About a quarter of the way through the homework, I realized my legs were built more on ellipses than sausages. I caught the error before starting on the bears, so everything from then on represents my current understanding of the sausage method as applied to animals. Thanks again for your critique!
Alrighty! Well, this is honestly a very interesting submission. It shows an overall grasp of the material, specifically the use of additional forms and construction as a whole, and shows an understanding of how forms fit together in 3D space that is developing nicely, but also shows that in order to focus so heavily on construction you have in certain places drifted away from as attentive a focus on observation. But we'll address that in a second.
Starting with your organic intersections, these are looking pretty good. They're generally wrapping around one another quite nicely, my only concern is that the top-right most form on the second page is getting a little wiggly. Try and keep your forms a little more sturdy, willing to bend a little but not quite wiggling into every little gap and crack that lays beneath them. Think of a filled water balloon, and how the tension of the skin against the water inside of it will cause it to maintain its volume.
Now, moving onto the animal constructions, I see two overall shifts throughout your set here. While all throughout you've demonstrated a good grasp of 3D space and construction as a whole, at the beginning you showed signs that a lot of your time was going into observing and studying your references quite closely and consistently. You avoided working from memory, and ensured that the majority of the forms you introduced were reflecting some specific aspect of the reference you were trying to carry over. While the goal was never about reproducing the reference perfectly, your choices were well informed.
On the flipside, right at the beginning you were just starting to get used to the idea of really drilling down into the nitty-gritty of an animal's body construction, getting more comfortable with the addition of masses to help capture some of the more nuanced musculature. As you pushed farther on this, it's very clear to me that your observation started to slip by the wayside. While your constructions felt more solid and complex, they started to drift from being more grounded in the reality of your reference.
That's not to say this was a consistent thing - even towards the end of your animal constructions, certain things (probably those you felt least certain of) like the chameleon came out quite well. The horse, also, while probably drifted from the correct proportions in a few places still came out feeling really solid and believable. But there were definitely some, like the big horn sheep, that seemed more to me like you were following the steps you'd learned, but without the proper source of information on which to base your decisions.
Now, there are a few specific issues I'm going to address, instead of speaking in vague terms in regards to the set as a whole. First off, I noticed a tendency here and there to end up with "sausages in hotdog buns". For example when we look at this bear, you end up wrapping your additional mass around the leg sections in such a way that it meets with a flat edge. I usually give my additional masses more of a twist to avoid those straight seams, as you can see on this ant leg. I also try and add more bulk to the form on one side than the other, leading to the kind of complexity you see in this dog leg.
Additionally, along that same bear's back, you didn't quite draw each additional mass there in its entirety, and you didn't allow them to actually pile upon one another. You can read more about how to approach those forms in these notes.
As a whole, I am actually really quite pleased with how things have come out, and where your focus has settled. When you combined it with proper observation, you ended up with a lot of really successful drawings, such as:
And frankly, I even quite liked the left cardinal even though they didn't delve into as much complexity as the others.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I just want to make sure that you are indeed focusing more on the observational side of things. In order to do that, I want you to do two more animal drawings, just to confirm that you're consistently able to take that confident grasp of space and form, that use of additional masses, and combine them with proper observational skills to create strong results. You're very close, and I wouldn't have felt terrible just letting you continue here, but I do believe a couple more drawings is the right call.
Next Steps:
Please submit two more animal drawings.
So, I'm submitting two drawings of the same bear from the same reference. The reason is that I'm a little confused about how to apply construction to very furry animals. With less furry animals, like a horse, the viewer sees a lot of the animal's musculature, and it seems to make sense to build all that up by massing forms on top of each other and wrapping forms around the basic sausages of the legs, etc. But when the visible part of the animal is mostly fur, it seems like building up the exterior of the animal by massing forms yields worse results. With furry animals, it seems like after laying in the basic structure with spheres and sausages, it's better to "outline" the furry parts rather than try to build them up by wrapping additional masses around each other. In the drawings I'm submitting, I first tried to build everything up by adding sacks of flour on top of each other (admittedly not very well). But in the second drawing, I outlined the furry parts of the legs and neck without building out the additional forms as extensively. The second drawing strikes me as more successful, but possibly not in line with the method you're trying to teach us here. So any guidance you can offer would be appreciated. I looked at your informal bear demos, but since they are older and don't use the sausage method, I wasn't sure what to take away from them.
Anyway, I hope these two at least demonstrate careful attention to observing the reference. Also, I'm happy to submit a drawing of a different animal if my drawing the same animal twice was against the rules--or if you think that I need to do more drawings before moving on.
My drawings: https://imgur.com/a/qgdVJ0j
Reference: https://www.flickr.com/photos/silvanofabris/8200620924/
With furry animals, it seems like after laying in the basic structure with spheres and sausages, it's better to "outline" the furry parts rather than try to build them up by wrapping additional masses around each other.
This is actually incorrect - the first approach (the sacks of flower) was the correct direction to take, rather than the second. The reason being that the former approach allows us to define some kind of a relationship between all the forms and the structure that lays beneath them. With the second approach, it's more like we've stuck the bear into a biohazard suit and filled it with air - the relationship between the outer layer and the bear proper is one of vague floating, and is not completely defined.
The additional masses can represent whatever we need, so long as it is some sort of a mass. A mass of fur, a mass of muscle, a mass of meat, etc. The key is that it defines a relationship between forms in 3D space, making everything feel solid and grounded.
While I agree that there's definitely room for improvement in how you approached the first drawing, it is absolutely moving in the right direction and for the most part it was well executed. Improving how you choose to arrange those additional forms will come largely from practice. What I can see is that you understand what you need to be aiming for, and how to think about them.
The only other issue I wanted to address was that the bear's head construction came out very flat in both drawings, because again, the relationship between the forms being added and the ones underneath were not well grounded. My prime examples for head construction can be seen in the following demos:
These demonstrate how each form is not ever enveloping another completely, but rather wrapping around a part of it to define a clear relationship. They also demonstrate how each component of the head buttresses against the eye socket - the muzzle, the cheekbone, the brow ridge, etc. These are things to think about, as though you're creating a 3D puzzle with all of these different pieces snapping into place.
All in all, I do think you've shown a good grasp of the material here (specifically with the first drawing), so while you should certainly continue practicing this on your own, I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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