your top-left arrow on the first page) will also compress, as explained here.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally pretty well done. I'm seeing an effort to keep the ellipses snug between the edges of the form (rather than letting them slip out of the silhouette or float arbitrarily within it). I'm also seeing experimentation with shifting the degree of your ellipses along the length of the form. There are a couple places where your alignment can use some work, but generally speaking it's well done.

The only thing I want to mention on this front is a reminder to keep your sausage forms simple. Sausages are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No pinching in the middle, no unexpected swelling of the form, no shrinking towards one end.

Your contour curves generally are okay, though I am noticing a slightly higher prevalence of alignment issues, and the degree of your curves tends to be a lot more consistent and static here. As explained here, make sure they're shifting gradually along the length of the form.

You've got a good start on the texture analysis exercise. You're demonstrating a gradual development of your observational skills, and a shift from drawing more symbolically to actually attempting to capture what it is you see before you. This carries over into your dissections, where you're tackling each texture with care and purpose, picking on specific visual information and detail to transfer over into your drawing rather than relying on any kind of scribbling, randomness, or generic hatching.

Your form intersections nail the first point I look for - which is whether or not you can draw forms that feel consistent within the same space. You're doing a great job on that front. Your actual intersections, which are a secondary aspect of this exercise, are getting there but there still do seem to be some mistakes here and there. Always remember - as covered in the lesson, the intersection line is something that exists on the surface of both forms simultaneously. If ever you find your intersection line leaves the surface of either one of the two intersecting forms, then you'll know something's gone wrong.

Additionally, don't forget that in the instructions, I mentioned that you should avoid any forms that are stretched in any one dimension, and stick to those that are more equilateral (roughly the same size on all three axes). This helps keep further complexity away by avoiding unnecessary foreshortening.

Lastly, your organic intersections are doing a decent job of demonstrating how these forms sag and slump against one another, finding a state of balance without pushing into each others' volumes. One suggestion I do have however is to focus on using basic, simple sausages (as explained earlier in my critique). The more complex you allow them to get, the more you compromise on their illusion of solidity. Construction, which we'll get into in the next lesson, works on the basis that everything starts out as simple as possible, so as to start out with as strong of an illusion of solidity as we can. From there, we add more and more forms, building things up towards our final intended object. That solid, simple foundation is key.

Overall you've done quite well. 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)"

2019-04-24 12:52

Ahh, I see. In a lot of ways, the compound forms exercise is quite similar to the form intersections, though perhaps somewhat easier. All things considered there's no harm in slipping that into the list of exercises you choose from for your warmups.

As for your other question, I'd rather you didn't. Peter Han's dynamic sketching course used toned paper because we dealt with rendering alongside construction, using markers, white pens, etc. to build up values. Drawabox does not touch on rendering (for the reason discussed in the texture section of lesson 2). I don't want students to get caught up and distracted in the idea of making their drawings look pretty - each drawing is merely an exercise to help develop your understanding of 3D space and how forms can be manipulated and combined within it. Therefore there's no benefit from using toned paper. Better then to stick to that which is most accessible - basic printer paper being ideal.

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

2019-04-24 02:58

Don't forget about the 2-weeks-between-submissions rule. It doesn't apply to revision work, but when submitting work for a new lesson, you have to wait a full two weeks. Your last submission was 9 days ago, on April 14th, so you'll have to hold onto your work and submit it on April 28th at the earliest.

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

2019-04-23 20:23

You've got a good start on your arrows. They're flowing quite nicely across the page, and I can see you playing with the width of the arrow as it moves farther away from the viewer. One thing that I do want to recommend however is that perspective doesn't only shrink the width of the arrow as we look farther away - it also compresses the space in between the zigzagging lengths, as explained here. This is something that you can definitely push a little further to help exaggerate the idea that these arrows flow through the depth of the scene, exploring all three dimensions of space.

With your organic forms, the first thing I want to point out is that this exercise really benefits from the use of simple sausage forms, as explained here. You can also take a look at this diagram, which shows how the sausages are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No pinching through its length, no swelling, etc. Keeping these simple allows us to focus on the contour lines themselves. In the future when we get into utilizing these kinds of forms as part of our constructions, you'll see that we rely on the idea of everything starting out as simple as possible, so as to maintain the illusion of solidity. We can always add complexity as we go by adding additional forms after the fact - but all of the components we play with are at their core, very simple.

You're doing a pretty good job at keeping your ellipses and curves snugly contained within the silhouette of the organic form. I'm also pleased to see you drawing through most of your ellipses - there's a couple where you didn't, and they definitely came out much more stiff and uneven than the others.

I'm also seeing signs that you're aware of how the degrees of your ellipses shifts along the length of the form, though there are a few places where you may not have been thinking about this, and as a result drew them with the same degree across the entire length. Just be sure to keep this in mind.

Moving onto your texture analyses, there's definitely signs here that you didn't fully grasp the purpose of the exercise:

• Your observation on the first one is pretty good - you kept an eye on your reference image and focused on individual details, capturing that information and transferring it to your drawing. I can also see that on this first one, you attempted to use the cracks in what I assume to be a wood log to convey a shift in density from left to right. That's pretty good, though the far left side is meant to be completely black, with a gradual transition to becoming more sparse. The point of the black bar on the left side is to give you something to blend from - but from the looks of it, you didn't pay too much attention to it, and didn't create a smooth transition.

