6:49 PM, Sunday October 4th 2020
Starting with your organic intersections, there are both strengths and weaknesses here. You're doing a pretty good job with the main focus of the exercise, which is thinking about how the forms wrap around one another. This could be pushed farther, in terms of exaggerating that curvature when one sausage slumps over another, but it's definitely fairly well done. That said, looking at your actual contour lines, most of these are quite shallow in their curvature and don't wrap around the given sausage forms correctly. As explained here, you should be overshooting those curves to exaggerate how they hook around the rounded form. Right now those curves are actively flattening out the forms. There are also a couple places where you didn't draw through a sausage form in its entirety, but for the most part you did a good job of that.
Continuing onto your animal constructions, as a whole you've actually done a pretty good job in a number of respects. There are some key issues I'll point out, but I believe that by and large you've demonstrated a pretty good grasp of how each of these objects are made up of solid, three dimensional forms, and how those forms relate to one another in 3D space.
Before I get into specifics though, there is one overarching issue that you need to be more mindful of: you're drawing way too small in a number of these, and this isn't the first time I've pointed this out to you as I definitely mentioned it in regards to lesson 4. In some cases like this rhino, it especially hindered your ability to think through the spatial problems. Working in such a cramped scale resulted in a lot of linework done from your wrist rather than your shoulder, and made your overall ability to navigate the relationships between your forms diminish considerably.
I won't dwell on this further - it is up to you to take my previous critiques into consideration and to apply them. I can only tell you of the issues.
In regards to the constructions there are a handful of issues I want to address.
Firstly, the one that stood out to me the most was how you handled your additional masses. These additional masses should generally be thought of as being a blob of meat that you're adding into your form. Our focus needs to be on the idea that this mass of meat has its own thickness, and while we can mould it to our construction to a point, it will always maintain its own thickness.
The way you tend to employ those additional forms is by treating them as being a sort of "blanket" or perhaps a piece of paper that you're wrapping around your animal's body. They're often very rectangular in form, and while you are indeed thinking about how they wrap around, it's all stitched together along very straight lines that don't look particularly natural. As you can see here, it's best to avoid that sort of rectangular, grid-like arrangement. Also make sure you're factoring in things like the animal's big shoulder muscles (which are responsible for moving their whole body), and then wrapping your additional masses around them. You can also check out these additional notes on how to build up construction and how to think about those additional masses.
Another issue I wanted to point out is represented pretty well in this bird where you started out with a smaller ball form for the torso, and then opted for a much larger one that engulfed it. In general, every single form we introduce to a construction is something solid, real and tangible. Once in place, we need to make sure that the relationship between the existing forms and whatever else we wish to add to the construction are clear and well defined. In this case, having a form floating arbitrarily within another does not provide us with a clear spatial relationship. Generally speaking here we'd have built that torso to be much larger in the first place, but given that you didn't, it'd be necessary to build up to that outer size by adding additional masses that wrap around the underlying structure. Same thing goes for the head, where you also kind of loosely enveloped it inside another silhouette.
Also, note how here I've shown the importance of defining the relationship between the neck and the torso, along with a few other points about your use of contour lines, and skipping constructional steps.
The last point I wanted to stress has to do with how you approach your head construction. In this tapir head demo and this moose head demo, you'll see how important it is to treat the head, or really any construction, as being a sort of 3D puzzle where all the pieces fit together. In your head constructions, you tend to draw the eye socket as a floating sticker pasted arbitrarily on the head. As you can see in these demos, the eye socket should be treated like a puzzle piece, which is buttressed against by the muzzle, the cheekbone, the brow ridge, etc. and whatever other solid forms exist around it.
As a whole, you're definitely moving in the right direction in a lot of areas, but your use of the specific techniques we cover are tenuous at times. Drawing big is really important, and I cannot stress that enough. As is understanding how to wrap your contour lines around the given forms. These are all things you definitely need to work on.
I am admittedly quite happy to see that you're generally making good use of the sausage method, although I do recommend that you look over the diagrams I offered you in my last critique in regards to that - the ant leg, the dog leg, etc. and study how I wrap forms around that sausage structure to build up musculature. I think currently your use of additional masses is a little simplistic, and the points I've raised there and here should help you get a lot more out of them.
All in all, you're not far off, but I do want to see you apply the points I've raised here, so I'm going to assign a few additional pages below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of organic forms with contour curves
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4 pages of animal constructions, one animal per page, and I want you to take full advantage of the page. Additionally, only draw one construction per day. I'm not concerned with you rushing or anything, but just in case, this can help us stay on task and really push a single exercise to its full potential without getting distracted by the next one we may want to get to.
Also, since you missed the bit about drawing larger in my last critique, I do recommend you read through it again before starting on these revisions.