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7:20 AM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're doing pretty well here! You've stuck to the characteristics of simple sausage forms for the most part, and your contour curves have been drawn quite well, such that they wrap around the forms convincingly.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I definitely feel that over the course of the homework, you've shown a good deal of growth and improvement, with that beetle towards the bottom coming out quite solidly. Early on you definitely exhibited a lot of uncertainty with the forms you were putting down and how you were building up to the end goal you were working towards. This resulted in a lot of rough, sketchy areas, as well as some habits you'll definitely want to avoid in the future.

One of these is something we see in this beetle, where you've drawn your underlying construction quite loosely, and notably more faintly than the lines that went back over it after the fact. This kind of underdrawing/clean-up pass should definitely be avoided, as mentioned back in Lesson 2's form intersections exercise. Tracing back over lines tends to focus too much on how those lines exist on the page, rather than how they represent edges and forms existing in 3D space.

Furthermore, once a form has been established in your drawing, making alterations to its silhouette will actually break the relationship with the 3D form it represents, leaving you with a flat shape on the page. This is best demonstrated in the case of cutting back into the silhouette of a form, as shown here, but it applies the same to when the silhouette has been extended. Instead, we need to make a point of working additively whenever we engage with organic subject matter. As explained in that diagram, there is a way to apply subtractive construction correctly, but it is better suited to hard surface and geometric construction.

Working additively means putting down our forms confidently, and committing to those structures - not putting them down loosely and attempting to reassert them with a darker line after the fact. Once in place, we can then define new forms that either wrap around the existing ones (conveyed by the shape of their silhouettes) or intersecting with that existing structure, with their relationship in space defined by a contour line. You can see this in play in this ant head demo.

Looking at that drawing at the end - which again, I believe shows considerable progress - there are a couple things that could be improved. The first are the spikes along the sides of the leg segments. Even though these mostly look fine on their own, you have approached this by effectively attaching 2D shapes, or even just simple lines, to these forms. Instead, you should be attaching complete and enclosed forms for each spike to properly abide by additive constructional principles. You can see this in this beetle horn, as well as in this crab claw demo. I also demonstrate it in the last step of this newer lobster demo.

In general, you definitely approach the legs of this beetle quite wheel - you're employing the sausage method, and you make an effort to wrap the segmentation at the end of each leg quite well, wrapping it around the underlying structure. Just to show how leg construction can be approached and pushed even further, here's a demonstration relating to an ant's leg. As you can see, there are often sorts of elements that can be pushed even farther that aren't necessarily all that obvious at first.

Either way, be sure to continue applying the sausage method for your legs in the next lesson as well, using them to define a base structure before building upon them with further additional masses.

Aside from that, you're doing well, and I am pleased with your progress. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:48 PM, Monday February 1st 2021

Thanks, on to the next one. :D

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Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.

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