• Textures are made up of little forms that exist on the surface of an object. Whether they're bumps, cracks, bits of bark, etc. In the lesson, I explain how instead of attempting to think in terms of drawing with line, that you should think in terms of the shadows these little forms cast. I don't see too much of this in your work - you should definitely reread this section, along with this "common mistake" from the exercise page.

• While you did a good job of observing your reference carefully in the first one, the second and third fell short in this area. You seem here to be working more from memory - that is, spending a lot of time drawing without looking back at your reference. As explained here, the moment we look away from our reference, our brain goes to work simplifying what we've seen - resulting in us drawing symbols that represent the information we'd witnessed, rather than accurate depictions of it.

All in all, I think you started off on the right track, but ended up forgetting the actual parameters and instructions of the exercise, and continued based on what you remembered about the task. Be sure to reread the instructions as much as is necessary - just as our memory is faulty when it comes to observing and capturing texture and detail, it often fails us when it comes to remembering complex concepts and instructions.

Your textures on the dissections were decidedly more successful than the texture analysis exercise. There's still room for improvement, but you had some particularly nice results with some of these. Your linework was more mindful, and I think you paid more attention to your reference images. You also did a good job of wrapping the textures around the organic forms. There is still room for improvement of course, but here you're on the right track.

You've got a good start on your form intersections. The forms largely are drawn in a manner that feels fairly consistent with one another, and the intersections are demonstrating a well developing grasp of how they relate to one another. I did notice that you seem to have missed the instruction about avoiding forms that are stretched in one dimension (like longer cylinders) - I specifically want students to keep their forms equilateral (roughly the same size in all three dimensions) so as to avoid any unnecessary complications from foreshortening.

Lastly, your organic intersections are moving in the right direction, though remember that you want to convey the idea that each of these forms has weight to it. If there's nothing supporting its weight underneath, it's going to be sagging down to whatever will support it. Additionally, keep these forms simple in order to reinforce the illusion of solidity (as discussed before).

By and large you're doing well, but you do have a habit of forgetting or missing important instructions, so as you continue to move forwards, take care and read through the instructions as many times as you need to. Sometimes when you revisit an exercise, or come back to it the next day, giving it another read will be worthwhile.

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

As for your question about 'compound form exercises', I'm not quite sure what you're referring to. Could you give me an example of what you mean?

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

2019-04-23 19:51

Your arrows are well done. You're doing a good job of having them flow through all three dimensions of space, playing with perspective by both having the far end of the arrows shrink, as well as having the space in between the zigzagging lengths compress as well. This demonstrates a pretty good grasp of the idea that you're constructing objects and forms within a three dimensional world, rather than just drawing shapes on a flat page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are reasonably well done, though there are some issues that are present in some of them, but not in others. For example, in some places the degree of your ellipses shifts pretty erratically (rather than shifting gradually over the length of a form), and in some places you're doing a pretty good job of keeping the ellipses fairly snug between the edges of the form (giving the impression that the contour lines run along the surface of the form, which is what we're after), and in some other places they have a greater tendency to float more arbitrarily and feel less grounded.

This merely suggests to me that you've got a decent idea of what to aim for, but that you will continue to improve with practice. One thing I do want to point out however is that these sausage forms are essentially two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width, as shown here in this diagram from a later lesson. I'm noticing that the ends of your sausages tend to be a little stretched - that is, the roundedness of the "sphere" at the end gets a little more elongated. Try and remember to keep spherical proportions here.

Your contour curves are doing a good job of wrapping around the forms properly, though keep an eye on their alignment relative to the central minor axis line. I can see that you are doing a good job of striving to keep the contour curves snugly within the silhouette of the form - they fall outside every now and then, but the intent of what you're aiming for is pretty clear, so keep that up.

Very nice work on your texture analyses. You're observing your reference images quite carefully and showing a good eye for the detail that is present, rather than drawing from memory. You also apply the information very effectively to those density gradients, controlling your shadow shapes expertly to achieve the kind of effect you're aiming for.

That shadow control and observation is definitely a little weaker when you get into the dissections, though I think this may be because you perhaps weren't as focused at the time. Some of these textures were fairly decent, while others did seem a little oversimplified (mars terrain, black widow, jaguar fur, etc). Also I noticed that in the rope texture you utilized more generic hatching rather than actually studying your reference carefully.

I know you're capable of solid observation, but it's important that you invest the time to actually execute the work to the best of your ability.

With the form intersections, there's two elements that I look at. The first and most important is whether or not you're drawing forms in a manner that makes them feel consistent, as though they belong together in the same scene. This is pretty important, and is at the core of this exercise. On this point, you're doing a solid job. It doesn't feel like you've cut out forms from different scenes and pasted them together - they feel cohesive, like they belong together.

The other point that I look at is the actual intersections you've drawn. I don't expect students to nail these at this point, but I do like to see how they approach them. This is definitely where yours are considerably weaker - the actual intersections between most of your forms on this page for instance don't entirely make sense.

