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4:52 PM, Monday November 23rd 2020

This is definitely a marked improvement, and while there are still areas with room for improvement (which I'll list below), all in all you're moving in the right direction.

  • You are improving with your sausage forms, and this will continue to get better with further practice. It is challenging, and it takes time, so be sure to continue practicing them as you move forward.

  • Also, you don't appear to have moved beyond the basic sausage structures in your constructions, which suggests that you ignored the part of my initial critique which talked about how you could delve deeper into the complexity of your insects' legs (as shown in the ant leg example I provided and the dog leg example). When I mention something in a critique, I'll generally want to see it applied in your assigned revisions where applicable.

  • To that same point, there definitely were some areas where you oversimplified internal details, like the cephalothorax (the head/thorax section) of these spiders. The eyes certainly don't just exist as a series of basic ellipses floating arbitrarily on the structure. Observe your reference more closely and identify additional forms you could build up along its structure, giving those eyes a more concrete, integrated way to fit purposely into the construction.

  • In general, once a form has been added to a construction, avoid changing its silhouette at all. This is similar to what I mentioned in my critique about avoiding cutting back into it, but the same thing goes for redrawing the silhouette to extend it out. For example, the bottom right ant on this page (bottom right once it's rotated correctly, that is) shows a head where you blocked in a basic ball form, but then redrew part of its silhouette to add the mandibles and add a little additional complexity. Manipulating the silhouette in this manner is an action performed in 2D space, and therefore encourages us to understand it as though it is flat and two dimensional. You did something similar on the bottom left ant as well. Instead, every single thing you add to a construction must be solid and three dimensional, drawing each form in full such that it doesn't require any ot her forms' edges to be fully enclosed, and defining how it relates to the rest of the structure. You approached this more correctly for the two ants across the top, where the mandible sections where established as separate 3D forms that connected to the original head mass.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you can continue to work on these points in the next lesson.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:00 PM, Monday November 23rd 2020

Thank you. For some reason every time I read through the critique before working I interpreted the leg part to mean (only use sausage forms in these exercises, but when we want to correctly draw the legs as forms this is what we'll do.)

I understand what you mean now when you're talking about adding and subtracting in 3d space. I'll try my best to implement that in the future. Though the concept is still quite abstract and fresh to me.

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