1:29 AM, Tuesday July 13th 2021
Starting with your organic intersections, these are looking pretty good! You're wrapping those forms around one another in a manner that convincingly conveys a sense of gravity and tangibility to the forms. Just one thing - in that first page, there's no reason for there to be a gap in the cast shadows along the ground. You seem to be focusing more on forms that are laying directly on the ground, but even where they're not, they're still going to be casting shadows onto the ground plane even though they're not touching it directly.
Going through your animal constructions, I think you've done a great job. I think your fears of avoiding extreme angles and foreshortening are actually a little misguided. It is far more important to me that you demonstrate your ability to work and build in 3D space with relatively more "normal" situations, with simpler subject matter, rather than pushing yourself to tackle more complicated things. Sometimes students get the impression that they'll learn more by jumping right into the hard stuff - but it's easy to end up totally missing the mark and wasting time if your core isn't solidly built to start. That core comes down to the simple stuff, defining relationships between forms in the more common, basic configurations.
While there are a couple little things I'll call out, as a whole you're doing a very good job here and are showing a keen awareness of all the major points I usually look for. That includes:
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Being cognizant of how forms wrap around one another as you build up your construction, and how the shape of each form's silhouette actually captures this relationship/interaction in space
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How to use sausage forms to build an underlying armature upon which to build up further masses and gradually work towards capturing the more complex elements of your animals' legs
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How the head construction (and frankly, all construction) is all about pieces that fit together like a three dimensional puzzle - separate entities that wedge into one another, reinforcing each others' illusion of solidity and structure.
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This actually isn't something I look for that much, because most students don't really get to the point that it matters - but for the most part your approach to handling detail/texture shows that you're focused first on hammering out the construction. It's common for students to let their construction get a little sloppier when they know they're going to add details, but you clearly have your priorities in order and focus on the task at hand, rather than thinking ahead several steps.
Onto the couple of minor points I had for things to keep an eye on:
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When constructing the head for this ram, you ended up starting with a cranial ball that was definitely too big, and ultimately cut back into it. When working through this course in particular, once you've added a form to the scene, you need to respect its solidity and presence within the world. This goes back to what we discussed in my critique of your lesson 4 work - if you cut back into the silhouette of a form, you're going to remind the viewer that they're looking at a flat drawing on a flat page. The silhouette is just a flat shape that represents a 3D form, so you need to be interacting with your forms as they exist in 3D space (cutting along its surface instead of through the shape) - although with organic construction like this, it's best to work strictly additively. This was, admittedly, the only place I saw this issue though so it's not a huge deal.
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I did notice a few places where you used contour lines - specifically those that sit along the surface of a single form - without them really contributing anything to the construction itself. This is actually a common issue students have - since contour lines are this tool that can make things feel 3D, they'll sometimes slap them on without necessarily considering how they're meant to contribute, and what they're meant to achieve. Always remember that the first step of the ghosting method - the planning phase - is all about thinking about the mark you're about to draw. Adding marks that don't really contribute anything suggests that we're not investing as much time as we could in that step. Again - this didn't come up too often, but there were a few spots.
Lastly, I felt your hybrid came out really well. The hybrid's generally a little bit of a test, because when students don't understand how the different elements they're pulling from various references exist in 3D space, they're not going to be able to combine them in a way that comes out believably. Here, your results feel as realistic as anything else you've drawn, which shows you're developing that grasp of 3D space and construction very well.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work!
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.