Specifically, if we look at this section as an example (from the upper left corner of the aforementioned page, we see two different intersections. Here's how I'd tackle them. I'm constantly keeping in mind the idea that the intersection between two forms, or rather the line that defines them, must run along the surface of both forms at the same time. In order to determine this, we need to take into consideration the orientation we're asserting for the given form in space, and how it relates to the other forms around it.

This mental model of 3D space is something that develops over time, and you're definitely on your way there. As you continue pushing yourself to handle these 3D forms in later lessons, you will gradually grow more comfortable with this sort of spatial problem.

Your organic intersections actually show just that - These are quite well done, and demonstrate a pretty good understanding of how these forms relate to one another, how they push one another aside, slumping and sagging in order to find a state of equilibrium without pushing into each others' volume.

There are a few areas to work on, but by and large you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2019-04-22 21:02

There's plenty of lessons out there on those topics, so they're not ones I'm going to be covering any time soon. Instead, my next lessons are going to be focused on illustration as a whole (focusing on composition, storytelling, etc.) or on design (shape/form language, using source material to inform your design decisions, etc.)

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

2019-04-22 19:20

Nope, as soon as the pledge is increased, you're welcome to submit. Just remember not to cancel your pledge prematurely.

You've done a pretty great job with your leaves exercise - they're flowing quite naturally and fluidly through space, and your approach to adding detail and complexity to the edges shows a good deal of respect to the constructional approach. That is, you're adhering to the underlying, simpler phases of construction, rather than ignoring them or treating them as though they're simply 'suggestions'.

Your branches are definitely moving in the right direction, but you'll want to continue practicing the techniques involved in getting your segments to flow smoothly and seamlessly from one to the other. Currently we can see quite a number of little tails that protrude from the end of each segment, making it clear that the long edge is made up of several pieces.

In both of these exercises, one thing does stand out to me - it's that you have a tendency to draw quite small. Remember that construction is a spatial problem, and our brains benefit quite a bit from being given more room to think and explore. Drawing smaller has a tendency to cause us to stiffen up, and makes it a little tougher to engage the use of our shoulder.

Moving onto your plant constructions, you've got some that stand out quite well (the edelweiss, tulip, cannabis leaf, rosemary, thyme, etc.) but there are a number where you don't employ as much of a constructional approach and instead slip back to being much sketchier.

Remember that this process is not one that involves a lot of sketching and exploration on the page - each mark we put down is planned and considered beforehand, and weighed against other options before we commit. For example, your orchid definitely fell away from this - you put a lot of marks on the page as you tried to figure things out, rather than breaking it down into its basic components and constructing each one using the specific techniques explored in the lesson.

Similarly, you get caught up sometimes in shading/rendering (like in your raspberries), something I specifically point out is not an element of this course in this section of lesson 2. Additionally, when attempting to move into texture, you have a tendency to rely more on general scribbling (like the bark of your palm tree), rather than actually observing your reference carefully and transferring specific detail and information piece by piece. This is also something warned against in lesson 2.

Throughout the lesson you do show yourself capable of constructing quite well, but you don't always follow that process, and instead at times get caught up in the desire to make a nice drawing (rather than treating the drawing as an exercise in construction and spatial problem solving). In addition to this, there are a few specific issues I'd like to address:

• When constructing branches/stems, don't overuse your contour ellipses. In your rose/tulips, it definitely stands out that you didn't need nearly so many, and having them spaced so close together resulted in that area getting a little stiff. The point is to break down complex edges, placing an ellipse as a sort of "dot" to connect. The primary goal should still be to achieve smooth, fluid strokes, drawn from the shoulder.

• You have a tendency to leave the leaf construction process by the wayside - for example, if we look at your amaryllis, the petals don't have any singular line responsible for determining how it should flow through space prior to the construction of the overall leaf shape.

• Draw every form in its entirety, rather than allowing it to stop where it gets overlapped by another form. For example, in the amaryllis you've got a lot of leaves that are not drawn in completion, and the same occurs in your fly amanitas mushrooms, where you do not determine where and how the stem connects to the cap.

One last point - for the palm tree, I would treat each fern as a single leaf construction before breaking it down. This demo shows what I mean.

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do 4 more plant drawings, taking into consideration what I've said throughout this critique. Be much more focused in your use of the constructional method, don't skip steps, don't sketch loosely, take full advantage of all the space the page affords you (rather than drawing small), don't attempt to shade/render, and when adding detail (if you should choose to), take the time to observe and study your reference carefully, looking at your drawing only long enough to transfer one or two specific marks before looking back at your reference.

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

2019-04-22 19:03

To start with, your arrows are quite well done. They flow nicely through all three dimensions of space, exploring the depth of the scene and avoiding the sense that they're merely moving across the two dimensions of the page you're drawing on.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly solid, though I'm noticing on occasion that your ellipses have a slight tendency to stiffen up. You are however fairly mindful of their alignment, and of keeping them snug between the edges of the form. One area you likely do understand but need to perhaps think a little more about is the shift in the degree of the ellipses through the length of a given form. In many of these cases your ellipses maintain a consistent degree, although in a few they seem to be a little more arbitrary.

For your contour curves, there's one issue that stands out - you have a tendency to draw the curves such that they fall outside of the silhouette of the form. This breaks the illusion that we're after - we're trying to make it seem as though these lines run along the surface of the form, so they can describe directly how those surfaces flow through space.

