Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, the intent with which you drew each of these appears to largely be correct - your contour lines' degrees properly reflect their orientation in space, the sausage forms are mostly sticking to the "simple sausage" characteristics, and all that. But while your sausage forms are largely drawn well, the contour curves feel as though they could take an additional moment or two to be drawn with greater care. Right now they're slipping outside of the silhouettes or floating loosely within it (breaking the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the forms), which makes them vastly less effective and generally feels sloppy. You're very close to doing a stellar job with this, but you need to take more time applying the ghosting method to every single mark you draw.
This definitely also continued to be an issue in some of your drawings. For example, the wasp demo definitely had a lot of sloppy linework which definitely undermined the solidity of your overall construction, both with contour lines not quite sitting on the surface of a form, or contour curves that don't quite wrap around the form believably. These are all things you're definitely capable of, but it just takes additional time and planning before each and every stroke to achieve. Line weight would also have helped to clarify when one form was in front of another, which will definitely be a common situation throughout all of this course.
Your louse demo drawing was considerably better, though I think this was largely because there were fewer contour lines in general. Line weight still would have helped clarify your drawing, and taking a little more care with your drawings would help avoid gaps and openings in the silhouette of your forms. Little shortcomings like those, which often show up here and there when a student is being a little too quick with their drawings can undermine the solidity of the result.
Skipping on down to some of your own constructions, the first thing that jumped out at me was that you weren't entirely consistent in your use of the sausage method when constructing your legs. The sausage method as shown here has several key requirements, and it's important that you follow them to the letter in order to apply it correctly:
Each segment needs to be a complete, simple sausage form, essentially made up of two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No swelling or pinching through its midsection. The outline needs to be complete, with no gaps or openings in order to maintain its solidity as an independent form.
The sausage segments must overlap/intersect - not simply share a circle for its joint, but actually be two separate complete forms that are interpenetrating.
The joint between them must be reinforced with a single contour curve drawn to establish the spatial relationship between the connected sausage forms. This will help emphasize the solidity of both sausages, while allowing them to maintain their fluidity and flow. These kinds of contour lines that define the relationship between two solid forms
The sausage method is important because it allows us to capture the legs in a manner that makes them appear solid and three dimensional while still maintaining their gestural flow. Often times approaches for capturing legs will do one or the other, but not both. As such, while you may not always feel that a chain of sausages best captures the leg you're attempting to draw (especially when enforcing the 'simple sausage' characteristics), that is entirely fine. You should still be using the technique, but treating it as though you're creating a base structure or armature. We can always add bulk to it afterwards wherever necessary, as shown here. The key is taking things one step at a time. and build things up steadily.
Overall, I think you definitely need to slow down. You're putting a lot of linework down and doing so without thinking through the purpose behind each and every stroke. The ghosting method itself is important, because it forces us to work through several steps before actually putting those marks down, and the first of them is to consider what exactly you are looking to have your next mark accomplish. What job should it be doing? How does it relate directly to the reference you're attempting to study, what specific feature are you capturing by drawing it?
To this end, it's also important to remember that most of your time should be spent looking at your reference, taking only as long as you need to draw a specific mark before looking back at it to refresh your memory. Our capacity for remembering is naturally not very good at this - as soon as we look away, we end up simplifying the information we've derived.
So, I do think that there's more work to be done before we can mark this lesson as complete. I'll assign additional work below, but the key things to work on are as follows:
Slow down and think more before you execute your marks.
Draw each form to be complete, and focus on the specific form you're constructing, not ahead to the one you're going to draw next.
Use line weight (drawn with the ghosting method, same as always) to help separate out the forms and clarify which forms are in front and which are behind. Line weight doesn't need to be obnoxious, but just adding a touch of additional weight can speak clearly to the viewer's subconscious and make a drawing much easier to read. I see you using cast shadows in a few places, but you're pretty sporadic in where/how you do this.
Apply every element of the sausage method - I can see you applying it in bits and pieces, varying from drawing to drawing - don't approach this in a loose manner, adhere to the specific stipulations of the technique and do so consistently.
