Links for sausage pages (because I realized too late):
I made some mistakes which should be adressed on later pages. Thank you for your time.
Hi Sillysnek, I'm gonna check your submission.
Starting out by your organic forms with contour lines, you are forgetting the importance to stick to the characteristics of a simple sausage. These are not arbitrary forms, they are two balls connected by a tube, strive for this! In a lot of times you are finishing your sausages too abruptly, give yourself some time to ghost them; they are hard, but if you keep on practicing them and ghosting them, you will get better at them.
Also, try out different directions and forms, right now, all your sausages look similar- You can also add variety by changing the degrees of your contour curves, which I'm see that you are not doing. This is a key element to create a solid illusion of depth!
Moving on to your insects, I see that you started applying the sausage method mid lesson, which is good, and also that you are using basic shapes to start your constructions. Though, there are some issues I wanna point out so you can, hopefully, step up your constructions.
The first concept I want to talk about is drawing in 3d vs. 2d. As we all know, every mark we do when we are drawing is on a 2d surface, meaning, a 2d mark- So, our job as artists is to treat and perceive that 2d mark as a 3d one, in order to create an illusion of depth. With time and practice, you get better at visualizing them as forms that sit on 3d space, but what's key to keep them like this, is to avoid treating them as 2d in any way.
The thing is, as I said, we are drawing on a flat surface, meaning that doing marks that are flat, is very easy- The thing about this marks is, that they undermine all our efforts to keep our constructions real and 3d, so we need to stick to strict rules to avoid these mistakes.
A key rule to keep in mind is, once you have establish a form in your page, you should not try to alter or redraw their silhouette. See both of these constructions you did- Here, you are just altering the silhouette, what's wrong about this is that the silhouette it's just a 2d shape that represents the 3d form, when you alter the shape, you don't change the nature of the 3d form, you just break the connection between them.
When you cut back or try to extend your forms, you flatten your construction and it creates a mix of 2d shapes and 3d forms- and the 2 shapes remind the viewer they are just seeing a flat drawing.
What you should be doing instead, is constructing additively- You should be introducing new, enclosed 3d forms and establishing how they relate to others forms, either by having their silhouette wrap around other forms (as presented here) or by intersecting with each other and showing this with contour curves (like the form intersections from lesson 2). Here is a good approach you could use for your constructions.
On the same topic we have talked about, I'm seeing that your constructions start with basic shapes, but you are not really adding any complexity by adding more forms as we have already talked about. Right now, your constructions, may look solid, but are really primal, I see that you are using a lot of circles, when you should've used more sausages, talking advantage of their flowy nature.
As I've already said, here we work additively, for example take a look at this ant head construction, or this beetle horn demo and this more detailed lobster demo.
Another thing, I've noticed that you started applying the sausage method for the legs, though this is just a first step on how we can capture the flow of the legs and maintain their solidity, what you can do after is to add more complexity by adding more forms (does this ring a bell?). Check this and this example on what I mean.
One last thing that I wanted to talked about is about your submissions. On your sketch book, I'm seeing that you don't have either lesson 2 and the 250 box challenge, Remember that Draw a Box is to build our fundamentales from the floor and up, by ignoring basic lessons, you are undermining your own ability to learn.
I recommend you go back and do both of them, it will help you on the long run. And if you decide to move forward, remember that a lot of the people that critique in here, prefer to spend their time for critique's on people who are actually doing every lesson, and waiting for critique's to move forward.
All this said, I'm gonna mark this lesson as completed! I hope that you take my advice so you can step up your drawing skills!
Next Steps:
finish the 250 box challenge.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
