Revisiting this course for gesture and mannequinization in anticipation of Michael Hampton's gesture course in February. Had a go at a horse and I must admit, breaking down into shapes helped. Although just as with my attempts at humans, the torso is always too loooong.

I don't often draw animals so this is great practice for me as I want to get better at them! Some of them turned out rather rough, I'll have to work on them more.

First few tries before wathcing the critique. I watched the critique afterwards. I think I focused too much on outlines and not on simplifying the animals in terms of structure. Shame on me. Will retry

i need to work more on cubes and cylinders but this was great practice.

So many things I'm struggling with lol, like how exactly to draw from observation. I look, observe the subject for a solid like 30 sec to a minute, looking at the edges, curves, how many planes are showing, etc. Then look at the page and still struggle a bit to draw what I remember, but when I look at the subject again and bounce back and forth, I get a bit tripped out since the perspective slightly changed so deciding between being faithful to the drawing or to the subject is kinda rough. I haven't really thought of tapering yet, since I'm drawing from observation, but I do want to try adding varying degrees of tapering/foreshortening once I draw from imagination (all of this was from observation). Line quality, how to actually draw an elipse, and other stuff are a bit frustrating too lol, but I'm honestly not stressing over it, so far this exercise has been pretty fun despite me complaining so much 💀

How do you guys draw from observation when each time you look back at the sketchbook and again at the subject the perspective changes slighty? 💀

Did I do it right? I did the 3 assignments. But I am not sure if I did right or well.

I found this subject to be an opportune moment to revisit form intersections. Personally, my goal when focusing on construction is to make it as clear the occupied space the subject is within. I find the visual more useful and appealing unless all the volumes merge into one larger, more complex volume. This of course quite hard and still these days involves me having to stop and study how a particular form of intersection would present itself. I struggled the most with solving heads as they seem to turn out quite complex if you try to be specific at all about their form. I was trying to avoid just turning them into a box or cylinder, while still keeping the construction overall simple and readable. I was correcting a lot of errors while working on this, so I apologize if certain sections seem smudged, as a pastel pencil doesn't erase as easily as graphite. Overall, I'm happy with my breakdowns, and looking forward to applying this approach more often in the future. I will include my references just so it is a bit easier if any happens to feel the inclination to offer a critique.

dis 3 of those, the dogs were constructed with yellow pencil but I decide to continue the drawing since i liked the gesture a lot

I think i 've got it. However, if you have any critics don' t hesitate!

Those were pretty fun indeed! Doing light gesture first and then lightly deforming the shapes to apply to the gesture also brought more live to animals!

A bear and a… different kind of bear haha. the bear’s head and muzzle is in an extreme angle in the reference, I ended up rotating it a small bit. could have better described the cat’s body with a flat top plane but a bloated side plane - which would have allowed me to wrap some contour lines around it.

Yesterday and Today's practice. Next up is animal simplification.

These are some of my drawing attempts. The first picture contains some of the cylinders and boxes I practised drawing, the second picture is a toucan simplified to boxes, spheres, and cylinders. Drawing the cylinders and boxes was very hard at first because I didn’t really have much knowledge on perspective. I struggled the most with the feet and body of the toucan as they were very hard to visualise. Would be open to any feedback, thanks!

My attempt at some animals, I'm finding it hard to not make the shapes look flat in some places. The Rhino demo really helped me start.

Any advice for my Giraffe would be greatly appreciated! It feels really wobbly and wonky... (Ignore my terrible snail I did prior to seeing Stan demo how to actually do the assignment)

Here’s my attempt at a few animals. I think I could’ve focused more on the 3D shapes instead of forcing them to create the contour of the animal. Any feedback is appreciated.

Here is my attempt at a dog

I should probably simplify even more into geometric shapes on these...

Structure assignment. A semi-feral cat has been brining her new kitten by my house a bit, so I thought I'd bone up on kitten structure.