12:12 AM, Friday August 20th 2021
I very much appreciate you taking my poor neck into consideration - sometimes I get submissions from students where all the pages are rotated incorrectly, and in different directions. Doubly so, I'm very pleased with your submission here - across the board, you've done a great job.
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're sticking pretty closely to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, and it's clear that this is intentional. There are a few places where you deviate a little, but that's understandable, and it's pretty minor. Most of these show a great deal of control over that basic sausage shape. Your contour lines themselves are also well drawn, and I can see that you're purposely shifting the degree of your contour lines as you slide along the length of a given form.
Continuing onto your insect constructions, it really stands out to me that overall, you've done a great job of building up your constructions with a considerable focus on how every element you add to the scene is its own complete and solid structure. You're building things up in simple terms first, then constructing on top of that three dimensional base to achieve greater complexity and nuance, but always carrying forward that illusion of solidity.
There are some small suggestions that I can offer however, that should help you continue to consciously move forward in this direction, and to continually yield more solid results. One thing to keep an eye on is the temptation to take a form you'd already constructed and modify its silhouette. So for example if you look at the head of the ant on this page, you'll see that the two protrusions coming off the top of the head are actually created by taking the silhouette of the original head ball, and extending it out.
Working in this manner is an easy way to risk flattening out your construction. We can actually see this most easily when we look at what happens when we cut into a form's silhouette (another kind of modification, just like extending it out), as shown in these notes. We can also see this kind of hiccup right at the tip of this insect's abdomen where you cut back into its silhouette a little.
Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.
So for the ant's head, you'd approach it more as shown here in this ant head demo. Now, as a whole this is not an issue I see occurring often in your work - in fact, you're much better at adhering to these principles of additive construction than most students at this stage, but I still felt it was worth calling it out.
Another quick point I wanted to call out is simply that it helps to reserve our filled black shapes for cast shadows only. Avoid using them to capture any kind of local colour (basically where things like the eyes appear to be black before lighting is even considered), just because it can make the resulting drawing a little less clear to the viewer. Treat them like they're covered in the same white coloured surface.
Lastly, I can see that you're generally making good use of the sausage method (though in a few places you do deviate a little - try to employ it for all the leg structures you draw, even into the next lesson). The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg.
So! Keep those points in mind, but I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.