5:30 AM, Tuesday November 10th 2020
Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along decently well, though I am seeing visible wobbling/hesitation in some of your lines. It's not always present, but there is definitely signs that you're not necessarily executing your marks as confidently as you should be, and that you're still acting on a fear of making a mistake. When making these lines, the ghosting method is all about doing what we can beforehand so that when we actually execute the marks, we accept that from the second our pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed. All we can do is push through and accept the result.
Moving onto your animal constructions, you've got some interesting results, as well as some areas for improvement.
One of your best constructions in my opinion was your first cat, so I focused my critique on it. Here are some notes I've made directly onto the drawing. The major points I raised there include:
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I didn't mention this one as explicitly: You're generally doing a decent job of laying down the major structures of the sausage method (though your back leg there as a distinctly not-simple-sausage form), but you appear to have forgotten the ways in which the sausage method serves as a base structure for more additional forms. I explained this to you in my lesson 4 critique, and provided this dog's leg example. I recommend that you go back and read it.
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Your additional masses along the back are a great start, although they can really be pushed in how they wrap around the underlying structure even more. You can also break them down into smaller, separate forms that pile atop one another. I explain this further in these notes.
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The head is drawn extremely timidly, and doesn't come together to create cohesive pieces and forms. The lines have gaps between them, and they don't feel confident or "carved" into the cranium. The trick to head construction is in the eye sockets - make them big. They are the first step to taking the curved surface of the cranial ball and breaking it down into actual planes. All faces are just a matter of figuring out where to separate vague, smooth, round surfaces into flat, straight ones. Once the eye sockets are in place, you can extend that to find the planes of the cheek masses, the muzzle, the brow, etc. All these forms end up fitting together like puzzle pieces, not sitting loosely relative to one another. You can see more head construction demos in the 'informal demos' page in the lesson - specifically the tapir head demo and the moose head demo.
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Don't put down contour lines frivolously. In the tail you added a bunch of them (quite poorly, in fact - they're not necessarily sitting within the silhouette of the form), and you didn't consider exactly what they were contributing to the structure. With every single mark you add, you need to think about what it's supposed to contribute to the drawing, and whether that mark is really the best one for the job. With contour lines, adding a bunch of them blindly does nothing, because they suffer from diminishing returns. The first may be impactful, the second less so, and the third even less. The ones that are most important are the ones that define the connection between forms, rather than the ones that sit along the surface of a single form.
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When thinking about paws, try to think of them in more "boxy" terms, where the silhouette of the form defines clear corners that separate it into implied planes rather than just another blob.
The points I raised there largely touch upon the most notable issues throughout your work here, but I can take them a little bit further with another example. Take a look at this one:
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Here your additional masses don't really make any effort to establish how they wrap around the underlying structure. You've just drawn shapes, and then tried to make them feel solid with an excess of contour lines. These don't actually help however - contour lines, even if drawn well (these are a bit shallow so they still come off as flat) only make a form feel three dimensional on its own, unless they define its relationship with other structures. The additional masses have to focus on the silhouette - how that silhouette is actually shaped sells how it wraps around the underlying structure. Internal contour lines won't help with this at all.
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You haven't applied the sausage method here at all - again, you need to go back to my critique of your lesson 4 work.
I think for now I'm going to leave you to absorb what I've pointed out there. I'll assign some revisions below for you to work on as well, so try your best to apply these principles and we'll move forward from there.
Next Steps:
Please submit 4 additional pages of animal constructions, adhering to the following restrictions:
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I don't want you to use any contour lines except those that define the relationship between two 3D forms. No contour lines that just sit on the surface of a single form.
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I want you to complete no more than one drawing in a single day. Invest as much time as you can into each drawing, and don't be afraid to spend more than one sitting on a drawing if you want. I get the impression that you're rushing through these a little quickly.
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Draw big, and make sure that your photos show the full page, rather than tight crops. Some of your drawings definitely look like they're quite small, and that contributes to some of the challenges of drawing, because it impedes your ability to think through spatial problems, and keeps you from engaging your whole arm when drawing.