And one last thing I didn't mention yet:
Next Steps:
So, I'd like to see:
2 pages of organic forms with contour curves. Take more time with each individual contour curve.
4 pages of insect drawings. Same deal, take more time with each and every mark you put down, spend more time in between marks studying your references and finding specific elements/forms you want to carry over into your drawing, and really focus on the execution of each mark. Don't think ahead to the next one, think about what the mark you're drawing requires of you, and what you're trying to accomplish with it.
I used sausage forms for the legs properly this time I hope but I still found a lot of trouble between keeping the lines instead the sausage and having them wobbly and unconfident.
So I decided to focus my critique on the drawing of the spider as I felt that was by far the most successful. Here are some notes on it:
You did a great job with many of the sausages for its legs, and you mindfully reinforced their joints with contour curves (which you forgot to do on your wasp). There were a few where I'd say you got a little sloppier (usually towards the ends of the legs - remember that you have demonstrated yourself to be capable of drawing these sausage forms, so consider what may have changed in your approach between the ones that were successful and the ones that were not).
I feel you did a vastly better job here of observing your forms and thinking of each one as an individual three dimensional entity, and in many (though not all) places, established the relationships between those forms in 3D space. This was less so the case with the wasp, moth, etc. where the actual forms you chose and the way you arranged them seemed less closely informed by the reference (and may have relied more on drawing from memory).
When drawing sausage forms, you don't have to draw through them - this is a technique we use with ellipses that helps keep them more evenly shaped, which actually works against us when drawing sausages. We do need to draw them with a confident pace (that doesn't necessarily mean quickly, but simply at a pace that allows us to keep our brain from steering the stroke as we draw).
That section that bridges the thorax to the abdomen is incorrect, in that it was drawn as a flat, 2D shape rather than an independent 3D form. You effectively extended it off the silhouette of one form and stretched it out to the other, so we lack a sense of how it actually occupies 3D space, and how it relates to the two masses it is connecting. I demonstrated on the left side of the image how I might approach it - creating a tube (with a consistent width) across from one to the other, establishing the specific location it connects to both masses, and then wrapping additional masses to create the "tapering waist" effect afterwards. Having the silhouette of that bridge taper right off the get-go will undermine the illusion of that form's solidity, so we need to tackle this process in successive steps.
Looking at your other drawings, I have a few other concerns:
Page 6, you appear to have used the sausage method on the legs (although you've got a couple stretched ellipses here and there), but when it came time to add additional masses/forms to them to bulk it out as needed, you seemed to only treat the structure you'd drawn as more of a suggestion. Your additions clip through those sections, zigzag around them, and largely don't treat them as though the sausages you'd drawn previously are actually solid, 3D forms present in the world. This effectively undermines the illusion of solidity of the whole drawing, because you're adding contradictory information - where some marks insist certain forms are present, whereas others don't acknowledge them. It's critical that whatever you draw on top attaches to the existing structure directly, and that you treat the marks you put down as adding a 3D form into the world, rather than just as adding flat shapes onto a page. This applies even here - we know that the leaf bug tends to have broad, flatter sections to its limbs, but they are still solid forms, and still need to adhere to the underlying structure.
For your organic forms with contour curves, I can see that you are still struggling with getting the curves to fit snugly within the silhouette. You are drawing them in such a way that they hook around well at either end, and you're properly mindful of the realistic degree-shift from curve to curve. All that's left is the control to be able to place the line where it needs to go. To this end, use of the ghosting method is critical - I'm unsure of whether or not you're using it (or putting enough time into the planning/preparation phases). You may well be doing it (it's usually easier to identify issues where students aren't actually executing their marks confidently, but you're doing a good job of that as your marks are smooth and fluid). It's just something to consider, as it would certainly explain the difficulty with putting the marks where they need to go. Additionally, remember that you should be rotating your page as needed for each and every mark to ensure a comfortable angle of approach. This can potentially explain why you do a good job with marks in a certain orientation and less so with others.
