12:38 AM, Tuesday November 17th 2020
Alrighty! Overall, as is expected based on your prior experience, your work here is largely very well done, but there are a few things I definitely want to draw your attention to.
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, your work here is solid. You're clearly striving to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, and your linework is confident. You could stand to keep working on your contour lines to keep them snug within the silhouette of your forms to really push the impression that they're running along the surface of the forms and not flying off a little bit, but you're definitely aiming for that and just need more practice on it.
Continuing onto your constructions, the key things that I look for is primarily the idea that the forms we use in constructing these complex objects are interpreted and understood by you to be simple and solid. Common mistakes from students includes adding details by just adding a line or two, rather than a complete and enclosed form. Another is simply treating the forms they've drawn as though they're not solid, and therefore giving themselves more freedom to just draw on top of forms as though they're not there.
While neither of these are issues in your work, I did notice on this praying mantis' head there were a few places where you got a little too vague/loose with some of your forms. As a result, you ended up redefining the "real" forms on top, and left these little bits outside of the object's actual silhouette. Avoid this in the future. If you end up with a very loose ellipse, make sure that you use its outermost perimeter as the silhouette of your 3D ball form, engulfing all of the inner lines.
Moving forward, you definitely did a lovely job in thinking about how you could connect different forms together, like the back spikes of this epicadus, although there was a bit of hesitation to the linework there that held you back. Specifically if we look at how you blocked in the abdomen and thorax, you did so with a fainter line and ended up partially tracing back over it in a later phase of construction. Construction should never redraw parts that don't change - they should be drawn confidently from the beginning, so the parts of the earlier phases that show through when the drawing is complete can stand on their own. Drawing more faintly initially is a normal urge that we may have to avoid committing ourselves too early, but that's what construction is about. Committing, and working on top of the structure we've produced. From the very first form we draw, we're building something up, but you can't build upon something that isn't yet solid.
Of course, line weight can be used to push and pull lines, clarifying overlaps and making some things more apparent than others, but its purpose isn't to replace a line. It only serves to clarify the relationships between them.
Looking at the legs of your insects, you're definitely doing a pretty good job of using the sausage method fairly well throughout, and you don't stray from it too much. I'm pleased to see that you're even exploring how to build on top of those sausage structures like with this spider. For some additional examples/demos on how to tackle that, I've got a few to offer:
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Works on animals too! https://i.imgur.com/97hS0XF.png
The key to this is to spend a good deal of time observing your reference to identify the kinds of forms that are present. When we get caught up in construction a lot, it becomes easy to focus on just the simple structural stuff. While that's a perfectly adequate way to start, doubling back to see what smaller more nuanced construction we can capture is important.
So! With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.