Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids
5:50 PM, Saturday August 22nd 2020
Pinterest board with non-demo references: https://www.pinterest.com/mja7803/lesson-4-references/
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Pinterest board with non-demo references: https://www.pinterest.com/mja7803/lesson-4-references/
Thanks for your review!
Starting with the organic forms with contour lines, nice work both in sticking to simple sausages, and in drawing the contour curves such that they wrap nicely around the given forms.
Moving onto your insect constructions, overall you've done a good job in many of these - especially this fly, in terms of how you've wrapped forms around one another, gradually building up complexity from the simple initial masses up to the more complex segmented pieces of exoskeleton. That said, there are some things I want to draw your attention to.
Starting with this wasp, it's important that you always think about how the elements you add to your construction are themselves solid, 3D forms, down to the initial masses we add to the scene. Those masses are not just loose circles - they're tangible, solid ball forms upon which we attach and wrap subsequent forms to build up our structure. Looking at the wasp's thorax, I am very pleased with all of the segmentation you added, but you got a little too caught up in the complexity of those shapes that you didn't stress just how they were to actually wrap around the underlying structure. Don't forget that it's easy to get carried away with detail, and in doing so, putting down marks that go on to contradict the illusion that our forms are 3D. Every line that sits along the surface of another form serves as a contour line, and if it's not reinforcing the curvature of that surface, it will contradict it.
Looking at the wasp's abdomen, there's a lot less structure there to begin with. You started with a much shorter base structure, but because it was so short most of the segmentation you built for the abdomen ended up just sitting on its own in space. These just came off as flat shapes, and not three dimensional.
It is worth mentioning that some parts of the legs - especially those closer to the body - demonstrate pretty good use of the sausage method, or at least important parts of it. As you push into some of the later drawings where you get more focused on detail (like the grasshopper and the ant), you ended up abandoning the sausage method altogether, in favour of a variety of different strategies that usually involve more complex forms that don't hold the illusion of solidity nearly as well.
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. 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, 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.
Looking at your praying mantis, I think it's fair to say you are improving when it comes to building up complexity at a steady pace, and thinking more about how to wrap forms around the structure that lays beneath them. Although in this case, at least along the forearms, you did admittedly go a little overboard with those contour lines. If you're specifically trying to capture a particular detail (which it looks like you might be), take greater care in executing each line - don't try and go all auto-pilot on them, every mark you draw should be specific and intentional to reflect a particular bit of information from your reference. The same principle applies if you're just drawing artificial contour lines as well, in that they should be drawn with greater care, but taking that a step further, there aren't generally going to be situations where you should be loading things up with lots of contour lines, unless they actually reflect what's present in your reference. Reason being, as soon as you add more than one or two contour lines, they're not actually going to make the form appear that much more solid.
Instead, always focus on drawing each individual contour line mindfully of how it's meant to wrap around the structure, and focus your efforts on the contour lines that are going to have the greatest impact. Specifically, those that define the connection between two forms - like those we use in the sausage method - are especially potent because of how they actually create a relationship in 3D space. You'll often find that this kind of contour line will make any others largely unnecessary.
The last point I want to make (though I've already alluded to it), is that you should be careful when it comes to adding detail and texture to a drawing. What we're doing here is not decoration - where construction serves the purpose of establishing how an object occupies 3D space, and communicates to the viewer what it might be like to manipulate this object in their hands, texture focuses only on communicating what it'd be like to run their fingers over the object's surface. It's not just a mindless effort to make something look pretty.
As such, texture should focus on the principles covered back in lesson 2, and should actually focus on implying the presence of specific textural forms on the surface of forms by capturing the shadows they cast on their surroundings. Looking at cases like the grasshopper that was not the intent you had when going into detail. The ant was a little better, although I suspect your intent of going into detail/texture caused you to put less focus on the construction itself. As a rule, avoid approaching any drawing with the intent of making it detailed. Sort out your construction entirely, and only once that's done should you decide whether any particular areas warrant textural information.
So, with that all laid out, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. Just be sure to keep these points in mind as you tackle the animals in the next lesson.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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