10:43 PM, Thursday January 14th 2021
Alrighty, so let's look at the organic forms with contour curves first. Just to be extra clear, I drew on top of your sausages to show the various ways in which you deviate from [the characteristics of simple sausages](), so you know what to work towards.
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When it comes to talking about keeping ends that are circular, that means that from the point where the width of the sausage starts to get narrower (remember that through its midsection it's supposed to stay totally consistent), we're basically transferring into our circle/sphere. You have a pretty noticeable tendency to stretch those ends out longer than they ought to be.
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You also do have some where they pinch through the midsection, or grow wider through their midsection.
Moving onto your constructions, the first thing that jumped out at me was that initially you had the layers of segmentation failing to wrap convincingly around the abdomen of your crayfish as shown here. You did improve upon this in this later drawing, where you did a better job of capturing how those forms wrapped around the existing structure.
That said, there's still a lot of signs that your approach to drawing these constructions is somewhat rushed, and to a point, a bit sloppy. You seem to go back over certain lines here and there (something students do when they're not necessarily investing as much time as they should in drawing the mark the first time), as shown here. Now with construction there are definitely situations where we end up with forms that overlap, and certain lines get concentrated in particular areas, but here it does look like some of them are extraneous.
I also noticed that there is a lot of room for improvement in your observation of your reference image. One trick that can be used to help improve your awareness of proportion and the relationships between different elements of your reference object is to pay attention to the "negative shapes" that exist between forms. For example, the shape created in between two legs, or between the legs and the ground, or between the claw and the head, as shown here.
You definitely end up drawing from memory quite a bit, resulting in inaccuracies that are pretty significant. For example, you've got your claw reaching forward only as far as the crayfish's head, whereas in the reference the claw/arm reaches much farther forward. The plates along the abdomen also don't wrap all the way around the abdomen - we're still able to see a fair bit of that underbelly.
Lastly, your use of the sausage method is still giving you a good deal of trouble, and needs to be ironed out. Specifically your sausages tend to be inconsistent, and they need a lot of practice, specifically in maintaining those "simple sausage" characteristics and ensuring that they're drawn in the correct positions, rather than having uncontrolled overlaps. Sausages can definitely be difficult at first, and moreso when they're drawn smaller. One thing that helps is to slow down the execution of the mark, while still applying the ghosting method. Meaning, we still execute the mark confidently, without hesitation, just at slower pace. This is something we generally get better at as we practice the use of the ghosting method (in our warmups and throughout every mark we draw). Drawing from your shoulder is also a big part in avoiding sudden changes in the trajectory of the line - looking at your work, there are likely some areas where you're using your wrist instead of your shoulder, though you tend to switch back and forth.
I'm going to assign additional work below. We won't be moving forward until this is hammered out, and we will get there. I'm adjusting the revisions I'm asking for to better target the specific issues I've seen.
Next Steps:
So there are three things I want you to tackle.
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Firstly, we have to hammer out your sausages. I want you to do 2 pages of sausage-chains. Basically chains consisting of 3 connected sausages, applying the sausage method to the best of your ability. Really fill the pages, focus on applying the principles of the sausage method (simple sausage forms, reinforcing the joints with contour lines, etc.) and of course use the ghosting method and draw from your shoulder for each individual sausage.
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Next, I want you to draw along with the lobster demo I made for you last time. For every stage, I want you to take a picture of the page, so you can show me how you're executing each individual step. You may also want to do each step in a different sitting, so you can focus on really putting everything you have into each and every step. It'll be slow and arduous, but this will help keep you from rushing forward too quickly or getting distracted.
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Do 4 more crustacean constructions, doing your best to apply everything from your sausage pages and your lobster study.