1:05 AM, Friday November 13th 2020
Starting with your organic intersections, there are a few issues that I'd like to point out:
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You should be sticking to simple sausage forms. The added complexity that comes from their ends being of different sizes, and some of them pinching through their midsections undermines the solidity of the individual forms.
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I can see that you appear to have traced back over the lines of your sausages as a sort of "clean-up" pass to separate your "final lines" from your initial construction. This, as explained here in the form intersections exercise is an approach I don't allow in this course. The main reason is that by tracing back over lines like this, we tend to focus too much on how those lines sit on the flat page, rather than how they represent edges moving through 3D space. As a result, our lines stiffen up and reflect the fact that we're really just looking at a flat drawing, not actual three dimensional objects. Line weight is fine to use, but it must be limited to parts of existing lines, rather than used to replace them in their entirety. The focus of line weight is to clarify specific overlaps between forms. Line weight should also be drawn using the ghosting method.
Moving onto your animal constructions, there are a number of issues I'd like to point out - but I think that they are things that can be addressed one at a time, and once they're understood, I think it should yield a good deal of growth in your work. I'm going to label them each separately, so I want you to take a good bit of time to read (and reread) through this critique to properly absorb the information on each individual point.
Every change we introduce to a construction must be a complete three dimensional form.
Not a line, not a flat shape. A complete form with a defined connection or relationship with the structures that exist within your construction already. In this image I have identified in a handful of your drawings a number of additions that consisted only of lines. While in combination with other existing lines in your constructions they constitute shapes, they are entirely flat and do not establish any kind of three dimensional information to add to the construction.
Whenever you go to add something new to your construction, it needs to first and foremost enclose an amount of space (meaning it can't have open sides or rely on other parts of the existing drawing to close itself off), and it needs to either establish a relationship with the existing structure through its silhouette (in the case where it wraps around existing forms) or through a contour line (in the case that it intersects with the existing structure, like in lesson 2's form intersections).
Throughout these drawings you've taken a lot of liberties, jumping back and forth between treating it like your object is real and three dimensional, and far more often just treating this like a drawing on a flat page. Yes, the latter is objectively true, but our job here is to create an illusion that we're creating a 3D object, and that means constantly fighting against the truth.
The way we shape our additional forms' silhouettes conveys how they wrap around the existing structure.
This is something you actually didn't do too badly at - there were clear efforts that when you actually did draw a complete, enclosed form, you were thinking about how its silhouette had to be shaped in order to wrap around the underlying structure. For example, the back mass of this ferret.
That said, this can definitely be done better. I explain a number of points relating to this in these notes. A few points there to keep in mind:
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These masses are like lumps of meat that we're adding to our structure. There are situations where we will want to pile up several pieces, in which case they're going to overlap one another. This means that they will physically pile up in places, creating little 'pinches' where the silhouette of one wraps around the silhouette of the other. On this grizzly bear's back, you simply cut one off, creating no 3D relationship between the two masses that meet there. Instead, one should have stacked on top of the other. By sorting out these spatial problems and keeping the interactions between these forms realistic, we create subtle information along the silhouette of the whole animal, which reads as musculature. This kind of piling-up is good, so you shouldn't be trying to stretch one form across too long a distance, and have it fill too many jobs, like you did on this ferret. It smooths things over that should be complex.
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These additional forms are simple, but their silhouette becomes complex when they're pressed up against something else. Whenever you add any kind of complexity, you have to think about what forms it's pressing against - and those forms should be defined too.
The sausage method
While you're making attempts to follow the sausage method to varying degrees, there are a number of issues in how you're trying to do it. For context, here's the sausage method diagram. I'll refer to it a bit below.
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You frequently end up drawing stretched ellipses instead of sausage forms. For example, look at this impala's legs. All of them are ellipses. As shown in the bottom left of the diagram, this is incorrect.
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Even when you do correctly draw sausage forms, I can see you going around the sausage form multiple times. "Drawing through", or drawing around two full times before lifting your pen is something we only do for ellipses, as it helps us more naturally draw along that elliptical path. When we do it with sausages, we make it that much easier to slip back into drawing ellipses. As you can see in my demonstrations, all my sausages are drawn with a single pass.
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Since you are still struggling with the basics of the sausage method here, I'm not going to put much pressure on building up more complex structures around those sausages (which we discussed back in lesson 4), but I will remind you of the demonstrations I gave you previously: specifically the ant leg and the dog leg. For more detail on this point, refer back to the critique I did for you in lesson 4.
Head constructions
When constructing heads, the eye socket is extremely important. The eye socket is basically our first big step towards taking the largely rounded surfaces of the cranial ball and the head as a whole, and breaking them down into flat planes. As shown in some of the demonstrations on the informal demos page, like the tapir head and the moose head, the eye socket is drawn with a series of purposefully laid out straight lines, carving what become the edges of concrete planes onto the surface. You frequently tend to draw these eye sockets as ellipses, just putting down some arbitrary shape instead. Along with this, I urge you to draw your eyesockets bigger than you think they need to be.
Lastly, make a point of fitting the other facial elements against the eye sockets, like the pieces of a puzzle. The eye socket can be buttressed on all sides, with the muzzle, the cheekbone, the brow ridge, etc. It all creates these three dimensional pieces that fit tightly together, rather than arbitrary elements that float loosely independently of one another.
So, I've laid out a lot of things for you to think about, and as I said before, I want you to take your time to absorb this information. Once you have, I've got a number of pages assigned for you below to draw. I want you to take your time with each and every drawing, doing no more than one in a single day. This is so you can properly invest as much time as you reasonably have into executing each individual mark, drawing every single form, and observing your reference closely and frequently. I think you're getting better at this overall, but you still need to push yourself not to rely on memory, and instead to constantly look back at your reference image to identify the next form you wish to draw, and think about it in specific terms so you can transfer it properly to your drawing.
Next Steps:
I'd like you to do 6 additional animal constructions, adhering to the restrictions I pointed out at the end of my critique.