I do see some improvement in certain areas in this regard, but it's not always necessarily a conscious thing - so you need to be more mindful of keeping the contour lines snug between the edges of the form here to push that illusion as far as you can. You are however doing a good job of hooking those curves around so they give the impression that they're wrapping around the sausage form, which is good to see.

Though you did have difficulty with the texture analyses, you actually didn't do a bad job. You took the time to study and analyze your textures carefully, and worked to the best of your ability from direct observation rather than from memory. The one area that I believe will benefit most from some advice is your tendency to try and enclose each and every element in your texture. That is, in the case of scales, you outline each and every scale completely.

This doesn't work particularly well for texture - it's something that we tend to do when it comes to construction for the major forms of an object, but when dealing with texture (and the little forms that exist on the surface of an object to give it the impression of texture) we have to shift to a different tactic.

As explained here, relying instead on drawing the shadows cast by a given form rather than trying to outline the little form in its entirety gives us a lot more freedom. It allows us to control how much linework we actually put down without having that determine how many forms are actually present. By adjusting the lighting scheme, we can plunge the texture into shadow, leaving a large, solid area of black (there are still scales there, even though we haven't drawn any of them inside of this area). We can also plunge them into light, overexposing with a direct light source to create a clear area of white - where again, the scales are still present, even if they're not drawn.

You actually did a significantly better job of applying this in your dissections, so it's good to see that moving in the right direction.

Your form intersections were very well done. I'm really pleased to see the volume of work here, and the fact that you're really demonstrating a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. Similarly, your organic intersections demonstrate a further grasp of how forms not only relate to one another in space, but how they interact with each other, slumping and sagging against one another as they reach a state of equilibrium without interpenetrating.

Overall, you've done a good job. Keep in mind what I mentioned in regards to the contour lines, but feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2019-04-22 18:43

Really great work! You've definitely demonstrated a great deal of care when observing and studying your reference, and have a great eye for both the nuance of the forms of each wheel and tire, as well as the detail in the tread, rims, spokes, etc. I'm also quite pleased with the boldness with which you push into the realm of using these solid black shapes - you're not afraid to put that ink down, and it really helps to convey both texture as well as the solidity and believability of the forms you're playing with here.

I do have one small observation however about how you're using those solid blacks that I want to point out that should help as you continue to move forwards.

One tendency I noticed (specifically in wheels 5 and 9) is that you're using the heavy blacks to differentiate the various faces of a given textural form. I can certainly understand why you'd approach it in that manner, but I've found that it is considerably more effective to reserve those solid blacks instead for the shadows those forms would cast on their surroundings, rather than on the form itself. Here's an example of what I mean (the one on the right is the approach I'd recommend when dealing specifically with texture.

That's really the only piece of critique I have to offer - your wheel constructions here are fantastic, and I'm glad that you were able to go out and find a full set of ellipse guides. Having that degree of control over ellipses without having to worry about freehanding them really emphasized your fundamental understanding of how they should be used, and how they work.

Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 7.

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

2019-04-17 14:20

Keep in mind that the cylinder challenge is pretty advanced, and while you can complete it now, it's better left closer to lesson 6.

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

2019-04-15 19:39

Nice work overall!

Starting out with your arrows, they flow quite nicely across the page, and I can see that you're being mindful of making the far end of the arrow smaller than the closer end. One thing that is sometimes missing from your arrows however is that you need to ensure the space between the lengths of zigzagging arrow shrinks as we look farther and farther away. It is, after all, all of space that compresses as we look into the distance, not just the objects themselves. I explain this further here.

Your organic forms with contour lines are looking solid. You're maintaining confident linework, and are achieving fairly solid control, with the ellipses and curves falling snugly between the edges of the forms. One thing I want you to be more attentive to however is the degree of your ellipses/curves, as it should be shifting slightly along the length of a given form.

Your texture analyses are very, very well done. You're focusing on precisely the core of this exercise, demonstrating excellent observational skills, along with a good sense of how to organize that information to control the required density of the texture at any given point. This carries over to your dissections, where you're doing an excellent job of wrapping the textures around these rounded sausage forms.

Despite your struggles, you really did a great job with the form intersections, and conveyed a strong grasp of how these sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another. Same goes for your organic intersections, where the challenge is specifically to make these forms feel as though they are slumping and sagging and brushing up against one another, pushing each other aside to find a state of equilibrium, rather than falling into the trap of making them feel as though they've been pasted on top of one another as flat shapes on a page. You did a great job in conveying the form and mass of each form, as well as their relationships to one another.

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 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-04-14 23:26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2019-04-14 18:13

Really excellent work! You've nailed the primary forms of the wheels, and have achieved a strong illusion of solidity, especially after your first page. You also approached the variety of tread textures with a keen eye and careful assessment of what kind of marks would best capture the appearance you were striving for.

I noticed only one thing that I'd like to offer advice on, and it has to do with the tire treads that involve larger, chunkier parts that protrude more considerably than the others from the tire itself. Specifically we're looking at 19, 23 and 24, but this also applies to any kinds of tread protrusions.

