8:19 PM, Thursday December 3rd 2020
So the issue about line weight actually makes me think you might just not have understood how we're meant to be applying line weight in the first place. I don't expect (or want) students to purposely vary their pressure while they're drawing an individual stroke. You draw everything with the same confidence as you figure out your construction - drawing confidently generally yields a stroke that will taper on both ends (as shown here), but aside from that the weights will generally be about the same.
Adding line weight is a separate step, which we achieve by going back over our lines. We still employ the same techniques, draw with the same confidence, because the strokes we want to create also need to be tapered on both ends in order to blend more smoothly into the existing marks. But it isn't all done at once. Breaking the drawing process into a series of separate steps is what we're after wherever possible, and this is no exception. Solve one problem at a time.
It is however worth reminding you that drawing slowly and hesitantly will create wobbly lines. You should drawing all of your marks with confidence. That doesn't mean everything should be super fast, but that you should not be drawing with any kind of hesitation, or attempting to steer the lines with your eyes.
Anyway, your work here has definitely improved , and I'm seeing you employing different aspects of what I introduced previously. There are, however, some areas where you're forgetting things I'd mentioned, though this is understandable.
With first several pages (all the way up to the kangaroo), I could see clear thought being put into head construction especially. The quality of your eye socket shapes is a little hit and miss - the meerkat at the start's eye sockets are quite well shaped, but here you end up with more simplified diamond shapes, and here you've got a more simplified pentagon shape. The key difference is that when you fall back to simplified shapes, it suggests that you're not thinking as much in 3 dimensions, where the world doesn't adhere to these basic shapes. Still, the way you're approaching those additional masses is improving, but there is a tendency to leave really thin gaps between them which we can see here. Don't leave those gaps - there's no reason for them. Your masses should be butting up against one another tightly.
When it comes to building up additional masses along the body, you've definitely made progress, but there are still plenty of areas where you're either adding complexity, like an inward curve, or some kind of corner where there is no logical cause for it (remember that all complexity is created from pushing our additional mass against something else that is specific and concrete), as well as areas where a form is pushing up against something, but still retains a simpler outward curve. I've marked out some issues on this kangaroo.
I've also noticed that you have a tendency in some places to attempt to wrap one form around another, but where it's not done so correctly (take a look at where I drew over your kangaroo's foot, for example).
Lastly, remember that when you pile one mass on top of another, because both have thickness and volume to them, they can't just blend smoothly into a smooth, continuous edge along the structure's silhouette. You're going to end up with a "pinch" where the top mass's thickness comes into play, as I demonstrated above your elephant's back here.
Now, as I said, there is progress here, but you still have a tendency to draw your forms' silhouettes with more complexity than is needed, and so there is more work to be done. Rather than just having you draw a bunch of animals, I'm going to give you a separate, new exercise to do first.
I want you to draw a bunch of sausage chains, like the one shown here. Fill a page with them. Once you've filled the page, then I want you to build up additional forms along those sausages, using animal and insect legs as reference (absolutely use reference for these, the higher the resolution the better), as shown in the two examples I provided to you previously: the ant leg and the dog leg. For your first two sausage chains, I want you to just reproduce those very same examples to the best of your ability.
I'd like you to do two pages of these, followed by 2 animal drawings.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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2 pages of sausage chain/leg studies.
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2 animal drawings