Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids
3:54 PM, Friday November 13th 2020
Hello
Please see my lesson 4 exercices and tell me your appreciated opnion.
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are largely coming along well. You're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, and you're executing those contour lines with a great deal of control and confidence, capturing the illusion that they wrap around the form's surface.
Overall you're doing a decent job, although there are a handful of issues I'd like to point out.
First and foremost, this is less of an issue and more of a warning. It's clear that in these pages you've been very focused on squeezing in 4 drawings per sheet. While it's admirable, quantity isn't the most important thing here. First and foremost, focus on giving each drawing as much room as it requires. When we purposely squeeze drawings into a smaller space, we limit our brain's ability to think through spatial problems, make it harder for us to draw from the shoulder (and in turn make it more likely that we'll slip back to our elbow and wrist), and when we start drawing especially small, our lines end up getting really thick relative to the whole drawing, making things a bit clumsy.
None of these issues are present in your drawings, but it is something to keep in mind in the future. Always focus first on giving each drawing as much room as it needs, then decide whether you can fit another drawing in the space that remains. If you can, do so. If you can't, then it's okay to have just one drawing on a page if there's good reason for it.
Next, it's clear that you're largely doing a very good job of approaching your constructions by introducing more and more solid, three dimensional forms to your structures, and that's fantastic. As a whole, you're following the core principles of the lesson and this course very nicely, but there are a few places where you don't quite follow this idea that every change you make to a drawing must occur in 3D space, by introducing a new solid form.
There are two ways in which this can happen incorrectly, and we can see both in the beetles on this page. Let's look at the bottom two. On the left side, you started with a larger ellipse (you forgot to draw through that ellipse, so keep that in mind in the future, though it's not relevant to the mistake here), then you cut back into it. On the right side, you started with a smaller ellipse, then added a little extension to it.
The problem with both of these is that this are actions you took in 2D space, rather than 3D space. By cutting back into the left side's ellipse, you treated it as a 2D ellipse, rather than a 3D ball. By extending the right side's ellipse, you added a new 2D shape, not a new complete 3D form.
There are ways to do this correctly. On the right side, what you attempted to do is called "subtractive construction", and I explain the correct/incorrect approaches in this diagram. As for approaching it on the right side, here are your two options. The key is defining the actual relationship between the two forms in 3D space using a contour line. This is how we keep our brain from going back to interpreting the drawing as precisely what it is - a bunch of lines and shapes on a page.
Thirdly, I noticed it just a few spots, but when you moved past construction in a few of your drawings, you didn't delve into texture - you focused instead on rendering/shading, or "decoration". Remember that back in lesson 2, I explicitly mention that we do not use shading in this course.
What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.
Lastly, you're making pretty solid use of the sausage method throughout most of your constructions, though there are a few places where you don't quite limit yourself to just using simple sausage forms, and overall you don't push much farther than the basic sausage structure. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.
So! Keep what I've said here in mind, but I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Overall you've done very well, so keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"
It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.
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