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8:17 PM, Monday August 17th 2020
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, there's a couple issues that stand out quite prominently:
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It appears you're still having some difficulty in maintaining the characteristics of 'simple sausages', as explained here in the instructions. I think this is something you are getting better at, but just keep an eye on situations where the ends get more stretched out (rather than being properly circular), and where the ends are of different sizes.
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You tend to jump around between having the curves wrap properly around the rounded surface, accelerating their curvature as they hook around at the edge, and having them just come out too shallow to properly give the sense that they're wrapping around. What you need to do is actually 'overshoot' those curves, as explained here. This means following the full elliptical path just a little further to exaggerate how you hook back around.
Moving onto your insect constructions, I honestly see quite a bit of improvement over the set as a whole, and while there are some issues I want to address, as a whole you're showing a significantly improved grasp of how your forms interact with one another in 3D space.
I'll outline the issues I want you to be aware of below:
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Firstly, I'm noticing you have a tendency to draw your initial masses with a fainter line, like you're purposely trying to hide them, and then you go back over a lot of your linework to try and add line weight rather liberally. This is not really how I want you to approach your drawings for this course, and you'll notice that in my own demonstrations I very obviously treat all my initial masses with the same kind of confident, bold linework as I do the later elements. I only use line weight where I need to clarify specific overlaps, or draw special attention to certain areas. It is not to be treated as though your drawing is made up of a 'rough sketch' and then a 'clean up pass'. Every single mark you draw defines a solid three dimensional form in the world, so make sure you treat them as being important. Also, be sure to draw them using the ghosting method - I noticed that there were some lines (like the legs on the other side of this one that were drawn a little more sloppily.
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You appear to employ a variety of strategies when constructing the legs of your creatures. This is something I see from students pretty often, but there is a pretty good reason that I want students to apply the sausage method in its entirety to every single leg they draw. It's totally normal to see legs and not really think that they'll fit the rather limited "chain of sausages" format, but that's fine. We're not building the whole leg out of sausages - we're building a base structure, or an armature. This is because the sausage method allows us to create this structure that balances both a sense of solidity as well as a sense of fluidity that every other technique tends to miss. You'll usually end up drawing legs that feel solid but stiff, or gestural but flat. The sausage method strikes a proper balance between them, when done correctly. Once that armature is in place, you can then build atop it as shown here and here to build up bulk as needed. This is a process you'll use in the next lesson as well, so it's important that you familiarize yourself with it.
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A minor point - I noticed that you filled in some of the insects' eyes with black. It's best that you don't, as it'll actually flatten that form out into a circle, rather than a 3D ball. Instead, reserve all of your filled black shapes for cast shadows only. These don't fill in the full surface of a form - they exist as shapes that are projected from one form onto another, and instead of flattening things out they help define a relationship between these forms.
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Another minor point - with your moth at the end there, you appear not to be drawing through your ellipses. Make sure you draw through them two full times before lifting your pen throughout this entire course.
All in all, you are showing strong progress, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to keep the points I've mentioned in mind as you move forwards however.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
11:22 PM, Monday August 17th 2020
Thank you very much for the critique!
Following the plants critique, I have tried to fix the line weight and quality issues, but I am still getting it quite wrong. I've tried to limit line weight only to distinguishing which forms were in front, but I still got the feeling after each drawing that I ended up with too much line weight. And poor line quality... Are there any line quality exercises I should do? Or just lesson 1 as warmup and keep drawing? For most of the points, I think it's a dexterity issue for me now (whereas before I was just ignorant altogether).
I feel very bad about not using sausages for legs. I did feel strongly that I was too stiff and that process would have helped me a lot. I was just a very bad student in this.
There are two minor/more specific things I'd still like to ask if I may...
On this insect: https://i.imgur.com/rxS27e4.jpg I feel the "snout" is wrong, spatially, but wasn't sure how to make it better.
And while drawing the hidden legs of insects, I get confused in combining what happens to cylinders when they move closer to or away from the central vision point and what happens to them when they're rotated.
Should I worry about these, or will they become better with the 250 cylinders challenge? This particular issue is one that's been plaguing me for a long time, and one of the reasons I was excited to find DaB :D (looking at drawings from half a year ago, I feel DaB has already helped me a lot with spatial thinking)
Thank you again for the critique! I hope I can fix these for the animals homework.
12:52 AM, Tuesday August 18th 2020
I wouldn't say the snout is wrong, but the scratchiness of your linework there is what really impeded the solidity of the form. Going back over the lines as many times as you did undermines the solidity of the form, which causes the main problems.
As for your other concern, foreshortening applies most strongly when objects are either very close up to the viewer, or very large. With the scale at which we're working, your legs should be constructed with basic sausage forms as mentioned in the sausage method diagram. There's no need to overcomplicate things by worrying about how one end might taper imperceptibly compared to the other.
Aside from that, the 250 cylinder challenge will help you at a larger scale, but again - if you introduce unnecessary complications that are not raised within the lesson, you will only distract yourself from dealing with the core principles being addressed.
7:37 AM, Tuesday August 18th 2020
Thank you!
I see the animal lessons use a lot of sausage forms themselves, I'll work on improving these issues!
Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.