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10:36 AM, Friday December 27th 2024
Hi there! I saw your submission was down there in the queue, so I figured I'd take a look:
Organic Intersections. Okay, so looking across these pages, the first thing that strikes me is that you do a really good job keeping your sausages equilateral. This is is more of a commonplace issue I see among students, so it truly stands out to me when someone works to avoid this. I do see some tapering on the smaller sausages, but I'm taking the impression that yo were focusing more on cramming some more forms in to practice on, so there. I also liked to see that you were experimenting with degree shifts and got some really nice narrow ones. I have noticed on more than a few sausages that the alignment was a bit off. This isn't a deal-breaker or anything, just keep an eye on this as you continue this exercise. There's also a couple on the second page that were missing their minor axis.
Insects. Going through these I'm seeing really strong construction in these. You picked up on giving the segmented portions of your bugs enough definition to look 3d against the silhouette, and it really pays off. And when it comes to the main body, you do a great job adding forms to create the various carapace(s) here. And I do see you using sausages to set up your legs(and drawing their intersection, nice!), but I think there needs to be a little more clarification on additive construction.
Now this is an old submission, and it's quite possible that you've picked up on the ideas I'm trying to convery in this section:
The idea behind using sausages for the leg is not because they look like insect legs, but they are a base form, much like the body, from which we can build on to create our insect's legs. I looked at two in particular, my personal favorites of your bunch, the mantis and the crab. I picked your mantis because the claw is a great place to demonstrate this. I noticed on the claw what looks like a sausage form that isn't really uniform with a contour line which appears to imply an added form to to the side of the claw that isn't facing the viewer. There's enough here to suggest that this could be an incorrect interpretation, and one thing we want to avoid with our constructions is misinterpreted forms. To that end, I offer a couple diagrams, the first demonstrates a tactic for enveloping an entire sausage with an additional form, and the second is my own take on the construction of the mantis' claw.
The crab is another one that can benefit from a stronger application of additive form. As it stands, the base form of the crab is that saucer shaped shell that as an elliptical contour to show it's curvature; it doesn't really show the crab as having any mass contained by it's exterior. It looks fine, but I believe that we can improve the illusion using a base form, which is a squished ball in this case. The last diagram I want to share is an ant leg's construction, which shows the possibilities of liberal application of added forms can do for the construction of an insect's legs.
Okay, that was a tough section to work out, but at the end of my critique, I believe you've done quite well with your constructions. Aside from the leg issues I wrote about, there really wasn't much else to point out on your work. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this as complete.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 5 if you haven't done so, and good luck to you!
3:49 PM, Friday December 27th 2024
Thank you so much! I really appreciate you taking the time to make the diagrams they are very helpful. Also, I see you helping out in the discord all the time so thank you for that too. Do you think you can also send an image of the ant leg construction you were talking about?
8:02 PM, Friday December 27th 2024
Oh happy to help, if anything I should thank you for making this an easy review! Sorry about forgetting that last link, this was the last thing I looked at for the night,so here that is: https://i.imgur.com/IOUmhSl.png
8:08 PM, Friday December 27th 2024
Cool thanks

Framed Ink
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.