Lesson four be here with all its legs. Upside, I'm more than comfortable with insects and stuff so if I have to revise some of this lesson then eh. Downside, GOD MY FIRST DRAFT LINES, WHAT FORM IS THAT, AGH. Once again, thank you for your time.
Very nice work! Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you've done a good job of sticking primarily to the characteristics of simple sausages, and your contour lines fit quite well within their silhouettes. The only thing I want to draw attention to is that while you do include some variation in the degree of your contour curves (in that you allow them to reverse where they ought to), outside of the reversals you tend to keep a pretty consistent width to them instead of pushing them to become wider and wider.
I'm assuming you understand how they ought to behave, but just in case, this is addressed in the newly updated Ellipses content from Lesson 1 (here and in the video at the top of the page).
Continuing onto your insect constructions, I am by and large very happy with how you've built these up. You're paying a lot of clear attention to how your structure exists in 3D space, as a collection and combination of solid, 3D forms. As you add more forms to the construction, you're paying attention to how they relate to one another in 3D space, and defining those spatial relationships, which in turn helps maintain and reinforce the illusion that we're looking at something three dimensional, and not just a drawing on a flat page.
One minor point to keep an eye on is the somewhat arbitrary and liberal use of line weight - for example, in the horsefly drawing, you end up going back over the silhouette of the eyes and the segmentation on the thorax quite heavily. Remember that line weight should be kept subtle, and shouldn't be used to reinforce the entire silhouette of a form. It should be concentrated in localized areas, to help clarify specific overlaps.
Additionally, there are a few places where you're a little loose with how you interact with and manipulate the forms you add to your construction. For example - on the horsefly once again - along the abdomen you actually end up cutting into the silhouette of that structure when you add the segmentation, instead of wrapping it all the way around the existing form. I demonstrate in these notes how this actually ends up flattening things out a bit. Always strive to work strictly additively in these organic constructions. To be fair, you generally do, there are just a couple little occasions where you slip out of that good habit.
Overall you do appear to be employing the sausage method when constructing your legs, although there are definitely times where you skip some sections - for example, you're not always sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages (though I think this may not be intentional, since they can be quite difficult to draw especially when they get really skinny). Additionally, you don't always reinforce the joint between sausage segments with a contour line. This step is quite important, because it helps define the relationship between the segments in space.
Additionally, when building up additional structure over those sausage segments to capture more complex detail, always do so additively (as discussed before), adding whole, complete, enclosed 3D forms instead of trying to redefine or modify the silhouette of an existing form, or adding open/partial shapes. Here's a good approach which involves breaking up the mass we wish to add into different parts, so that we can ultimately have more of the addition's silhouette make direct contact with the underlying sausage structure. The more contact we can make, the more clearly we can define how they relate to one another in 3D space. You can also see this principle in action in this diagram.
Taking it a step further, you can see this being used on this ant leg and even on this dog leg (because this will come into play in the next lesson as well.
All in all you're making great progress, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Just be sure to keep what I've mentioned here in mind.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
Thank you once again for your timely and thorough critique and advice. To start, yeah those were very much not my strongest contoured sassiges, many of the contours ended up just being an identical curve further down the form, they were flat. I do know better, I'll try to pull the curves out more where applicable.
I'm glad to hear that my general construction came out well, that the forms are at least believable. A confirmation of progress is a good relief.
As for line weight yeah, it continues to be something that just needs practice and work. Something I catch myself doing is using line weight to make up for scratchy lines, or just using it too liberally as a crutch to make things look less messy to the eye. I'll keep in mind that weight, like contours, should be used sparingly, not for entire silhouettes.
As for manipulating additions to forms yeah, I'd catch myself being more subtractive sometimes. Usually I'd do it to more keep things in proportion as occasionally when doing so additively I end up overshooting lines sometimes. I'll try to keep it additive.
For the sausage legs part of what happens, while definitely unintentional, is I'll just not give as much attention to where the sausage is going, where it ends. Sometimes I'll just lose track and start rushing or just not giving it enough thought in general. Bad habit. And yeah it's a big issue with skinny ones. I'll slow down which will just end up wobbling the line. I started putting a small mark for the endpoint in the last few, as we were taught to do with the boxes n' stuff. As for the joints yeah, the intersection is important, it helps the forms read solid. I'll try to keep them weighted.
When it comes to adding to structures, my main issue was size/area to draw. I didn't wanna complicate things by adding too many lines in small areas like the legs and then try to add line weight to clarify things and then just make it big mess. When I draw small, I tend to draw slow, which in turns ends up being thick. It's just something I'm going to need to practice. I'll keep it in mind heading forward.
Additionally I'll need to practice breaking down whole forms into simple masses like with those leg examples. Seeing it broken down is clear, easy to comprehend. Doing so myself is...messy.
Either way I'll try to keep what I've learned and been advised on in mind moving forward. Thank you once again for your time and knowledge, I'll move on to the next lesson.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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