I had difficulty maintaining control when drawing more complex or precise forms, which made some of my lines are wobbly.
I know texture is optional but I made a few attempts to try and gleam some texture from the references, but I was unable to get any usable information to the point where I couldn't even begin.
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are mostly coming along well, save for a couple things to keep in mind:
Make sure that for the contour ellipses at the ends of the forms, that you draw through them two full times before lifting your pen as discussed back in Lesson 1.
Right now you appear to be shifting the degree of your contour lines, but you're doing so in the opposite direction. As discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, as the cross-sectional slice moves away from the viewer, it is perceived as getting wider. The video demonstrates this with the use of a prop, to help explain the concept.
Moving onto your insect constructions, you've got some varying results. Some of them fall a little more flat, but others - like the praying mantis - do a reasonably good job of feeling more three dimensional. In the areas where your drawings feel more flat, the reason for that generally comes down to the manner in which you're interacting with the construction.
Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.
For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.
For example, we see this even in the more successful mantis drawing (here), but it's much more prevalent in others like this ant. Furthermore, it's not just about situations where we cut into the silhouettes of our forms - any action that involves manipulating what we're building up in 2D space, and treating it like a flat drawing, is an issue. So that includes taking the silhouette of a form and extending it out, or simply adding partial/flat shapes to our constructions. So for example, the way in which this crab's head mass was drawn smaller initially, then redrawn after the fact.
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.
You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see more complete examples of construction where every single form is drawn in a way that reinforces the idea that they're all three dimensional and solid, in the shrimp demo and the lobster demo from the informal demos page.
This is all part of accepting that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for the viewer to believe in that lie.
Moving on, I did notice that you definitely made an attempt to apply the sausage method when constructing your insects' legs. You did, however, stray at times from the specific requirements laid out in the diagram I just linked. There are plenty of cases where you end up drawing more ellipsoid shapes (rather than simple sausages), and a number of cases where you didn't reinforce the joints with a single contour line to define the relationship between them in 3D space.
Taking it further, 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 (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well).
I completely understand that the sausage method itself can be quite tricky - especially when it comes to adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages when they get particularly narrow. This does get easier with practice, but it is particularly important to execute them using the ghosting method, and from your shoulder. Slowing down that execution (while keeping it confident to avoid wobbling) will also help you maintain more control.
So, I've given you a few things to work on - I'm going to assign some revisions below so you can demonstrate your understanding.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
Drawings done along with the shrimp and lobster demonstrations included in my critique
4 additional pages of insect constructions
Sorry for the late reply but I have question regarding the crab drawing. From what I understand the issue I had was I was cutting into forms instead of building on them. The reason I bring up the crab is because that's what I believed I was doing by starting with a ball and then adding mass on top of it to make it the shape of the crab's actual body. Can you give an example of how you would go about adding the mass to make it seem 3D rather than 2D?
You can see this being done in the ant head demo I provided before. Focus particularly on the big protrusions along the upper left and upper right of the ant's head - you can see it most clearly on the one towards our left.
As highlighted here, the additional mass is a complete silhouette, whose relationship with the head ball is defined in 3D space by having that silhouette wrap around the existing structure, in the manner shown here.
In your crab, you instead built off the 2D silhouette of the head mass, extending it out on either end but not establishing how this addition was something separate and three dimensional. What matters most is defining the relationship between them, how they exist independently of one another, as well as how one wraps around the other.
For the lobster and shrimp drawings, do I need to copy all the details included? I'm having a difficult time understanding the finer forms and how they sit in 3D space without having a reference of the actual animal.
Do your best at copying what's there, but don't worry too much about the small details. My focus is more on how your larger structures fit together, and how they interact with one another in 3D space.
Here are the revisions. I've been extremely busy the last month and a half so I didn't have much time to do them for a while, which I think affected my line quality.
I've read the critique a few times and I'm not quite certain I grasped all of it but I did my best to respect the construction and bend the legs more.
Regarding the joints, there were a few cases where the joint was at an awkward angle that made the line blend in with the line of the leg. In those cases should I cheat a little and put a line where it's more visible?
As a whole, this is largely looking very good. You followed along with the shrimp demo quite well, and you're definitely improving in terms of how you apply those principles to your own constructions, resulting in a stronger sense of solidity and believability. This is something you'll have ample opportunity to continue working on into the next lesson, but as it stands I feel confident that you're very much moving in the right direction.
To answer your question, it is okay to alter the orientation or positioning of certain things if you feel it'll help you communicate things more clearly to the viewer. Our goal here isn't to replicate the reference image perfectly, but rather to use it as a source of information to inform what we end up constructing - to help it feel more tangible and believable.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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