8:44 PM, Monday January 6th 2025
Hey Cyberkitty,
I appreciate the effort to stick to the critique recommendations. The sausage forms are clear, just missing those contour lines at the joints. The additional forms are also on the right track with conveying their spatial relationship as they press against each other.
I can see why you might have conflicting feelings about the method itself since it doesn't completely reflect how rigid the legs are. We favor the sausage in order to capture the gesture of the leg while retaining similar volume to the branches. The branch method tends to make it much more difficult to rein the curves and overall flattens the leg construction. Although we're stuck with using sausages, we can still alter them to fit our scenario.
I'm not sure if you've done the Puma informal demo, but it presents a similar situation in which the reference does show a "stiff" leg. Since we can vary the amount of bend, DIO solves this with individual sausages that are subtle in curvature but still convey that the leg itself is straight. Sort of like a balloon tube, we can choose as much or as little to bend the sausage. Getting this method down takes some practice to get comfortable with; like you mentioned, it's possible you might not be used to it yet.
Our goal with these animal constructions is not to create a 1:1 copy of the animal reference. References act as a source of information to pull certain features and apply them under the methods we've learned. As long as you're attempting to adhere to the lesson instructions as much as possible, it's totally fine if the end result isn't 100% anatomically accurate.
All in all, I think you understand the Lesson 5 concepts well, so I’ll go ahead and send you off to the 250 Cylinder Challenge. Keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
Remember to take these exercises into your warm-ups (10–15 minutes), and you can move on towards the 250 Cylinder Challenge. Good Luck