So I decided to go ahead and get the couple critiques I had on my docket done today rather than leaving them for tomorrow, even though it'll push back my OGMA work and maybe make me stay up a little later. Say thank you.

As to your begging, don't worry - there won't be any redos. All in all you're doing a pretty good job of capturing how your subject matter is made up of simple forms, and building them back up on the page. There are some minor issues here and there, especially early on that I believe come from your general psychological discomfort and the more overwhelming nature of the problems you're tackling, and I will touch upon them, but all in all you're definitely still moving very much in the right direction. Also, I think you found some excellent references to work from, and that coconut crab is awesome in how it's built. Great choice.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, I do feel these were done a little sloppier than they could have been - take a little more time and be patient with your planning/preparation for every mark you put down. You don't have to draw them to be immense (as a bunch of these were), maybe split the difference between the big three boys on the first page and the tiny one in between them. Also, remember that we want to stick to simple sausage forms. You've strayed from that in a few cases, where the ends were of different sizes. The more you stray from this, the more complexity you add to the form, and the more difficult it becomes to sell the illusion that it's solid and 3D.

Moving onto some of the demo-draw alongs, I did notice a slight tendency to be again, a little sloppy and loose when it comes to your mark making. I expect that this is at least in part because drawing these insects seems daunting, and you're not as confident in what you're doing as you could be, causing you to rush forward a little bit. Don't worry, and when you find yourself anxious, take a step back and assess the situation. You know which forms to draw, you just need to give yourself the time and patience to plan them out, rather than jumping in and hoping your instincts will win the day. So, when looking at things like the initial mass for the louse's abdomen, or some of the balls/ellipses you drew for the scorpion's tail, they definitely could have been tighter, as I know you're entirely capable of that.

Skipping forward to your own constructions, I felt that you did a pretty good job of capturing how your grasshopper exists in 3D space, and having it angle towards us definitely helped with that (while also making it somewhat more difficult). You managed it well. One thing to watch out for though is that its back feet don't seem to be quite on the same ground level as the front ones - always keep in mind where the ground is, as this can be a major selling point for the illusion. For the caterpillar, I like that you were continually thinking in terms of 3D forms even when drawing the feet, but you did skip some steps, drawing the feet to be rather complex in their silhouette instead of breaking them down into simpler forms. Still, the way they attach to the torso is pretty solid.

Jumping down to your dragon fly, I think you realized pretty early that your proportions were a little whacked out, but the mistake you made was in attempting to correct some of that. Specifically, how you constructed the head within the sphere you'd drawn for its cranial mass. Remember that construction is all about placing forms in 3D space, and respecting the fact that they exist there. Having placed a solid ball of marble into the world, we can't simply act like it's not there and draw inside of it - we have to somehow deal with it.

Construction comes in two flavours:

Additive construction is where we place a solid, three dimensional form in the world, and then move forward by building further simple forms on top of it. As we build up these forms, each one existing as a solid mass in three dimensions, we gradually build up complexity. This is what we do most of the time, and it is what I recommend students do wherever possible.

Subtractive construction is the opposite - it involves taking forms that we've constructed in the world, and then cutting back into it. It's easy to think that this means that what you did there - drawing your head construction inside of the ball is what we mean, but it's not. What you did was treating the ball as though it was just a flat shape on the page, and this undermines the overall illusion we're trying to create.

In order to maintain the illusion that our drawings are in fact solid, three dimensional forms, we need to treat them that way from the beginning. This means that we see every single mark we draw as being part of a solid form that now exists within the world. That initial mass you drew existed in the world like a ball of marble (as I mentioned above). You can't simply have another form occupy the same space as something that is already present - you have to interact with it and actually deal with what is already there. This is where subtractive construction comes into play.

Subtractive construction is the act of taking a 3D form and separating it into two sections. We do this using contour lines, drawing along the surface of the form in three dimensions, as though our pen were a scalpel. Once this line properly divides the form into two sections, we can then designate one as being positive space (the piece we keep), and the other as being negative space (an empty void). Being that we still clearly define how both exist in 3D space, we still maintain the illusion, and are allowed now to cast aside the piece we don't want. You can see this demonstrated here in a demo I did for another student.

The thing is that additive construction is really good at helping the student further develop their grasp of how forms interact in 3D space, whereas it's very easy to slip back to thinking in 2D when working subtractively. As such, the more you work additively, the better your results will likely be when you have to work subtractively.

For this dragonfly's head, you certainly could have kept working additively, you just would have ended up with a bigger head (which I actually think would have held up better in relation to the big thorax). Even if it hadn't, however, your proportions were already set, you were committed. All you could do was hold to the principles of construction and maintain the illusion that maybe this is just a really weird, messed up dragonfly that you were drawing - that it is that way in real life, and that you were merely capturing it faithfully.

All in all, I think your work is still pretty well done, and this dragonfly was the only one where there were notable constructional errors. The only other thing I want to draw your attention to is how in your coconut crab, you kind of applied the sausage method for constructing your legs, but you also weren't adhering to it as closely as you could have. For instance, not all your sausages were simple (many with ends that weren't entirely spherical), and many of them didn't really overlap with a defined intersection line as shown in the diagram. Adhering to the steps shown in the diagram is really important - even if you feel that the legs you're looking to draw don't match it entirely, it really only serves as a base structure or an armature onto which you can add additional forms and masses to bulk it up as shown here. Keep in mind that bulking up doesn't mean just redrawing its silhouette as you did along the crab's right leg (along the far left of the drawing) - we actually need to establish a relationship between the mass we're adding, and the structure it's being added to, by wrapping one around the other. Often this means wrapping a few masses around it, which is also shown in that linked demo.

So! You're doing a good job, with a few things to keep an eye on which will continue to come up in the next lesson (as the sausage method is just as important there). I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work.