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8:42 PM, Monday August 3rd 2020
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're largely doing this well, but keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines need to change as you slide along the length of the sausage. As they move away from the viewer, they'll get wider, and as they move towards the viewer they'll get narrower.
Over the course of the lesson's insect constructions, I think you've shown a considerable amount of improvement. Early on, there were certain less-than-ideal habits - for example, attempting to draw your earlier masses with a fainter line, purposely to make it less noticeable in favour of a cleaner end result. Funnily enough, in your attempt to hide them and make them less noticeable, you actually called out attention to them because of how they stood apart from the rest of your clean, concise linework.
Now, as you progressed through the lesson, you relied on this less and less, and drew those masses with more confidence, but looking closely, an element of that approach is still present even in your later drawings, so I want to make this clear: these drawings are, all of them, exercises. We're doing them not to end up with a pretty end result, but rather to learn from the act of drawing them, to let them help us explore what it means to manipulate forms in 3D space, to think about how those forms relate to one another and how they can be drawn to feel believable and solid. Drawing anything to be more faint, more timid, or in any way other than entirely confident will undermine some aspect of what you benefit from your drawings.
Most students who end up doing these sorts of things have a lot of other habits that go with it, and it usually leans into things like not drawing through forms, skipping constructional steps, and so on - and for the most part those are not things I see from you, aside from maybe with this spider. Notice how there's a connection between its cephalothorax (the head/thorax area) and the abdomen - how you've extended the silhouette of both to merge together? What you've done there is taken the flat, two dimensional manifestation of the 3D form (which is what the silhouette is), and then extended those to merge them together. What you did was not to create a three dimensional form there to bridge between those structures, and so the result doesn't feel 3D. It reminds us that we're looking at a 2D drawing. Fortunately that's the only instance of such a thing that I've seen in your work.
To the contrary, you've got many features that actually suggest a very strong grasp of 3D space - like how the segmentation around the thorax of this one wraps so confidently around the underlying structure, implying a complex form there but with incredible solidity. It's very well done, and that makes it just a little unfortunate that the thorax and head were initially roughed in so loosely.
As a whole, I have no doubt at all that your spatial reasoning skills are very strong, and you exhibit them throughout your work for this lesson. The only thing I want to see from you as you move forwards is that you not attempt to draw with two different kinds of marks - some that are loose and semi-hidden, and others that are confident and proud. Every mark you decide should be a part of your constructions should be drawn with confidence, because it's there to serve a purpose. If it's not, then it shouldn't be drawn at all.
I'm going to leave you with two notes on issues I can't quite find places to sneak into my critique, but feel you should be made aware of:
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Similarly to the issue with the silhouettes in that spider, students sometimes make the mistake of cutting across the flat silhouette of an object. This is a mistake I explain in these notes. I noticed a couple places, specifically where you roughed in a form, then cut back across it with a more confident line (like the thorax of the wasp on this page). Since this leads to you manipulating the silhouette, it reminds the viewer that they're looking at a flat, 2D drawing.
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This crab claw demo is a useful extension of the same concept which may help you how to think about drawing your scorpion claws.
With all that laid out, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep these points in mind as you continue to move forwards. For the most part you've used the sausage method quite well - that will come in handy when drawing animals, as the same principles apply - although you'll often find yourself wanting to add bulk after the fact, which you can do as described here and here.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
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