In these particular ones, you treated these elements as independent forms - you drew their outlines, enclosing them entirely, then from there, applied further shadows that they might cast. That is in a lot of ways moving in the right direction, but that first step of enclosing them entirely with a clearly defined outline is not a great idea. Remember that these elements are still essentially texture - they punch through the silhouette more than most textures do, but in their nature (that they wrap along another form, being subject to how it flows through space), we still want to treat them as texture and avoid drawing more of each element than is necessary - simply because all the additional clutter tends to look bad.

So the first point is that you only want to focus on the shadows they cast. Try and visualize the forms themselves, but don't draw and construct them in their entirety. Secondly, make sure you do pay more mind to how those elements actually wrap around their parent form - with these rounded tires it can be quite tricky, especially when the forms curve as they do in 24. I can see that you did attempt to adjust those curvatures as we dealt with different parts of the tire, but there is definitely room for growth on that front.

All in all, these particular kinds of challenges are quite difficult, so I'm glad you tried your hand at them. All the others are definitely coming along very well, and your underling forms are superb. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 7.

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

2019-04-11 20:38

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely across the page. I noticed that you're playing with the width of your arrows as they move farther away from us, but one thing to keep in mind is that the space between these zigzagging lengths is also going to get smaller as it gets farther from us. This is because all of spaces compresses as we look farther and farther away, as explained here.

Your organic forms with contour lines are looking pretty good. The only thing I noticed as an issue is fairly minor, but it does look like the degrees of your ellipses remain fairly consistent through the lengths of your forms. Just in case you weren't thinking about how those degrees change depending on the orientation of each cross-section, be sure to give these notes a read.

Your texture analysis exercise definitely went off in the wrong direction. What you ended up doing was relying very heavily on crosshatching - this is exactly what texture (the patterns and formations of cast shadows produced by the micro-forms that exist along the surface of a larger object) replaces. Crosshatching is instead a sort of stand-in that is frequently used when someone doesn't want to bother to convey the texture that is present, and wants to focus on shading/rendering. Shading and rendering are things we simply don't bother with, for the reasons explained here.

Now, your approach to texture did get back on track in the dissections exercise, at least somewhat. You've still got a lot of hatching here and there. If you look at any of the examples provided alongside the exercises, you'll see that I don't demonstrate any use of hatching at all - instead, I focus on the little forms that make up the surface of a given object, and I look at the shadows each one casts on its surroundings. The little pocks, the bumps, the rough surfaces, etc. I use these patterns of shadow to move from dark and dense to light and sparse.

Your form intersections are looking solid. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space. I did mention in the exercises that you should stay away from any forms stretched in any one dimension (like the longer cylinders), but aside from that, you did well. Just be more mindful of the instructions in the future.

Lastly, your organic intersections do convey a good grasp of how these forms would interact with one another, how they slump and sag against each other and find a state of equilibrium, rather than feeling as though they've just been pasted on top of each other as flat shapes. My only issue here is that you've filled maybe a fifth of each of those pages, which is a pity. It suggests to me that you see these exercises as things to get through, rather than exercises that are helping you to develop your grasp of space and form, and things that should be taken advantage of. Keep that in mind as you continue to move forwards - you benefit from making the most of each exercise.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You definitely have a lot of room for improvement with texture, so I recommend that you continue to practice that on your own, and also tackle the 25 texture challenge as you continue to move forwards. That challenge in particular should not be done all at once, but rather in parallel with the other lessons.

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

2019-04-11 00:43

You may find that it's less about how many times you ghost (4-5 sounds fine to me) but more about how your arm is moving during the process (locking down to the elbow will make the movement more erratic, while moving from the shoulder will be more even and driven more by the single pivot, making it more predictable and regular). In addition to this, your rhythm is important - make sure you're not missing a beat between ghosting and execution. No pauses in between. Ghost until it feels comfortable and familiar, and continue repeating the motion but press your pen to the page.

I'm not terribly concerned about repetition in your boxes, and didn't feel that it was noticeable. Boxes by their nature don't have a lot of options - you're either looking at them dead on, from below, from above, or from either side. I can see that you jumped from one to the other, and may have repeated the same configuration quite a bit, but as long as you're not doing the exact same one many times in a row, you're fine. Boxes are just an excuse to practice parallel lines and familiarize ourselves with how those VPs work.

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

2019-04-10 23:32

Perfect! There's certainly nothing wrong with jumping into the 250 cylinder challenge immediately after lesson 2 (that's kind of the minimum prerequisite I require) but as you noticed yourself, the second half of the challenge really does get pretty deep in the weeds with topics that only really rear their heads at lesson 6. All in all, the challenge is just something that needs to get done somewhere between lesson 2 and 6. If you'd like to see the recommended "next step" after a lesson, you can follow the little links at the bottom of each page - the one on the last page of a lesson will point you to the next lesson that should be tackled.

So as the two halves of the challenge have different goals, I'll critique the first one, then the second.

All in all, with the first 150, you are being quite mindful of the minor axis for each and every one of these, and are certainly being conscientious when it comes to testing them. Where you did struggle a great deal however was with the ellipses themselves. Across the board, I can see that when you draw your ellipses, you do so with a great deal of hesitation. Each one is quite wobbly and uncertain, like you're focusing overmuch on accuracy, and as a result, aren't trusting in your muscle memory.

