8:18 PM, Tuesday November 30th 2021
Hi Kunito, good to see you are making progress, I'll critique your homework and try to be more detailed this time.
Starting with your organic intersections, your forms wrap around each other believably, but you could try to push those cast shadows further, and also I noticed some inconcistency with the lighting. With shadows being cast left and right. And also remember to avoid any elongated sausages as explained here.
-Now let's move to your animal constructions.
You did pretty well handling the additional masses, in some cases like the pelican's head that relationship is not entirely clear.
I'll try to address the things you mentioned
Sausage method
Don't forget the specific requirements of the sausage method, as explained here. Contour lines go right on the joint between sausage segments, not anywhere else along their length, and of course be sure to stick to simple sausage forms. The sausage method is just the start. It lays down a base structure for our legs, but we are still expected to build upon it. That is how we achieve those areas of more significant girth and bulk - not by introducing it right from the beginning, but building up to it, step by step. You're going in the right direction here though.
Lineweight
Keep in mind that actually drawing your marks is just the very last step of the whole three step process introduced in the ghosted lines exercise that you may want to read again to refresh your memory.Maybe you're forgetting about all of these core principles, and just focusing on getting something done. You're held back by panic, but because your hand shakes, you're assuming that to be the cause.
Your hand shaking may in some way contribute to your anxiety, but ultimately that shouldn't stop you from intending to create the correct marks.
Additional Masses
When drawing those muscles - when defining their silhouette - you have to go to any lengths to define the relationship between them and the structure they were being attached to in 3D space. This 3D relationship is something that can only be defined by the form's own silhouette - not by adding contour lines after the fact, because those contour lines will only make each form feel 3D on their own, in isolation. That's why they don't feel like they're being held together with the body. If you look at the example from the lesson, those masses are actually curving and wrapping around the other parts of the body, "gripping" them.
When it comes to the additional masses however, we're not intersecting two forms - we're piling them atop one another. They rely really heavily on how their silhouettes are drawn. When floating in a void, on their own and away from our construction, we can think of them like soft balls of meat, with nothing but simple, outward curves the whole way through (looking kind of like a sphere). Once they press up against a structure however, the part that makes contact will curve inward in response, and corners will form where these curvatures change. You can see this demonstrated here. These inward curves and corners introduce complexity to our silhouette, and so in order for the form to continue to feel solid and three dimensional, it is critical that every bit of complexity corresponds to a specific defined stimulus. There should be no such complexity without a clear form-interaction to cause it.
I think this has got pretty long so I'll leave you with a bunch of references
2.Approaching leg construction with the sausage method - the ant leg example and the dog leg example.
3.Things to consider when employing 'additional masses'
4.How to think about forms' silhouettes when they're built upon one another.
As a final note this is meant to be a word of advice regarding the things you mentioned, it is not a critique of your homework in its entirety.
Next Steps:
Send 3 more animal constructions to see how well you absorbed this material. good luck and sorry for any misspellings.