Hi again. Felt like I didn't want make any details/texture to animals, but I forced to do it to get better on it. Let's see how it goes.. Thanks for critique in advance. I recognized after drawing these that, maybe I should focus more on proportion, so that way animals would look better.
Starting with your organic intersections, these are generally pretty well done. Your second page is especially well done, and you've done a good job of wrapping the forms around one another. Just two things to keep in mind:
Never scratch something out, as you did for one shadow on the first page. It does not eliminate the mistake, it simply adds to it.
Keep your shadows more consistent - on the second page, you've got shadows being cast to the right and to the left (although since your light source is pretty much straight up, this is actually very slight - but I suspect you may not have been thinking about where the light was coming from, so I figured I'd call it out anyway).
Moving onto your animal constructions, there are a number of issues I want to address, so I labelled them on these two drawings of yours, and will touch upon them below:
Biggest of all, the way you add your additional forms is incorrect. It is critically important that when you add a form to a construction, you capture how it wraps around and integrates with the existing structure through the silhouette of that new form. This is how we make it feel solid - by establishing its relationship with other forms. Adding contour lines to the forms after the fact won't help establish those relationships - it'll only make those additional forms feel more solid and three dimensional in isolation. That doesn't solve the problem at hand, and so the result is that the additional forms feel more like shapes that are layered on top of one another, rather than actual forms. You can read here about how to think about these additional forms.
When constructing your animals' heads, the eyesockets are extremely important, because they define the first step to take the variety of curving surfaces and breaking them down into planes. From there, we fit other forms against these eye sockets, not putting gaps in between them but pressing them up tightly against one another like a 3D puzzle. This ensures that the head becomes a more defined, planar structure, making it feel more three dimensional. Your approach puts a lot of gaps in between these forms, making them feel like they're floating more loosely. Along with the demo I drew on your page, you can also see this demonstrated in several demonstrations on the informal demos page of the lesson.
The sausage method is still very important, and you're kind of inconsistent in following it. Between sausages that are more complex and don't adhere as closely to the 'simple sausage' characteristics as they should (admittedly this can be hard and requires practice, but you need to keep pushing at it). I can see you attempting in some places to use additional forms to add complexity to your limbs, but in general it's not very much, and the issues addressed before about the additional forms not really establishing how they wrap around the existing structure definitely gives you some difficulty. As shown in my lesson 4 critique, here's how you'd see those additional masses being used on a dog's leg. There's also this ant's leg and this demonstration of how to 'wrap' the forms around.
When it comes to the addition of detail, I understand that you forced yourself to add it here, but I do think your initial instinct to leave it out was correct, at least for now. Detail and texture can be distracting as we struggle to get the structure down, so I recommend that for the next set that I will assign below, you avoid texture altogether, and focus only on how you build up these three dimensional structure, pinning down how the different forms relate to one another in space. In addition to this, I want you to avoid all contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form. The contour lines that define the connection between forms (like form intersection lines, and the contour lines at the joints between sausages in the sausage method) are still okay to use, and I encourage you to do so - but the ones that sit on just one form at a time should be avoided for now. This should force you to use different tools to build up your structures.
Next Steps:
I'd like you to do 4 more pages of animal constructions, keeping what I've said above in mind, and adhering to the restrictions at the end of the critique.
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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