Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids
6:40 AM, Monday January 25th 2021
Proportions are really hard.
I'm looking forward to reading your critique!
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're definitely aiming for maintaining the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, but there are definitely some deviations. I can see one where you've got one end way bigger than the other, but more importantly, I see quite a few where the ends are getting more stretched out rather than remaining entirely circular.
It is pretty normal for students to struggle with these sausage forms, and they do get more difficult when they get narrower (like on the page with your wasp demo drawing). One thing that can help is to continue applying the ghosting method, but to work towards slowing the execution down as much as you can while maintaining a confident pace. There's a reason I generally talk about executing one's marks confidently - not specifically "quickly" even if everyone understands it that way. Speed is the easiest way to achieve confidence at first, but as we get more experienced with the ghosting method, we become more capable of executing our marks more slowly without wobbling and hesitating. That's what comes into play here.
Moving onto your insect constructions, I can see that you're definitely trying to focus on building up your constructions by working with simple forms, and trying to keep yourself from jumping ahead into greater complexity too quickly, and that is certainly a good thing. It helps lend to the believability of many of your constructions. There are however some issues that I will draw to your attention.
First off, once you've placed a form in the world, do not attempt to redraw or alter its silhouette. The silhouette of a form is just a flat shape that sits on our page, but it represents the actual 3D form that exists in the world of our drawing. Some students will attempt to change that silhouette in order to quickly and easily introduce more complexity into their drawing, but in doing so they are not changing the 3D form. They are merely breaking the relationship between silhouette and form.
Let's take a look at this ant. I've marked out areas where you cut into those initial masses in order to 'refine' your forms. In this diagram, I explain precisely why this kind of alteration breaks the illusion that we're dealing with 3D forms, and instead leaves us with flat shapes. It is possible to do this correctly in a way that maintains the illusion that both the piece being cut away and the piece remaining are still three dimensional, but this doesn't work particularly well for organic subject matter. Instead, it's best to work additively, as shown in this beetle horn demonstration and in this ant head demo. I've also got this more recent lobster demo which employs a great deal of additive construction throughout its process.
Moving forward, a minor point to keep in mind - back in Lesson 2, we talked about leaving form shading out of the drawings for this course. There are a few places where you added an amount of shading, likely with the intent of exploring texture. Often when students gravitate more towards shading, they're getting more caught up in the idea of 'decorating' their drawings.
What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.
The last thing I wanted to mention actually circles back to the first point discussed here. It's very clear to me that you're making a conscious effort to employ the sausage method for constructing your insects' legs. There are definitely shortcomings here, but as a whole you're trying to build simple sausage forms and to define the joints between them with contour lines. While there are definitely drawings where you're employing basic sausages fairly effectively, like this beetle, but there are others like here in this mantis where you have used ellipses instead of sausages, which is incorrect.
Furthermore, in the beetle I just linked, you were very sloppy in adding anything beyond that sausage structure, drawing the little protrusions as haphazard lines. The sausage structure we start with is really just a base. We can then go on to build new forms on top of it, as shown here and here and demonstrated in this ant leg demo. We can (and should) even employ these same principles when working with animals, as shown here on this dog's leg.
Overall there is definitely a lot more attention to be paid to your references, to identify the complex segmentation and structure that exists on the legs beyond the basic sausage structure.
Now, I've shared a number of things for you to work on here. I'm going to assign a few pages of revisions below, so you can demonstrate your understanding.
Next Steps:
Please submit 4 additional pages of insect constructions.
Hello!
Thanks a lot for the critique! It was very clear and straight to the point. I have rewatched the insect introduction and it helped me a lot to watch it after reading your critique. It allowed me to focus my attention more on the things I had the most trouble with. I also looked at other official submissions along with your other critiques, it was very helpful too.
I didn't think about dividing the ant body in four parts but it seems so logical now. I really tried to stick to simple sausage forms while drawing the legs and the antennas but sometimes it was really hard, especially for long thin ones. The construction of the beetle horn made a lot more sense after following the recent lobster demo, even though it is a very different subject they share a very similar logic of construction.
Going through the exercise with your critique in mind was insanely useful. I would sincerely be happy to redo additional pages of insect if necessary.
Here's the link to the 4 pages: https://photos.app.goo.gl/6pXk44miBm8VfvPn7
You've definitely made a good deal of progress here. There are a few things to keep in mind, however:
I noticed a pretty liberal use of line weight throughout your constructions. Remember that line weight should be focused primarily on clarifying specific overlaps between forms. You appear to be adding a lot of line weight in areas that don't necessarily need it for any clear purpose, so keep that in mind. That also includes using any larger shapes of solid black for anything other than cast shadows. Sometimes we can get a little confused as to the difference between line weight and cast shadows - line weight can cling around the silhouette of an object (although should be focused on key localized areas of said silhouette), but will always remain subtle. Cast shadows on the other hand can be as broad and heavy as you want, but they must be cast upon an existing surface - they can't just float arbitrarily around the silhouette of another form.
Your use of the sausage method is definitely getting better, although there's still room for improvement in sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages (this'll get easier with practice). Also, note that just putting down a basic sausage structure isn't taking a leg construction as far as it can go. As shown previously in this ant leg demo, there's a lot more information that can be gleaned from a proper, high-resolution reference image. I strongly recommend you reread the part of my previous critique that touches on the use of the sausage method, and how to build on top of it. There are a few diagrams that I provided there, and while I'm sure you did read through them, studying them further as you continue to move forwards should help.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.
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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