10:44 PM, Wednesday February 5th 2020
Thanks! It was a bit rough of a start initially, but I think things have largely stabilized. Lots of bugs to fix, still, but they're not too big in scope and impact.
So! Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are quite well done. You're sticking to simple sausage forms, which is great to see - no pinching through the midsections or arbitrary swelling. You're also doing a good job of wrapping those contour curves around, just make sure you keep working on getting them to fit snugly between the edges of the forms, so as to better convey the impression that they wrap around the sausage form's surface.
Overall you're doing a pretty good job with the insect constructions themselves. For the most part you're conveying a very strong understanding of how these forms exist within 3D space, rather than just as a collection of lines on the page. There are a few things I want to point out however. Some are relatively minor, while others are significantly more important.
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Starting off with something light, you tend to use a lot of contour lines, and the majority of them are not really contributing much. Students often do this, feeling that they should add contour lines, but not really thinking about what they're trying to get out of them. A contour line's job is to help communicate that an object is three dimensional - but if that form already reads as being 3D, then it serves no real purpose.
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Contuing from the previous point, not all contour lines are equal. Those that sit along a single form can certainly help, but they are not nearly as effective as the contour lines that define the connection/intersection/relationship between two forms. These are so much more impactful because not only do they function precisely as a regular contour line does, but they also build a recursive connection between those two forms, establishing the relationship that if one reads as being solid and 3D, then so too must the other one be three dimensional. We emphasize these heavily in the sausage form, as shown in the middle of the linked diagram. Focusing on these contour lines rather than placing the less effective ones all over the place will make a far better use of the line you choose to put down.
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You seem to be somewhat inconsistent in how fully you apply the sausage method. I can definitely see major elements of it, but I can also see that in drawings like the scorpion that you're not sticking to simple sausage forms here, instead allowing them to swell and pinch wherever necessary. Instead, you should still be constructing everything with basic sausages, and then coming back later to append further masses to them, on the bottom of this diagram. This will continue to be an important technique to achieve an underlying armature which captures the fluidity and solidity of the leg structure before building up the additional bulk that is required.
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One thing I'm seeing a lot of is the tendency to put marks down that ultimately get ignored as part of the final drawing. We can see this on this beetle's thorax (where you started out with a much broader, looser ellipse that ends up sticking out underneath), as well as in this one. Every single mark we put down establishes a solid, existing form within a 3D world. We cannot treat this as something that can be ignored or modified as though it is simply a series of lines on a page - doing so undermines the illusion we're trying to create. Similarly, this means you should not be approaching the drawing as though you're doing any sort of a rough sketch, followed by a clean-up pass (as you did in the second beetle I linked there). Not only does this result in final linework that is stiff, it also lacks the kind of respect and acknowledgement of the three dimensional nature of our construction.
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I feel that when it comes to texture, a lot of your experimentation tends to mix up the idea of "texture" with just any sort of rendering that'll make the drawing look pretty. As such, you end up incorporating a fair bit of shading-for-shading's-own-sake. I highly recommend you go back to lesson 2's texture section, which has recently been updated with new lesson content and videos. Give it a read/watch and it should clarify how texture should be treated.
So! All in all, your construction is still largely coming along quite well. I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to keep the points I've mentioned here in mind as you continue to move forwards.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.