11:51 PM, Monday November 8th 2021
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are for the most part coming along pretty well - you're staying fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages, and your contour curves are fitting snugly within the silhouette of each sausage. I am however definitely picking up on a fair bit of general hesitation/stiffness in your linework that is undermining some of these positives. Be sure to always prioritize executing your marks with confidence. This inevitably can hinder the accuracy of our strokes, but being sure to use the ghosting method and execute the marks from our shoulder can generally help offset that issue - and of course, practice will take care of the rest.
Before I move forward, I do want to mention that I think going forward, if it's possible, taking photos of your work might be preferable to using your scanner. Your scanner's settings are currently really blasting up the contrast, which eliminates some of the nuance of your linework and can also make the drawings a lot harder to parse visually. This normally isn't a problem (I'm quite used to looking at forests of construction lines), but when the scanner artificially ramps up the contrast, it can definitely interfere. Camera phone photos honestly are perfectly fine, especially when the photos are taken using natural light coming in through a window.
Now, moving onto your insect constructions, your work here is for the most part very well done. I do have a few suggestions and adjustments to offer to how you approach certain things, but overall I'm seeing a lot of work being done strictly in 3D space. That is to say, you're putting a lot of effort into figuring out how these forms all relate to one another in 3D space, and your constructions generally come out quite solidly as a result.
To start- there are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.
Continuing on, the point I raised before about thinking in 3D space, and continually working in 3D space, is very important - and it's something you do most of the time, but there are definitely some cases where you'll jump back into 2D space to put down a quick mark or take another quick shortcut, and unfortunately these things do have a negative impact on what we get out of these exercises. Each drawing here is of course just an exercise - they're little spatial puzzles that we're having our brains solve. We know what we want to work towards, but we have to figure out a feasible path to get there, and every step of the way we have to force our brain to perceive this flat piece of paper as a window looking out into a 3D world.
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.
You don't do these things too often, but they do come up. If you take a look at this page, I've highlighted in red a few places where you cut into the silhouettes of existing forms in the manner explained in that previous diagram. In blue, I've marked out areas where you've added flat shapes to your construction, effectively extending out the existing silhouettes rather than actually adding more 3D information.
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. You can also see this in action in the shrimp and lobster demos from the informal demos page. 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.
This kind of thing comes up in the use of the sausage method when constructing our legs as well. This is definitely an approach I've focused on more and more as the course has progressed and evolved, so you'll definitely see me breaking these rules in earlier demos. For example, in the wasp demo we do apply an approach that builds upon the existing structure in a way that does continue to work in 3D space - but it can be done better.
Instead, the approach shown here and here is superior simply because the silhouette of the masses we add makes more overall contact with the existing structure, allowing it to define a stronger relationship in 3D space. You can see this in action here in this ant leg demo, as well as in this dog leg demo (since this will continue to be very relevant throughout the next lesson).
So! Be sure to keep those points in mind - but as I said before, you are definitely doing a great job at most of this already. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you can continue to refine your approach as you work on animals.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.