8:18 PM, Sunday September 5th 2021
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are mostly coming along well, save for a couple things to keep in mind:
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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.
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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:
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Drawings done along with the shrimp and lobster demonstrations included in my critique
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4 additional pages of insect constructions