4:05 AM, Tuesday December 15th 2020
Starting off with your organic forms with contour lines, these are looking solid. You're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms, and your contour lines are drawn confidently. You do however need to work a bit on getting them to fit snugly within the silhouette of the form (you've got little gaps here and there). Continuing to apply the ghosting method to your contour lines should help with this.
Moving onto your insect constructions, your work here is by and large very well done. There are some adjustments to how you approach certain aspects, but all in all you're demonstrating a clearly strong grasp of how the things you're drawing exist in 3D space, and you're also showing a deep respect for that fact in how you establish the relationships between your forms.
The first point I want to remind you is minor, but comes up a fair bit so it's worth calling out early. Back in Lesson 2's texture section, I explain that in this course we won't be bothering with shading. While there's an argument for adding a bit of form shading specifically to provide us with somewhere to include actual texture, you frequently end up using hatching, which suggests that your goal is to add the shading itself, for no other purpose.
What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.
So that isn't to say your drawings aren't lovely - just that this course is focused on each drawing as an exercise in spatial reasoning, and so it's easy to get distracted from that.
The next point I wanted to call out is that it's important that we build up our constructions piece by piece, and that every addition is its own separate form. So for example, here's how we'd steadily build up an ant's head. Note how every single form I add is its own fully enclosed form, and I'm taking care to establish how they each relate to the existing structure. Establishing the "seams" where these forms connect to one another is important.
With this weevil you can see examples of where those defined relationships were missing. I also called out how you'd initially roughed in the mass for that weevil's torso to be much larger, but decided to pull back by cutting into its silhouette. I explain here why this is not a good idea.
The last thing I wanted to call out is that 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, 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.
So! All in all, your work here is already going well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.