Sometimes this merely leads to the line being a little wobbly - many of your ellipses are still fairly well rounded. There are many others however where the shape itself falls out of whack, especially as you get into wider degrees. This is definitely something you're going to need to get control of as you continue to move forwards. I believe it's actually something I called out in lesson 2 as well.

The key here is in the ghosting method - in putting all of your time into the planning and preparation phases, and ultimately executing the mark with a confident, persistent pace. The second your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed - all you can do is commit to it and push through. Right now what I'm seeing is that you're not yet willing to commit to that stroke, and so you hold yourself back.

What you may want to do is take a piece of paper and just draw ellipses without any preplanning, without any consideration for where they need to go or how big they need to be - just to loosen yourself up. Your lines can be smooth and confident, you just need to allow yourself to do it. Reining them in and gaining control over them is a matter of applying those first two steps of the ghosting method - not in drawing more slowly or more carefully as the pen touches the page.

You're certainly just as conscientious and patient when it comes to the second half of the challenge, extending all of your lines, checking your minor axes and convergences. There are a few places I noticed where you extended some lines in the wrong direction (towards the viewer, rather than away). Remember that we're meant to extend them towards their implied vanishing point, so we can see how those lines converge towards it.

The other important point to keep in mind is what this approach actually tests. When applied only to the boxes, it's merely checking if each set of 4 parallel lines converges consistently towards their shared vanishing point. Relatively simple.

Once we throw the ellipses into the mix however, and add the minor axis or contact-point alignment to those sets of lines from the boxes, then we start talking about two different, but related things:

• Whether or not the face of the box is reasonably square

• If it is, then whether or not the ellipse itself was drawn correctly within it.

In general, you'll find that 80% of the problem if those lines don't align correctly, falls on the face of the box not being a proper "square". That is, square within the terms set out by all the implied vanishing points, and the way that box has defined the space in which it exists.

So once you've gone through a page of these cylinders in boxes, and you apply your checking method, what you want to be paying attention to is what it says about those proportions. In a lot of cases, you can point out, "well this face was probably too long in one dimension", or "this one was pretty squashed". And so you take those points into account when drawing the next set of boxes.

Given that there's a lot here to deal with, it is understandable that it looks like you may not have conveyed that sort of awareness from page to page in terms of which direction you should be going. You did certainly improve, but perhaps not with the kind of efficiency that would be ideal. Still, baby steps.

So all in all, you've got a couple things to keep in mind:

• More important than anything else - get those ellipses smooth and confident. Flow above all else. Loosen up.

• Consider what your line extensions are telling you about the nature of your mistakes - think about why they're suggesting that the faces you're placing those ellipses into aren't squarish (within a reasonable margin of error), and what you need to adjust in your next box.

• Also worth mentioning, your boxes certainly do have issues with their line convergences themselves, so that's something else you're going to want to continue practicing. Look at those line extensions and ask yourself what's going wrong, and work on improving on those specific issues on the next page. You may want to look back at the critique I gave to your box challenge as well, as I did point out specific kinds of things to keep in mind while drawing your boxes.

Anyway - congratulations on toughing through this doozy of a challenge. I'll go ahead and mark it as complete. You should move onto lesson 3 as your next step, but keep on top of practicing your boxes, ellipses and cylinders as you continue to move forwards.

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

2019-04-10 22:45

You've got a good start on your arrows - there's a few here that really strongly convey the sense of depth of the scene and explore all three dimensions, so that's great to see. It probably would have been better had you made better use of the page though - I'm generally very much in favour of drawing big and not being afraid to overlap, but it does feel a little all over the place here, with large swathes of blank space in some areas, and heavy clusters in others.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking solid. Your ellipses are quite smooth and tight (though on occasion they do stiffen up a little, so keep an eye on that and don't ever put accuracy ahead of the flow of your lines). One other thing I'd like to mention is that the sausage forms are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You've nailed that in a few places, but you've got a few others that are more stretched and elongated, with the ends no longer appearing to maintain their spherical integrity, or where one end is considerably smaller than the other. Just something to keep in mind as you continue moving forwards - keeping your sausages simple in this manner will help maintain their solidity.

You're doing well with the contour curves as well - they're wrapping around the forms nicely, and aligning fairly well to your minor axes.

Very, VERY nice work on your texture analyses. You've clearly demonstrated a strong grasp of how this involves leveraging cast shadow, and have shown a good grasp of what it means to draw from observation rather than memory. This carries over to the dissections as well - a lot of great choices of textures, and you tackled each one with specific consideration for each individual subject matter, rather than applying any kind of one-size-fits-all solution. Very well done.

Your form intersections demonstrate a pretty good spatial understanding. The forms feel solid, and consistent within the same space. The only thing that stands out to me here is the use of hatching on rounded surfaces. I can see that you've attempted to wrap those hatching lines around (rather than keeping them straight), but often times this is something of a losing battle. The hatching lines, especially when they're quite short, tend to flatten things out regardless. Instead, on cases like cylinders, it's better to apply longer hatching lines lengthwise along the cylinder - ones that are meant to be flat and sleek. In general, hatching does work best when the lines are straight, so finding places where that works is generally the best bet. On spheres, rather than applying hatching, adding a contour ellipse - like the pole of a globe - can be much more effective.

