Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids
2:44 PM, Friday June 11th 2021
Here are my drawings for lesson 4
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are coming along fairly well. You're definitely striving to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages (a few of them have some ends that get a little stretched out, not remaining entirely circular, but all things considered you're handling this quite well). Keep working on the control of those contour lines though - you're making good progress here, but we want to aim to have each one fit snugly within the silhouette of the sausage form, not falling outside of that space or floating loosely within it. Being sure to keep employing the ghosting method, with a focus on the planning and preparation phases, as well as executing the marks from your shoulder will help you improve further on this front.
Moving onto your insect constructions, I can definitely see a lot of areas in which you're moving in the right direction, and as a whole you're doing a pretty good job. While there are a few important issues I want to draw your attention to, I feel that your constructions are coming along nicely, and that your results in many ways do come out feeling fairly solid. This can, however, be improved upon.
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.
We can see this happening quite a bit in the second insect construction (I believe it's a wasp), to varying degrees. For example, you blocked in a very loose ellipse for the head initially, but then went on to entirely ignore it. Also, for its abdomen, you changed the shape of the mass you started with, cutting into it as a 2D shape to add that inward curve and narrow the abdomen down. There were a few other smaller instances throughout your insect constructions - usually where you'd start with a bigger ball form for the head, then cut back into it to "refine" that shape.
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.
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.
Moving on, I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once 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). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct
The last point I wanted to call out is a minor one, relating to how you use certain areas that you've filled in with solid black. It's generally best, at least within the particular restrictions imposed in this course, to reserve the use of solid black shapes for cast shadows only. There are some instances here - especially with some insects' eyes - where you felt that you ought to capture the fact that those eyes were black, effectively capturing their "local" surface colour. Unfortunately, this becomes inconsistent - because we have no way of capturing any other local colours - no reds, greens, yellows, etc. - it doesn't make that much sense to make black a special case. Instead, if we stick to capturing only cast shadows with those black shapes, we can keep what we communicate to the viewer more consistent, focusing instead on how those shapes will always capture the relationship between the form casting a shadow, and the surface receiving it.
Anyway, all things considered, I think you are definitely moving in the right direction. I'm going to leave you to work on applying what I've shared here to your work moving forward. You may consider this lesson complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
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