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10:27 PM, Tuesday February 18th 2020
Overall you're doing a pretty good job here, with just a couple issues to point out that should help as you continue to move forwards.
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, one thing that stands out is the sausage forms themselves. To start with, you are definitely making an effort to keep them simple, and their widths are indeed consistent through their lengths, but I'm noticing that the ends tend not to be entirely spherical. This results in them looking pointy, and can be a problem when we try to use them in our constructions.
Now, actually looking at your insect constructions, you're doing a lot of good here. You're paying attention to how your forms fit together, you're wrapping segmentation around the underlying structure, you're using the sausage method to construct your legs and other such anatomy. These are all very good things and demonstrate how you're developing a strong grasp of 3D space and how these forms interact with one another inside of it.
Constructional drawing itself comes in two flavours - there's additive construction, which is what you're employing the vast majority of the time in these drawings. We take one form, and then we add another to it, in a way that demonstrates how both exist in three dimensions, rather than just on the two dimensions of the page. We wrap forms around one another, we allow them to intersect with contour lines to help define those relationships, and so on. You're employing this to great effect.
The other flavour is called subtractive construction, and it is by its very nature considerable more difficult to wrangle, and can be used incorrectly quite easily. There are a couple places where you employed it, but did so in a way that flattened out elements of your drawings. Admittedly, there's actually very few instances of this - you've been pretty consistent at using additive construction wherever possible (which is great to see), but if you look at the claw on the right side of this scorpion drawing (the scorpion's left claw), I can see how you started with a ball form, but then decided to change that form a little later, pulling back into it and leaving a few lines outside of the form you ultimately moved forwards with. What this ultimately tells the viewer is that there are two contradicting forms present, one encompassing the other.
What you did here was to take the shape of the claw as it sits on the flat page, and then changed its silhouette. This kind of alteration, though small and seemingly harmless, emphasizes how it is not a three dimensional form, and instead reminds the viewer that it only exists as a drawing on a page.
Instead, when we want to cut back into a three dimensional form, we do so by dividing that form into two entirely separate sections. We use our pen as though it is a scalpel, drawing contour lines along the surface of the given form, establishing exactly where these two forms touch one another. Once properly separated, we can choose to regard one of these as positive space and the other as negative space. Because both are still solid and entirely defined as three dimensional, this doesn't flatten out the drawing, and in fact reinforces the illusion. I demonstrate what I mean by this in the lower right of this page, where I made a quick demo for another student who was struggling with the same idea.
Aside from this one point, your work is largely very well done. If I had to call one other thing out, it'd be how you approach the furry texture on the top right of this page. You drew individual strands of fur that break the silhouette. The silhouette itself is an enclosed shape, but this makes it seem more like a collection of lines. Instead of having these lines shoot out, try and work more with shape. This is actually demonstrated in this section of lesson 5, since it becomes more relevant for animals, so be sure to give it a read.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.
PureRef
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.