Hi there! Guess it's my chance to return the favor with your stellar critiques! I'll try my best, but to be fair, most of this work is pretty stellar, and I'm pretty sure I saw you in lesson 6 already. Nevertheless, we'll give it a try:
Organic Contours. Okay, so looking at these, I'm intrigued with your approach, as you draw some with 5 contour lines, and others that are narrower with 6+ contours. These sausages are still equilateral, so it looks like a productive avenue of experimentation. I do wanna point out that some of the contours seem to have illogical contour progression through the form. I sketched a few of them on your second page, but I can't rule out the possibility that I'm looking at them wrong. Just a friendly reminder to consider that even though we're taught to look at them as having a wide-narrow-wide progression of contours, sausages can progress from narrow to thin and vice-versa, depending on how they're oriented in space.
Insects. So looking through the first few without texture, I think your work is just stellar! I love your consistency between your works, and they all have a good sense of solid-ness to them. You do a great job of relying on the sausage form for the legs. Something that I picked up on while browsing through the informal demos was the idea of building on leg forms in order to make them match the forms we see in the reference. Although it looks like you missed it at first, by the time you started on textures, you were adding forms with clean execution. Incidentally, I was given a diagram in my review of an ant's leg construction that you might like to hold on to as a reminder building on sausage forms or for your own L4 reviews down the line.
THE OTHER thing I want to talk about here before moving on to your outstanding textured bugs is your praying mantis. This one sticks with me because I suffered to make my orchid mantis a while back. All I want to touch on is the claw and leg construction. After staring at these bugs excessively, I wanted to suggest some finer details missing in your construction, namely the claw features, and the lil' skinny reachy feet similar to the ones on the claws. So here's that sketch, hoping it'll give you something to think about, though I have no idea how many more insects you plan on constructing in the near future.
Moving on to your textured works, I think you continued to do great work through these. I'm especially fond of how well your shadows follow the form of the shell on your snail, and that weevil is second to none. One thing I would like to touch on in regards to texture is that lines don't give much information as a shadow shape. It's encouraged somewhat to give these extra-fine shadows just a little shape to them. That said, I think it still looks pretty good, so I there's not much for me to add after that. All in all, I really enjoy seeing your work here. It's top-tier and it's something to be admired. You just nailed that wasp too, your careful application of cast shadow kept that leg area from getting too confusing!
So in summation, I think you got the 'A' for this lesson with nary a doubt. I can't imagine you struggling with anything in Lesson 5 or anywhere you happen to be.
Next Steps:
Move on to Lesson 5 if you haven't already. Best of luck to you!
Hey! Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough critique! Sorry for the late reply, I haven’t logged in recently T_T. I think you’ve levied thoughtful and valid criticisms.
To be more specific, on my organic contours I honestly wasn't counting my curves, just starting from the middle and going out until it felt right. But you are certainly correct in your assertions – I felt beholden to the “wide-narrow-wide” progression even if the sausage itself didn’t appear to flow in this way naturally. I was too laser-focused on having “narrow degrees inside, wider degrees outside” that I missed the forest for the trees during this exercise. I think during subsequent practice I’ve corrected this subconsciously, but it’s very helpful to have these sorts of things explicitly pointed out to me.
I definitely struggled with the legs, those left much to be desired but I wasn’t really sure how to build out details on top of them, or what details were too small. That ant leg construction you linked is extremely helpful honestly – I’ll definitely be working on applying that some 3D construction method to small scale objects.
You’re so right about the praying mantis – this was another instance of me deciding “This is a ‘construction only’ piece, the claw/leg details are small enough that I should just skip them, right…?” But the diagrams you’ve included really help showcase that those forms aren’t actually “detail” and are large enough forms to be included even in a purely constructional piece. I’m probably gonna end up taking another crack at this one in particular, thanks for sharing!
And thanks for taking the time to help out in Elodin’s queue! You didn’t have to do that and your efforts are greatly appreciated :)
Hey there! For what it's worth, don't sweat the sausages, that stuff I mentioned I absolutely did NOT figure out until lesson 5, so I'm just spreading those lessons around. Also, I do think your mantis was pretty great in its simplicity! I learned a lot about additive forms while analyzing the claws in my experience, and I just picked up an approach to the arms that I am all too happy to share, and the opportunity just doesn't come up in lesson 3 or 5.
And helping review the higher lesson students on the queue is my pleasure! It's good composition practice, and it helps reinforce some of the random useful things I've been picking up!
Marshall Vandruff is a ubiquitous name in art instruction - not just through his work on the Draftsmen podcast and his other collaborations with Proko, but in his own right. He's been teaching anatomy, gesture, and perspective for decades, and a number of my own friends have taken his classes at the Laguna College of Art and Design (back around 2010), and had only good things to say about him. Not just as an instructor, but as a wonderful person as well.
Many of you will be familiar with his extremely cheap 1994 Perspective Drawing lectures, but here he kicks it up to a whole new level.
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