One last thing - I did notice that you mentioned accessing the lessons on a bus being difficult (due to the lack of a solid offline version of the material). Just to make sure - are you just looking to read the material on the bus, or are you actually doing the drawing work while on a bus? I understand that everyone's got time limitations and we have to make the most of the time we can scrape together, but a bus definitely would not be terribly conducive to doing the work for this course due to the difficulties involved in being on a moving vehicle, not having a proper desk/table at which to draw, etc. This can definitely give you trouble when it comes to putting marks down, and can also impact one's mental state in such a way that it leads to more rushing, less patient observation of one's reference image, etc.
Careful, patient observation of our reference images really is a critical component to bridge the gap between a simple construction of the most basic forms of our object, and digging into the more specific forms that run along the major ones, that give greater nuance to its silhouette and its body. For example, if we look at the spider again, its thorax is essentially just a ball. As a basic structure this is entirely correct, but there's always more than that going on - forms that wrap around this ball to create larger divisions. To this end, your constructions are often a good starting point, but they are far from actually complete, instead having stopped fairly early in the process.
All in all you are making progress, and I think you're demonstrating far more patience and steadiness here than in your previous drawings. That's an excellent sign. There are some additional pages I'd like you to do in order to try and incorporate what I've outlined here, however, so I will list those below.
Next Steps:
2 more pages of organic forms with contour curves - remember to apply the ghosting method to your contour curves (in case you haven't). That includes rotating the page as needed to find a comfortable angle of approach for each and every mark.
In my previous critique, I shared this diagram with you. I think you're still struggling when it comes to getting forms to wrap around one another, so I'd like you to do a full page of sausages with masses added to them as shown on the bottom half of this diagram.
2 more pages of insect drawings - while I don't want you to get into detail/texture, be sure to take the drawings as far as you can when focusing on construction specifically. Build every component out of simple forms, and then build upon them to capture the specific elements while maintaining the solidity. Everything we add is three dimensional, and all the forms present in our construction relate to one another within 3D space. Be sure to define that, and to think about it as you draw. At no point should the relationship between two connected forms be loose or unclear.
The going over sausage forms is something I do panicked with the shape,and with the lynx spider, I was almost seeing the body like marbles in a sock, which kinda created that 2D silloute you are talking about, I will incorporate more 3D shapes next time to describe it more accurately than try to take shortcuts.
Leaf insect did destroy me as I didnt put the rear leaf properly attached to the body and got stressted with the flatter tops of the legs they have. As discussed before, probably need to think about the 3D form more in-order to improve that.
I ghost by ghosting a full eclipse/circle then trying to get the pen down and up for a more-than-half eclipse/circle, should I be doing it like lines where I just ghost an arc going from one point to another?
I am not using public transport anytime soon, but when I was, it was only reading/watching materials on public transport, also a collecting habit that is both physical and digital.
My current set-up involves a clipboard leaning against a folding table, maybe not the most stable set-up but the clipboard allows me to rotate easily, maybe I dont rotate as much as I do in warm-ups and I will try to do more in the exercises themselves.
I will push myself to take it slower by observing more, another thing that may help the concerns.
Also, I am not seeing the list? It has not appeared on my laptop or phone.
I think I kinda screwed some curves while trying to end them without going out at times, resulting in a flatter curve or weird angularity on what should be a smooth arc.
The sosig mass drawings turned into sausage rolls, not sure if that was the desired shape.
I think I had more control over sausage forms in the bugs, legs some times ended up funny in placement. I hope I managed to bridge the Termite thorax properly, I tied to use the merging shapes example shown before but nor sure a cyclinder wouldve been better as I used a circle.
These are my favourite sketchbooks, hands down. Move aside Moleskine, you overpriced gimmick. These sketchbooks are made by entertainment industry professionals down in Los Angeles, with concept artists in mind. They have a wide variety of sketchbooks, such as toned sketchbooks that let you work both towards light and towards dark values, as well as books where every second sheet is a semitransparent vellum.
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