Finally, your organic intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, pushing each other aside, and slumping/sagging against one another in order to find a state of equilibrium. You've pushed well past any sense that these are just flat shapes pasted on top of one another, and are conveying a strong sense of form and three dimensional space.

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

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

2019-04-10 22:20

This challenge is technically situated quite a bit later in the flow of the lessons - you can certainly do it at any point, but it does fall under the $10 patreon tier along with the constructional drawing lessons.

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

2019-04-07 22:11

No, and like I said - it doesn't look like you rushed (at most, you just didn't draw a lot of sausage forms per page), but I just wanted to be clear in case you had. It's just something I need to watch out for.

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

2019-04-07 19:13

That's certainly looking better, though I am concerned at how quickly you came back with those. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but make sure that you're always giving each exercise as much time and attention as it requires. It doesn't look like you rushed too much here, but.. just in case.

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

2019-04-07 17:04

Your arrows are looking pretty good. They flow nicely across the page, though one thing I want you to keep in mind is that while you've got the width of the arrow decreasing as it moves farther away from the viewer, the actual amount of room between the zigzagging lengths should also be getting smaller, since it is all of space that compresses as we look farther and farther away. I explain this further in this section.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses do leave a bit to be desired. Your ellipses are certainly drawn confidently, though there are a couple of issues that need to be addressed:

• You've neglected to draw the central minor axis line for many of these, which suggests that you're not really concerned with the purpose it serves, and therefore not thinking about how your ellipses are aligned within the form. Read about this here.

• It's important that you work on getting your ellipses to fit snugly between the edges of the form, since we're trying to create the illusion that they are lines that run along the surface of the form. As soon as the ellipse bursts outside of the silhouette of the form, or floats somewhat arbitrarily inside of it, this illusion gets lost. Applying the ghosting method more conscientiously will help you improve your control and accuracy while continuing to maintain the evenness and smoothness of the elliptical shapes.

• You've got some cases here where the degree of your ellipses makes sense, shifting naturally along the length of the form, but there are others where it seems somewhat more random. Give these notes on the topic a read.

Your organic forms with contour curves are generally better, though you are struggling in a few places with getting the lines to accelerate in their curvature as they reach the edge so as to give the impression of hooking back around. You're close, and you're getting it in a number of cases, but there are still examples - like the bottom right of the page - where many of the contour curves just fall short of giving the impression that they continue along the other side. Overshooting your curves a little as explained here can definitely help with this.

Very nice work with both your texture analyses and your dissections - you've demonstrated a great deal of attention to detail, and a good understanding of the little forms along the surface of your forms to inform how you apply the little cast shadows to create the illusion of texture. At no point did you work on auto-pilot, trying to scribble in the illusion of texture - you were purposeful with every mark, and clearly thought through how you wanted to approach each texture individually. Great work.

Your form intersections demonstrate a pretty good grasp of how these forms all relate to one another in 3D space. My one critique here is your use of hatching lines. Any line that sits on the surface of a form functions like a contour line, and describes how that surface deforms through space. So when you put straight lines on the side of a box, that's fine - the surface is flat, so the straight lines help reinforce that. When you apply similarly straight lines on the rounded surface of a cone or a cylinder however, you serve to completely flatten it out. You need to be a little more mindful when applying techniques like this, and consider what kind of impact they're going to have.

I noticed in a few places where you attempted to curve those contour lines (so you clearly understood that what you were doing wasn't working), but those curves were quite sloppy and shallow, and continued to flatten things out.

Lastly, you've done a good job with your organic intersections. You're clearly demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, how they sag and slump in order to reach a state of equilibrium. Your contour curves are looking a bit better here, though they are a little sloppy still - you need to work on the alignment of the curves (relative to the minor axis), and on keeping the curves snug between the edges of the sausage forms.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two pages of organic forms with contour ellipses and two pages of organic forms with contour curves.

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

2019-04-03 19:32

Generally pretty well done, with a few little issues to address.

To start with, your arrows are looking good. They flow nicely through all three dimensions of space and explore the full depth of the scene, rather than just being limited to running across the two dimensions of the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses were pretty well done, though I am noticing a tendency to use the same degree for each ellipse. In addition to this, I am seeing some issues - and this gets a little more noticeable with the contour curves - in maintaining your alignment with the central minor axis line, as explained here.

You've definitely put a great deal of effort into your texture analyses, which is great to see. You're headed in the right direction, though one thing that definitely jumps out at me is the fact that you're attempting to enclose each and every element of your texture in a solid, closed line. You're basically very clearly defining the outline of each of these elements, which in turn makes it quite difficult to play with the density of detail, since there's no way to bleed through these elements and leave some information to be implied rather than explicitly presented to the viewer. I explain this a little further in these notes.

You don't want to get caught in the trap of treating your lines as though they exist in the real world. Instead, the marks we tend to perceive are simply shadows cast by the forms present. Shadows themselves are very fluid, and depend heavily on the nature of the light source. A light source can be lacking, in which case our "lines" expand in width and merge together, or that light source can be very bright, blowing everything out like an overexposed photograph, leaving only a few minimal shadows to imply the presence of further detail.

