1:22 PM, Friday July 18th 2025
Hello Demonile, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.
Starting with your organic forms you’re doing pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.
Your contour curves are fairly smooth and even, though there are a couple of curves that look like they may have benefited from a little more patience and care being given to their alignment. You show that you definitely understand that we’re aiming to have each curve cut into two symmetrical halves by the central flow line, just be sure to take as much time as you need with the preparation phase of the ghosting method, and remember you can (and should) rotate your page to the angle that is optimal for each contour line.
In terms of the degree of your contour lines, this isn't quite right (you appear to be drawing them to either be consistent in degree, or decreasing in degree the further back along the sausage we slide). Keep in mind that barring any actual bending of the form, a sausage is essentially a cylinder which follows the same logic explained here in the ellipses section of lesson 1. This means that the degree of the contour curves should be shifting wider as we slide along the sausage form, moving farther away from the viewer. This is also influenced by the way in which the sausages themselves turn in space, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb to follow. You can see a good example of how to vary your contour curves in this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.
Moving on to your insect constructions overall you've done very well, it looks like you’re being intentional and methodical in your approach, starting with simple solid forms and building your constructions up piece by piece. I particularly liked some of the abdomen segmentation on your various pages, it feels bulbous and voluminous as it follows the curvature of the underling form in 3D space.
The biggest point I want to bring to your attention is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had. This main point is about differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:
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Actions in 2D space, where we're just putting lines down on a page, without necessarily considering the specific nature of the relationships between the forms they're meant to represent and the forms that already exist in the scene.
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Actions in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about how each form we draw exists in 3D space, and how it relates to the existing 3D structures already present. We draw them in a manner that actually respects the 3D nature of what's already there, and even reinforces it.
Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would 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, I've marked on this beetle in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice looking through your various constructions is that many of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.
While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. On this section I also marked in blue some places where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. While this approach worked for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.
Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - 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.
This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.
You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page. As Uncomfortable has been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.
The next thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly, especially when blocking in the head/thorax/abdomen. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves.
The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working with the sausage method in mind for most of your pages, which is a good start, and you’re clearly able to draw these sausage forms successfully when you choose to. The sausage method is quite specific, and to use it correctly you’ll need to draw each sausage in its entirety, instead of cutting some of them off where they overlap. Once the sausages are in place we add one contour line to each joint which shows how the forms penetrate one another in 3D space, much like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise.
It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.
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 in these examples here, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5.
Wrapping this up with a look at your approach to texture and detail, for the most part this is coming along very well, with strong observation skills and a developing understanding of using cast shadows to imply textural forms, without outlining the forms themselves.
Observation is only part of the puzzle though, the application of texture requires us to understand the forms that are actually present, rather than simply copying and filling in things that look dark in the reference. As far as I can tell, it looks like this is what happened along the legs of the mosquito with the black and white banding likely to be markings on the insect (changes in local colour) rather than anything to do with physical texture.
What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. When thinking about how to add texture, it may help you if you imagine the subject has been painted solid grey or white. If for example we think of a zebra, the physical texture of the fur will feel the same, whether we happen to be running our fingers over a black stripe, or a white one.
If you’re unsure how to approach texture in this course these reminders are a good section to refer to, they provide the instructions that are the most recently updated, and the most useful in terms of these constructions all being exercises to develop spatial reasoning skills.
All right, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are coming along well and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please make sure you refer to this critique and apply the points discussed here to your animal constructions in the next lesson, where they will continue to be relevant.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.