11:49 PM, Sunday July 25th 2021
Starting with your organic forms, these are largely looking good. The line work is rich and confident, which is great to see in your contour curves. There are a couple of things though:
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I'm seeing alot of pinching and swelling here. Make sure you're sticking to the characteristics of a simple sausage as explained in the instructions. Remember, sausages are supposed to be two balls connected by a tube of consistent width. That means no pinching through the midsection, no ends with different sizes, etc.
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Your contour curves have their degrees all the same. Remember that, as discussed in the lesson 1 ellipses video that these should get wider as it moves away from the viewer along the sausage form. They're not that far off though.
Moving onto your insect constructions, again, you're moving in the right direction in some ways but there are some things still present here that were present in your plants.
As i've mentioned in my previous critique, you're not giving ample room as a drawing requires. Drawing smaller has its downsides, it can limit our brain's ability to solve spatial problems and with engaging our whole arm while drawing. Both of these make the drawing process clumsier and may impede what we get out of it.
What happened here? It appears as if though you tried to capture greater levels of complexity right off the bat, instead of building up towards it.
I can see similar deviations, such as these two. You didn't start out with the simple ball forms for the head, thorax, and abdomen in their entirety and instead drew these however felt natural to you.
Throughout your drawings, I'm seeing that you're being timid about introducing new forms and piling them on top of one another. You've followed the shrimp and lobster demos just fine, but this didn't carry over to your other drawings unfortunately. On this page and here, you've added the leg spikes as flat open shapes, rather than defining how they sit along the surface, where the presence of one form displaces the other. You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo and this lobster claw demo.
Moving onto the topic of legs, I noticed you seemed to employ different strategies here and some even came out as stretched spheres, rather than sausages. While not uncommon for students to be aware about using the sausage method, but instead they decide not to adhere to them because the legs they're looking at don't actually look like a chain of sausages to them. In your case though, it seemed like you were aware but simply strayed from it.
The sausage method as a base structure allows us to capture the solidity with the gestural nature of legs. Once in place, we can lay in additional masses to convey the complexities as shown here, here, this ant's leg, and even in this dog's leg. This'll become relevant coming into the next lesson where we stack forms on top of one another (as per the organic intersections exercise from Lesson 2).
Again, I'm seeing patterns in your textures which suggests that your relying on memory rather than direct observation. Your demos are fine, but you're not applying these concepts outside of them.
This next point isn't necessarily your fault since the lesson doesn't go in depth about it, but notice the way you went about adding the hairs on this page? I don't like that. These perpendicular tangents create conflict and its not the way you should be adding texture. Uncomfortable talks about this in the latter half of his intro video for drawing insects but you can also see this as a topic covered later on in lesson 5. Also, these hairs shouldn't be applied everywhere along the silhouette but dispersed only in a small number of areas where you want to draw attention to. Less is more.
One last thing that catches my eye, is that in a number of cases, you're applying line weight arbitrarily, with some sections silhouettes being made darker/heavier for no particular reason. This is made most notable on this page. One thing to keep in mind about line weight is that it's best to focus the tool on solving specific problems consistently throughout your drawings. This example of overlapping leaves shows how it's best to allow it to show how forms overlap in localized areas.
I am seeing some improvements, however and I'm happy to see you're not cutting back on forms anymore. That is a step in the right direction.
Overall, i think I've pointed out a number of areas in which you can stand to improve even further. Unfortunately, I'll have to assign some revisions to give you an opportunity to apply these concepts. If you've already started working on some animals from Lesson 5, it would be a good idea to toss those aside and focus on what i pointed out here before moving forward.
Next Steps:
1 page of organic forms
5 pages of insect constructions (no texture)