The key thing to remember here is that this means we don't have to explicitly draw every little bit of detail - we can imply the presence of further detail in the areas we don't draw. That applies to both the areas of solid black, where everything is engulfed in shadow, as well as the areas of solid white. I definitely noticed in your gradients that you did struggle with pushing the darker area to the left of your attempts, resulting in the transition from the solid black inch or so to your actual texture being very visible. When done correctly, there should be no visible border between these two regions that you can identify.

Your dissections are definitely a good start, but there are a couple things I'm noticing here:

• There's definitely a tendency to get a little cartoony with some of these textures. This suggests to me that you're still drawing from memory, rather than spending most of your time observing your reference, only looking away to transfer a specific mark or two before looking back at your reference (as explained here). Do not trust your memory.

• You've got some success in certain areas with wrapping the textures around the rounded surfaces, but this is definitely something you aren't entirely consistent with. Keep how that surface moves through 3D space in mind.

Moving onto your form intersections, you're doing okay here, but I am definitely noticing some shakiness for your overall line quality. Don't forget to apply the ghosting method to each and every mark to ensure that each stroke is smooth and confidently drawn, without hesitation. The second your pen touches the page, you're committed, and any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed. All you can do is push forwards and make the mark. If you mess up, no big deal, there are plenty more lines to draw. Don't allow yourself to hesitate under any circumstances.

I'm also noticing that you didn't quite fill up most of these pages. Consider why you're doing these exercises - this is for your own betterment, so you should be taking full advantage of ever opportunity to practice these skills, and should not be leaving ample blank space on your pages where you could have otherwise furthered your practice.

Finally, your first attempt at the organic intersections was fairly well done (though on that larger sausage form, I think your contour curves are reading backwards, causing a strange optical illusion). You definitely need to work on keeping the contour curves wrapping around the form (as explained here), but you're doing a good job of demonstrating an understanding of how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, and how the space they occupy must be resolved to find a state of balance.

Your second attempt definitely fell flat. I'm not sure why you added line weight in the way that you did, but it entirely flattened out the drawing, and made your linework appear very shaky, and as a result, undermined the illusion of solid form. Your contour curves here also seemed to be drawn somewhat sloppily, as though you weren't thinking about what each mark was meant to achieve.

By and large you're moving in the right direction, but you do have a tendency to get a little sloppy (especially when it comes to applying the ghosting method, or taking the time to apply your contour curves correctly).

As such, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one full page of form intersections, and one more page of organic intersections. Take your time and work through each one with patience. Before attempting each one, I want you to reread the instructions for it, and rewatch its video so you're completely up-to-date on exactly what you should be doing.

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

2019-04-02 19:22

So you're definitely getting there, but there are a few little hitches I'm noticing in some of your sausages.

1. Put special emphasis on maintaining a consistent width throughout the length of a sausage. No pinching, tapering, etc. Having shaky lines can accidentally cause this effect as well, and as a whole it'll undermine the perceived solidity of the sausage in small, but impactful ways.

2. Take a look at this section on your last page, where you've tried to make one end of the segment larger than the other. You drew your somewhat more consistent sausage, then wrapped it in another. That's not how I want you to approach that sort of thing - instead, look at the bottom right of the diagram provided before. Basically you draw your sausage, then you add a ball-like mass on the end you want to increase in size, and then bridge the transition between them.

3. Always try and ensure you've got a healthy intersection between them, so you've got room to add that reinforcing contour line right at the joint.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - you're making good progress here, and will have ample opportunity to practice this technique further in the next lesson.

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

2019-04-01 16:04

It looks like your last submission was on March 28th, so you'll have to wait until April 11th before submitting this work (as per the 2 weeks between submissions rule). Feel free to submit it again on or after that date and I'll jump right on it.

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

2019-03-31 18:32

Generally when a student submits a followup as quickly as you have here, my concern is that the work was rushed, or that they did not take all the time they needed to process the information that was given to them (and given that I asked you to reread all the lesson 1 and 2 material, it's hard to imagine that you could have gone through it in any real detail in the time you had). I think that is definitely what happened here.

Your results aren't really any different:

• Your linework is still very hesitant and wobbly (somewhat smoother for the outer edges of the organic forms with contour lines, but not on the organic intersections - though the contour ellipses/curves are all still quite stiff)

• You didn't follow the instructions of drawing the organic intersections at more of a 3/4 angle (in case you didn't understand, this is what I mean).

Honestly, rather than asking you to simply redo this exercise again, the responsible thing would be to ask you to start over from lesson 1, doing all the exercises from the beginning. The issues with your line confidence are significant enough that continuing on from this point without addressing them directly is going to hold you back in the long run, and I think shielding you from having to redo that stuff would be a huge mistake, and while it'd save you some time up front, it'd cause you to waste a lot more effort as you continue to move forwards with far fewer visibly gains.

If you disagree with me on this, then feel free to cancel your pledge before the month is over so you don't get charged. Many students end up going back to the beginning after long stints away (and 10 months is a long time to be away from this stuff, having gotten rusty is inevitably). Some do so voluntarily, others do so because I believe that is what's best. It's up to you whether or not you want to follow that advice, of course.

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

2019-03-31 16:48

Yeah, your addition of line weight is definitely a lot smoother and more consistent, and doesn't stiffen your linework at all. Nicely done.