12:02 AM, Saturday December 25th 2021
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are coming along well - you're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages quite well, and your contour lines are executed confidently. One thing I am noticing however is that at times you're a little loose/sketchy with your linework - it's not to an overwhelming degree, but I can definitely see cases where there appear to be more lines than there ought to be in certain areas. For example, in this one we can see a lot of additional linework on the perimeter of the sausage.
Sometimes students will feel that because sausages and ellipses are similar, that the same "draw through your ellipses" rule applies there - it doesn't, since doing so tends to push our hand towards producing evenly shaped ellipses (which would be bad for drawing sausages) - but in your case, I think it's more a matter of simply being too loose and unintentional with the specific lines you put down. Be sure to use the ghosting method for every mark, investing your time in the planning and preparation phases to help pin down precisely what mark you want to make, before your pen touches the page.
Continuing on, this looseness/sketchiness actually does become a lot more apparent in your insect constructions. Throughout these, you actually demonstrate a solid grasp of how to approach construction, through the introduction of simple forms, considering how they're meant to relate to, intersect with, and/or wrap around the existing structure to build up complexity - but you're simply rushing through the linework a little too much, and it's undermining what is otherwise among the best work I've seen for this lesson.
I really cannot stress this enough - what we do here is not sketching. Every mark we put down is the result of forethought and planning, and needs to exhibit both confidence and control. That's what the ghosting method embodies - the planning phase ensures that we know exactly what mark we're intending to execute ahead of time. The distinction between that and sketching is that individual marks do not matter in the latter case - it's the totality of it, that one stroke of many falls where it needs to. But what we're doing here is meant to be a purposeful way to help improve how we draw when we sketch. By being purposeful and conscious of every choice made, by being aware of precisely what it is we're aiming to achieve, and then judging the accuracy with which we executed it. Mistakes are inevitable, but we have to know what we aimed for in order to judge the nature of a mistake, so we can address its cause moving forward.
That aside, the rest is quite good. You're demonstrating a consistent respect for how every new addition to the construction is its own solid, three dimensional form. You're sticking to the idea that every form introduced must be drawn as its own complete, enclosed shape (rather than jumping back and forth between adding complete forms and partial shapes/individual lines) - which makes the difference between engaging with a construction in 3D space, and merely interacting with a flat drawing on a flat page. Many students make the mistake of trying to modify the silhouettes of forms they've already constructed - but doing so is an operation on a 2D shape (the silhouette is a 2D shape that represents the 3D form, after all), and so it breaks the connection between the form being represented, and what's on the page.
One thing to keep an eye on is that the sausage method does require us to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. You often do, but there are some cases - for example here on the praying mantis drawing where you ended up with more of a stretched ellipse.
Now, while your work is good, I cannot in good conscience mark this lesson as complete. I'm going to ask for a very limited revision below, just for you to demonstrate that you can pull off the same level of structural integrity, but while executing your marks in a manner that continues to reinforce the solidity of your forms, rather than undermining it with all of the extra marks flying around. You'll find the revisions assigned below.
Next Steps:
Please submit 2 additional pages of insect constructions. I have full confidence that you'll knock this out of the park - just be sure to take your time with each and every mark.