Starting with your organic intersections - great work. You've focused on keeping the individual forms simple, allowing them to maintain their individual solidity, and then put a great deal of effort towards figuring out how they all ought to slump and sag against one another. There's just one small thing to keep in mind - in your first page, you've got shadows being cast primarily to the right of your forms, but you do have one being cast to the left (towards the lower left of the pile). Always remember where you want your light source to be, so you can keep consistent with it.
Continuing onto your animal constructions, I think you've really put a lot into this lesson, and it shows in the overall growth and improvement across the whole set. It is very clear that throughout the whole thing, you were trying to figure out how to best establish these forms as they interact with one another in space, how they wrap around the structures to which they're attaching, and how to ensure that the end result feels solid and tangible. I have a couple recommendations as you move forwards, but as a whole I think you've done a great job.
The main point that stood out to me comes down to where we can include complexity to the silhouettes of our additional masses, and where we must keep things as simple as possible. In a lot of ways, you handled this quite well, and improved at it throughout your work, but I did notice a tendency to include corners in some places where there wasn't any arguable cause for them.
If you take a look at this, you'll see a few corners I've highlighted on the additional masses which have been added to that aardvark. There are others - in fact, most of those along the legs have some pretty sharp corners. As explained here, all areas of complexity in our additional masses' silhouettes (that is, corners and inward curves) need to be there for a reason - primarily from interacting with other existing structures. Complexity occurs when two or more masses push together.
They fall into two categories - you've got the big mass along the back, where I'd argue that there should be complexity in the areas you added it - we just need to provide an excuse for it. As you can see here, if we introduce masses at the shoulder and hip - which are generally going to be there because that's where the "big" muscle engines that allow the animals to walk around exist, though they're not always super obviously visible if you dont' know what to look for - we now have forms that can press up against the back mass and help make it more complex to further establish its relationship with the construction as a whole. Of course, those shoulder and hip masses then need to have their intersections defined with the sausage forms, but that's just another contour line - no big deal.
The other category are the masses you added to your sausage structures, where you tended to have sharp corners but without anything to press against. In these cases, because there isn't any structure to create such a sharp corner, we can instead create a smoother S-curve transition, as shown here. This still allows us to "wrap" around the structure, but doesn't require such a sharp turn.
The other point I wanted to address comes down to head construction. You're actually, for the most part, doing a great job with this. You're mindfully establishing how the different components of the head "wedge" together, creating a solid, grounded, three dimensional puzzle with each piece reinforcing the illusion that its neighbours are 3D. The one point I want to push here however comes down to the specific shape of the eye socket. Right now I'm seeing you experimenting with a lot of different eye socket shapes, but I do fine that leaning more towards the specific pentagonal shape I use in this demo. It combines thinking about how we're cutting into the cranial ball and separating it into distinct planes, while also creating negative shapes around it - like the wedge between eye sockets which the muzzle fits right into, and the flat top across which the brow ridge settles - that lend themselves to establishing these other structures. Of course you can always play with them and experiment, but I do find this approach really reinforces what we want to be thinking about when dealing with head construction.
Also, remember that the ball we place within the eye socket is an eyeball, around which eyelids wrap. We can construct those eyelids as separate masses to really push the interaction in 3D space, as shown here.
So, with that, as a whole I think you're doing a great job and have shown a lot of improvement. There's still plenty of room for growth, but you're on the right track. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
Hello Boss, many thanks for the feedback.
Can I ask a follow-up question? The feedback that you gave about complex forms/sharp edges on forms (using my aardvark for the example) actually brings up a question I've been wanting to ask but didn't know how to articulate.
Those sharp edges on the wrapping forms arise because I'm following the contours of the underlying base forms when creating those wraps. The reason I made this design/construction decision: by following contours of the base form when wrapping new forms on top of them, this contributes to showing the 3-dimensionality of those wrapping forms and thus the overall animal construction. I made the choice the err on the side of including those potentially-unnecessary corners on all my forms, in order to preserve 3-dimensionality of the construction.
I've drawn base contours on my aardvark here (in blue), and those base contours end up producing the sharp corners on the wrapping forms, which you pointed out (in red).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MOdiiPwmptubmkd7IkmCeBfc7q6_TV7z/view?usp=sharing
When you demonstrated your example here with the aardvark's foreleg.... https://i.imgur.com/rvHWACP.png
...How do your forms drawn here maintain the sense of 3-dimensionality of the limb?
I suppose my question is: How do you decide when to draw a form that potentially breaks the 3-dimensionality of the construction (as with the aardvark's foreleg), and when to make more complicated forms with sharp corners in order to preserve 3-dimensionality (as with the aardvark's big back mass)? You explain some of your reasoning with this example (https://i.imgur.com/I9d5Mdr.png) but I'd to understand this decision making a bit more.
Thanks a bunch.
So there's a few things to clarify here. Firstly, let's look at what it looks like when a cylinder (like the sausage form) intersects with a sphere (similar to one of the additional masses): https://i.imgur.com/6WgR3yU.png
The key thing to note is that there aren't any sharp corners - like the masses I drew on your aardvark, it achieves a smooth transition, basically taking two C curves (one from the sphere and one from the cylinder) and adding them together to end up with a sort of S. It's not quite as simple as that, but those are the core mechanics of it. The only place where we end up with such sharp turns are either when the underlying form has an edge/corner of its own (like when intersecting a sphere and a box), or if you're artificially introducing some other reason for there to be a sharp corner.
Having that sharp corner in there isn't wrong, but the issue is that it implies the presence of some other structure that is causing it, but that element is at no point defined in your drawing. Any and all complexity (like corners) should be the result of specific forms that are present, and you need to yourself understand how they exist in space.
The other alternative would be if your additional mass itself had its own corner (like if you were wrapping a hotdog bun around a sausage, where the bun itself eventually ends), but our additional masses are just amorphous blobs of meat, which exist in a vacuum as a simple ball until something else presses against it.
To answer your question at the end, I don't. As shown in the intersection between the sphere and the cylinder, that is the correct intersection, and therefore it doesn't break the illusion that the construction itself is 3D. There is no such decision being made, and the 3D illusion is paramount - so if you did want to create more of a hotdog effect (with your sharp corner), you'd simply have to also define the form that is causing it to occur. It wouldn't be a great idea, however, because these sorts of additional forms are mimicking the behaviour of muscles, which also don't have those kinds of sharp corners, and instead all press up against one another in more of a "twisting", organic fashion.
Many thanks for the explanation. I forgot about those form intersections - good timing to revisit them for L6/L7!
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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