3:41 AM, Tuesday May 4th 2021
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are very well done. You're adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages (aside from one on the second page), you're applying a shift in degree along the length of the form, and your contour lines fit snugly within the silhouette of the forms.
Moving onto your insect constructions, you're mostly doing a really good job, but there are a couple things I want to draw your attention to. Before that, it's worth remarking upon the fact that you are in many ways adhering quite well to the principles of construction. You're building things up through the addition of individual forms, you're considering how you can define the relationships between your forms, and in general you're creating a strong illusion of solidity.
So the first issue isn't present in all your drawings, but it is an issue that I want to ensure we avoid moving forward. Do not draw forms faintly to start, then go back over them with a darker line. Commit to your stroke from the beginning. S ofor example, this spider's initial masses were drawn in a way that wasn't entirely committed, and you then followed up by going back over them. You may be seeing this as a use of line weight, but line weight itself is a tool for a specific purpose - to clarify how particular forms overlap one another. It is limited to specific, localized areas, with that line weight being added with a stroke drawn confidently, using the ghosting method, and blended back into the original linework by virtue of confident strokes generally tapering on their ends.
When we get too overzealous with tracing back over our forms' silhouettes, we end up sometimes re-establishing or altering those silhouettes. Because the silhouette itself is just a 2D shape that happens to be in the right shape to convey the illusion of a 3D form, making a change to it will undermine and break that connection, leaving us with something flat. This can also happen if we intentionally try to "refine" or alter the shape of a form (and cutting into that form as shown here), as well as when we build upon our construction with flat shapes.
For this reason, all of our organic constructions must be built up additively, introducing new, solid, three dimensional forms and defining how they relate to the existing structure either by defining their intersection or by designing their silhouettes in a way that wraps around what is already there (as shown here).
You can see this in this beetle horn demo as well as this ant head demo. Of course, you do however apply this pretty well in most cases. Still, it's worth having pointed out more directly.
For the most part when constructing your legs, it does appear that you're employing the sausage method, but there is some deviation in places. For example, you'll find that the sausage method diagram specifically says not to add contour lines through the midsection of a segment. I noted several places where you did this. When the contour lines at the joints are applied correctly, these additional ones don't really end up contributing much at all.
As with the additive construction discussed previously, when you want to build upon that basic sausage armature - as you often will - the trick to doing so is to wrap new masses around that structure as shown here and here. I can actually see you kind of trying to apply this in this drawing, but there are differences. In my example there, the key is creating a twist along the length of the sausage, to really "wrap" it around the structure.
Paired with careful observation of your reference, you can capture quite a bit of complexity, as shown in this ant leg demo and in this dog leg demo (as this technique continues to be relevant into the next lesson as well.
So, as such you do have some areas where continued work will further improve your results, but as it stands I'm quite pleased with how your work has turned out. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - be sure to continue working on these points into the next lesson, where they will continue to play a major role.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.