12:07 AM, Thursday October 7th 2021
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are for the most part, really well done. You're doing a great job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, and maintaining confident, smooth linework. There's just one thing I want you to keep an eye on - right now your contour lines are roughly the same degree throughout. Remember that as we slide along the length of a given sausage form, moving away from the viewer, the contour lines will get wider. The reasoning for this is demonstrated in the ellipses video from Lesson 1.
Continuing onto your insect constructions, your work here is for the most part, really well done. Overall you're showing me that your spatial reasoning skills, and your understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space, is all developing really nicely. The drawings themselves are very clearly and believably 3D - each one feels more like something solid and tangible, rather than just a collection of lines on a flat page. This belief that what you're drawing is 3D shines through especially well in areas where you wrap segmentation around insects' abdomens - like this one for instance - but honestly, it's present throughout.
Now, while your end results are coming along fantastically, it's important to always remember that each drawing in this course is itself just an exercise - a spatial puzzle we're solving to continually improve and develop those spatial reasoning skills, and to rewire our brain into believing more and more that what we're drawing is solid and three dimensional. There is one little touch where your approach can be adjusted to make the exercise itself more effective.
One thing to avoid are circumstances where we take a form that has already been drawn, and modify its 2D shape on the page. This is often something students will do to take a shortcut towards some addition of detail. It's also not something you do often, but I did notice a bit of it in your insects' legs. For example, here I've marked out where you slightly flared that silhouette out after the fact, on top of the simple sausage you started with. Building upon the simple sausage structure is entirely correct - but instead of simply modifying the drawing on a 2D level, 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.
This, applied to the sausage method/leg construction looks like this and this. Of course, you can push it beyond just adding things that change the silhouette. As shown on this ant leg and this dog leg, those additional masses can be twisted and integrated together to really build out a lot of the subtler nuances of what we see in our reference images.
So! Be sure to keep that in mind as you move forward, but in general you're doing a fantastic job and should be very proud of yourself. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.