7:26 PM, Tuesday August 3rd 2021
As a whole, I think your work throughout this submission has shown considerable growth and improvement, and across the board you've definitely improved a great deal. Your understanding of how these complex structures fit together has really come along.
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, overall you're keeping fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages. I'm also pleased to see that you are playing with the degree of your contour lines as you slide along the length of a given form.
Continuing onto your insect constructions, there are some issues present in your earlier constructions that you more or less completely resolve by the end - but I do still think it's worth talking about those issues. Sometimes a student may correct mistakes without realizing what they were entirely, and understanding them will help going forward.
If you look at the ambush bug and dung beetle, you had a tendency of not really "respecting" the earlier masses you constructed. You'd draw them more faintly, and then cut across them (leaving pieces of those early masses outside of your "final construction"), generally not treating them as though they were solid, three dimensional structures - but rather as flat drawings on a page.
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.
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.
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 - and I am confident that somewhere after those first few drawings, you changed the way in which you looked at the things you were drawing. There is a considerable shift towards believing that what you're building really exists in a three dimensional world, and it has a definite impact on your results, for the better.
Continuing on, I did notice 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. In your case I think you were trying to stick to many of the principles of the sausage method in many cases, but there were definitely a lot of cases where because of the subject matter, you made alterations or shifted away. In general, even if it doesn't seem like the right strategy, try to apply all the elements of the sausage method - from sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages for each segment, to reserving your contour lines only for the joints between them (and not adding others along their lengths).
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, in 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.
Aside from that, your work is coming along really 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.