Hi thanks so much for the critic but I've got a question I'm redrawing the grasshopper and I'm confused with how the forms of its shell wrap around its body in the image you sent me on added masses/forms it said corners should be avoided but the shell on the grasshoppers back looks like there are corners I'm also having trouble understanding how the forms of its underside work any advice?
Hi! So, corners. Corners form when two forms interact with each other; if you look at the tail of the lobster, there's a clear corner there. Of course, that's the form that's in the reference, but it's also a point of intersection with the rest of the forms. The thing with corners is that they tend to suggest interaction with other forms.
Like here, the corners make it easy to imagine that there's another form clashing with it. That's not useful when we're adding forms to the legs, because in that case we need them blending with the rest. But if you notice in the example, those look a lot like plates, which is what we need for something like a grasshopper. So, it's not about avoiding corners, but about noticing when it's useful to use them and when it is not.
So, about the way the grasshopper plates work. It's something like this. Remember that all those forms wrap around your initial construction. In the case of the underside, you can break the plates as if you were following the contour lines of the abdomen; think about the wasp demo. The example is drawn in Paint so it's not accurate, it's just an example for you to understand how those things could be broke down.
And I'd recommend that you work with images as big and HD as you can, because in that grasshopper is a little difficult to figure out what's happening back there.
Hopefully that helped a little!
Hi sorry its taking so long it's just been hard wrapping my head around drawing the forms around each other but i do feel it's getting better then before I mainly wanted to ask you how I use line weight to separate my forms and make them clearer so I just give my forms in from a thicker line weight? I'll also show my drawing and reference so you can get a better idea of what I'm working with
https://imgur.com/a/N2SJwP9
Hi, no problem, take your time, from what I can see it's getting better. As for the lineweight, try to apply it just to the overlapping lines. For example, on that leg, you applied lineweight, which is good, because that area is full of lines; but you also applied it to the underside of the leg, which doesn't have any overlapping lines.
So what you should do is give more lineweight to the overside of that leg, ghosting every line, that way they will be precise and confident. And just to the section that overlaps with the body, the section that is alone on the side doesn't need it.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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