Hello I'll be handling the critique for your lesson 4 homework.
Organic Forms with contour Curves
-Starting with the organic forms these are coming along well, your sausages are simple and easy to work with which is a strategy to produce good results. You should keep practicing them, I did notice a few instances where your sausages had unequally sized ends. The contour curves themselves are turning out well and I can see that you drew them with an awareness of how they change degrees as they love through the length of the sausage. There are some cases like the sausage at the top right of your first page, where there is no degree change. Keep in mind that contour curves are a useful tool to describe how a form sits in 3D space, but they can also work against us by flattening our drawings. The best strategy is to use the ghosting method to think about each mark's purpose and how you are going to achieve it best. Once you have gone through that planning phase you should draw your marks with confidence.
Insects
-Your insects are turning out well and overall you have stuck to the principles of construction, I can see that you have broken everything down into its primitive elements. But you have more trouble when adding the more complex details and you don't push your constructions far enough, so let's see what you can keep working on to improve.
-I can see that you are laying down your major masses (head, thorax and abdomen), remember that you are not bound only to them, they just serve as a scaffolding on top of which we will add the more complex details. I can see that whenever you tried to add extra mass to your constructions you did it correctly, but you also had a tendency to jump from working with 3D masses and adding 2D marks. For example on this grasshopper you added some masses to the area behind the head and you did it correctly, but you tried to capture the segmentation with simple 2D marks.
What you should do whenever you want to change something is to add full masses that are fully enclosed and have its own volume, we can do so by wrapping the silhouette of each mass around the existing structure as shown here, or we can do so by defining the intersection between them, just like the form intersections exercise in lesson 2.
-Whenever adding extra masses you should also take some time to think about and design the silhouette of the shape you're about to draw. One thing that can help with this is to think about how this mass would exist by itself in 3D space, here with nothing else to touch, our mass would be a ball or sphere, then as it presses against the other forms it's silhouette starts to get more complex in response to the structure already present. This process is exemplified in this diagram
-Now I want to talk about leg construction, this is the weakest part of your constructions, and while the approach is not entirely incorrect, it lacks many of the requirements for the sausage method.
Your chains if sausages are turning out well, but in some instances you let the sausages cut off each other rather than drawing them in their entirety. This is an important step as it allows us to draw the intersection between them. The important thing to keep in mind is that the sausage method is not about capturing the shape of the legs precisely as they are, instead it is about laying down a very basic structure which captures both the flow and solidity of these limbs, once that structure is in place we can start to add the more complex details, in order to more precisely capture the shape of the legs. You can see concrete examples of this approach in this dog leg's demo and this ant's leg demo
Another minor thing is that you tend to attach the legs directly to the thorax, if you look closely at your reference you will always find a mass that connects the legs to the thorax, as shown in this diagram
The trick to these construction exercises is to break everything down into simpler shapes and make a lot of small moves rather than trying to make a few big moves that try to capture a lot of things at once, while always working with full forms rather than 2D marks.
Okay, you still have some things to keep working on so I'll leave you some additional work, good luck
Next Steps:
When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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