Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids
1:09 AM, Saturday October 9th 2021
It was a pretty rough excersise but a fun one. I really feel how my sense of construction and observation has been developing with each new drawing.
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, the first page was definitely off in terms of adherence to the characteristics of simple sausages (as explained here), but you definitely improved upon this a fair bit into the second and third pages. There were a few things I noticed though:
Be sure to draw through all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1. This holds for all the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.
Right now you seem to be maintaining a fairly consistent degree to all the contour curves along a given sausage form. They should actually be getting wider as we slide away from the viewer along a given sausage, as explained back in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.
Continuing onto your insect constructions, I'm definitely seeing a lot of signs that your underlying grasp of 3D space is improving nicely. While there are a few adjustments I'd make to your overall approach (which I'll get to in a second), I can see that you're pushing more and more towards considering the things you're drawing as though they're made up of separate elements that exist within 3D space. While their relationships in 3D space aren't necessarily as concrete and well defined as they could be, you are definitely thinking about them as you draw, and as such you're moving in the right direction. The main issue here comes down to the slight tendency to jump back and forth between interacting with what you're constructing in both 3D space (as a series of 3D forms) and in 2D space (as a series of flat shapes on a flat page).
Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.
For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.
This comes up in a few places throughout your work - for example, on this stick bug, I've marked out in red where you've cut into the silhouettes of your existing forms, and in blue where you extended those shapes out. All of these occur in the 2D space of the drawing, rather than through manipulation of what exists in 3D space.
Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.
You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. This is all part of accepting that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for the viewer to believe in that lie.
Another point I noticed that's worth mentioning is that when you get into the detail phase of a drawing, you seem to get a little lost in the idea of 'decorating' what you've drawn - effectively doing what you can to make it look visually appealing. Unfortunately decoration is not a particularly concrete goal, as it's difficult to identify when one has added "enough" decoration. 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.
When it comes to the use of filled areas of solid black, it's best to reserve these only for cast shadow shapes (which imply the presence of other forms, both in construction to reinforce the forms that have been explicitly drawn, and in texture to imply the presence of smaller textural forms without drawing them directly). Avoid using it for local surface colour (like capturing the blacks of your insects' eyes) or for form shading (as discussed here in Lesson 2.
The last thing I wanted to call out is that I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. In your case I can see that did appear to be trying to apply the sausage method, but that you weren't as strict in applying all of the rules laid out in the diagram (in terms of adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages, and in focusing the contour lines specifically at the joints between sausage forms and nowhere else).
Beyond that, 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, in 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). These approaches align well with the additive construction explained earlier, where each added form is its own separate mass which wraps around the existing structure.
As a whole, I do feel that while you have plenty of areas for growth and improvement, you're headed in the right direction. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, just be sure to apply the points I've raised here throughout your work in the next one.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.
This is a remarkable little pen. Technically speaking, any brush pen of reasonable quality will do, but I'm especially fond of this one. It's incredibly difficult to draw with (especially at first) due to how much your stroke varies based on how much pressure you apply, and how you use it - but at the same time despite this frustration, it's also incredibly fun.
Moreover, due to the challenge of its use, it teaches you a lot about the nuances of one's stroke. These are the kinds of skills that one can carry over to standard felt tip pens, as well as to digital media. Really great for doodling and just enjoying yourself.
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