7:21 PM, Thursday June 3rd 2021
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.