3:16 AM, Tuesday February 8th 2022
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, your results are somewhat mixed. In the page of contour curves (note that both pages were actually supposed to be contour curves, but I won't dwell on that), you're doing a great job of sticking fairly closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, although this cannot be said about the page of contour ellipses as well. In addition to this, the actual degree of your contour lines seems somewhat inconsistent - remember that as explained here in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the rule of thumb is that as our cross-sections slide farther back from the viewer, the contour ellipses/curves that represent them will get wider. In some cases, like this one, you've got them doing the opposite.
Lastly, I should also mention that all the ellipses you draw freehand should be drawn through two full times before lifting your pen. You of course do this just fine in the page of contour ellipses, but you neglect to do this on this page.
Now, continuing onto your insect constructions, by and large you're doing a great job. You're holding quite solidly to the idea of starting simple and building up to greater levels of complexity, and throughout your work - while you do have some areas where you still jump back and forth between engaging with your construction as something solid and three dimensional, and engaging with it as a flat drawing on a flat page - you're honestly showing a lot more respect overall for the three dimensional nature of your construction than most students at this stage.
This one especially stood out to me, as the elements at play here all feel quite solid and believable. That said, I do still want to elaborate on the idea of working in 3D vs working in 2D so you have a clear grasp of what it means. Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.
For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.
Now, as I mentioned before - you do this far less than most others at this stage, but you do still run into it. On this ant I noted quite a few areas in red where you cut into the silhouettes of forms. Sometimes this may have just been due to an especially loose ellipse - but in such a situation, you should treat the outermost perimeter of that ellipse as being the silhouette of the resulting ball form, so that all of those errant strokes remain packed within the silhouette. Conversely, in blue I marked out a few spots where you extended the silhouettes of your forms. Similarly to the ellipse point, sometimes this can occur if we're overzealous with our application if line weight - but in general line weight should be used sparingly, focusing it only on clarifying how specific forms overlap one another, and limiting it to the localized areas where those overlaps occur as shown here with these two overlapping leaves.
Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.
You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. Given that this is actually a relatively newer point that we're pushing upon students (with all of the critiques I do, I'm continually developing and refining how I go about explaining these concepts, so those submitting for official feedback tend to get an earlier preview of such things before they're integrated into the lesson material itself), you'll see more general examples of this in the more recent shrimp and lobster demonstrations from the informal demos page. Note in particular how each step ensures that whatever forms were introduced feel solid and three dimensional, before ever building upon them further. This is all part of accepting that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for the viewer to believe in that lie.
These principles can also be applied to leg construction. Once our basic sausage structure is in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well).
So! As far as your insect constructions are coming along, there are a few things to keep in mind but as a whole you're doing well, and can continue to tackle them into the next lesson. Before I mark this lesson as complete however, I do want you to take another swing at the organic forms with contour curves, just to make sure that's sorted out.
Next Steps:
Please submit 1 more page of organic forms with contour curves.