12:59 AM, Friday January 5th 2024
Starting with your organic forms, these are looking great in general! I can see that you're adhering to the characteristics of a simple sausage as explained here in the instructions although there is still some examples where the ends are a bit pointy. Remember that sausages are two balls of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width. I'm also pleased to see that the contour curves become wider as it runs along the length of the sausage although I would push these even harder to really convince the viewer and ourselves that these forms are actually 3 dimensional. This video explains how the ellipse changes in width depending on whether it's facing toward or away from the viewer.
Moving onto your insect constructions, overall I think you've done a pretty good job on them. I'm pleased to see that you're building these solid three dimensional forms in phases, opting to approach these contructions additively rather than cutting into these forms thus flattening the shape as shown in this diagram. There are a few things I want you to direct your attention to.
The way you've approached the plate-like structures such as on this cricket read as flat and 2 dimensional for reasons outlined in red. I recommend the first two informal demos, the shrimp and the lobster, as they show how you should think about wrapping these plate-like forms around the insect abdomen area.
Continuing onto your leg construction, you're making a clear effort to stick to the sausage method as much as possible. That's a step in the right direction. However, I noticed you laying in your basic sausage forms for the legs but not doing much more after that. The sausage method as a base structure allows us to capture the solidity with the gestural nature of legs. Once in place, we can lay in additional masses as shown in this ant leg demo, and even in this dog's leg demo. This is someing you seem to understand, but I believe these demos would help push your constructions even further.
Lastly, when it comes to the smaller forms like the spikes on your hercules beetle, make sure they're wrapping around the underlying forms as shown in this lobster claw demo
And that about covers everyting I have to say. As a whole, you've done a solid job. While I do feel like there's a few minor things to keep in mind, I'm fairly confident that you can work on these in your own time. Feel free to move onto the next lesson!
Next Steps:
Lesson 5