12:25 AM, Friday August 14th 2020
Your work here is really well done. I have a couple small things to point out, but all in all I'm very pleased with how it's all come out.
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you've done an excellent job of sticking to simple sausage forms and wrapping the contour lines around their rounded surfaces. One minor thing to keep in mind here though is that if we look at the far left sausage of your first page, we'll see that you've got your contour curves wider on the end that is facing the viewer (the bottom) and narrower as it gets farther away. This is generally going to be the opposite. Unless the sausage is actually turning quite dramatically as it moves away from us, the end closer to the viewer will end up with a narrower degree than the end farther away.
Continuing on, you're largely demonstrating a really good grasp of 3D space in how you combine the various simple forms to create solid, believably 3D, complex results. I just have a few things to point out about your approach, minor adjustments that should help keep you entirely on the right track:
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Looking at one of your later spiders, I noticed that as shown here, you bridged the transition between two 3D forms by basically taking their silhouettes and altering them to cross that gap. Something I want you to get in the habit of is making every modification, every adjustment to your drawing by adding an actual 3D form to the construction. So I highlighted along the bottom side where you stretch a 2D shape across the two forms (something that can remind the viewer that the drawing is itself just 2D), and along the top I showed how you can instead integrate a 3D form there that wraps around the existing forms, establishing a relationship with them. The difference is subtle, but when adding additional forms we can't perfectly get things to fit in how we want, because each of these forms have their own volume and mass. It's this that actually gives our drawings their sense of complexity - the idea that to solve a problem, you're introducing a new, different problem - the fact that your addition itself is going to provide its own little bump. While this may not reflect your reference perfectly, it will help you better grasp the spatial relationships between the forms, and will serve you very well when tackling things with more prominent musculature (like animals).
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The other issues I wanted to address are ones relating to the legs. Looking at the same spider as the point above, you added a lot of contour curves to the lengths of your forms that are largely unnecessary. The sausage method basically allows you to define a strong relationship between your forms in 3D space by only reinforcing the joint between them with a single contour line (as shown in the center of this diagram). By defining this relationship, it clearly makes both forms feel three dimensional, making additional contour lines unnecessary. When adding contour lines, always try and think as to whether or not another one is really needed. Often times students will just add them because they feel that's what they're supposed to do, without necessarily considering what it's for.
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If we look at your weevil drawing, you've in many ways approached the use of the sausage method quite well, in that you put down an armature of sausage forms, and then built atop them to add bulk where it's needed. You also added bulk in the way shown in the wasp demo, which again, is fine. Moving forward however, as soon as I get the chance I'm going to be replacing these demos to do this sort of thing in a somewhat different manner, which I now believe is even more effective. It relates very much to my first point, where we use an additional 3D form that wraps around the underlying sausage structure instead of the addition of a 2D shape, as shown here. The reason this is better is because again it defines clear relationships between the original sausage and the newly added forms. You can also see this principle demonstrated here.
Aside from these points, your work is coming along very well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.