11:15 PM, Thursday March 26th 2020
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:
- Make sure you're taking full advantage of all the space available to you on the page. You do this in some cases, but there are definitely other drawings that end up being much smaller than they could be. The more room you give yourself, the better your brain will be able to think through spatial problems.
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.