DIO

Hello RarityMyLove, well done making it through the bugs! I appreciate that they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, and yes, it is perfectly fine to draw crustaceans instead for this lesson.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both pages to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

Your forms are an improvement on your lesson 2 pages, you have a greater proportion of them sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and I’m happy to see that you haven’t crossed out any of your work. Some of them are still a bit erratic (swelling through the midsection and becoming bloated, or having one end much larger than the other) so make sure you keep consciously aiming to keep the ends round and evenly sized and the width consistent when going through the planning and preparation stages of the ghosting method.

It looks like you’re prioritizing smooth confident linework, which is great, and you’re doing pretty well at fitting your contour curves and ellipses snugly against the edges of your forms.

I’m not seeing much in the way of consciously shifting the degree of your contour curves. Sometimes you’ll flip their direction, but their degree tends to stay quite narrow. Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines 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. If you're unsure as to why that is, review the Lesson 1 ellipses video. You can also 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 as far as following the construction process introduced in this lesson goes, you’re doing fairly well. I can see that you’re starting with simple forms that feel solid, and thinking about how the various pieces fit together in 3D space.

An issue that does stand out to varying degrees across the set, is that you’re not adhering to the principles of markmaking introduced back in lesson 1, as closely as you should be. Wherever you chicken scratch or redraw lines you break the first principle of markmaking, lines should be continuous and unbroken.

Redrawing lines causes another problem. In ending up with all of these different lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing.

Furthermore, the ghosting method (which you should be using throughout these exercises) emphasizes the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to execute each mark.

In some areas it looks like you’re redrawing lines in an effort to add lineweight. Everything we do in these exercises serves a specific purpose, and additional lineweight is no exception. The most effective use of line weight - at least given the bounds and limitations of this course - is to use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localized areas where those overlaps occur. You can find an explanation on how to use lineweight in this video. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight.

The next point I need to talk about relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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.

This is happening on quite a few of your constructions, for example I've marked on your lobster and mantis 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 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.

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 talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working with the sausage method in mind, although on many pages you’re constructing your legs using ellipses, which are not sausage forms. They’re actually noted on the lower left of the sausage method diagram as something to avoid, as they tend to be way too stiff.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method, 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.

Okay, I think that should cover it. I am admittedly concerned about the sketchiness of some of the linework and the tendency to cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn, especially as ThatOneMushroomGuy already called these points out in your lesson 3 feedback. Normally I’d be assigning revisions, but if bugs give you such a bad case of the heebie-jeebies that you struggled to look at and draw them, what I’m going to do is move you forward to the next lesson, with the expectation that you’ll make every effort to address the points I’ve called out here as you handle your animal constructions. If something said to you here, or in a previous critique, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions. Best of luck.

Hello Carpediem, thank you for completing the additional pages as requested.

Nice work! I’m happy to see that you’re keeping your first forms simple, and drawing through them, giving you a solid foundation upon which to build your constructions.

You’re also getting to grips with building up your constructions with complete 3D forms and establishing clearer relationships between the various pieces. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure (as seen along some of the leg sections on this page), it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

This is excellent progress, and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed in the initial critique in mind as you move forwards, they will continue to apply to animal constructions.

No problem, best of luck with the cylinders, and I hope you have a great weekend too!

Hello Diniarcm, thank you for completing these revisions as requested.

Starting with your organic intersections these are much better. You’re thinking about how gravity will affect your forms, giving them a feeling of weight and stability, and I’m happy to see that you’ve been able to draw through and complete them and follow a more consistent light source. Good work.

Moving onto your animal constructions these are heading in the right direction. Most of your linework is smooth, and you’re (usually) reserving additional lineweight for clarifying overlaps. You’re making better use of the space available on the page, there is scope to draw bigger still, but you’re using more than half the space on the page so I can see you got the message. This appears to be helping you construct fiddly areas such as heads and feet, which are looking clearer and more solid.

I do have a couple of tips for designing additional masses. In these notes on your rat I’ve called out a (fairly minor) case of pushing an inward curve into an additional mass where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing physically present in the construction to press into it and cause this kind of complexity. You’re already using the solution to this issue quite effectively along the front leg, where you’d layered additional masses to create an inward curve along the silhouette.

The other point I wanted to note is that you seem to be wrapping the large additional mass around the ribcage, but if you really think about the structure that is present as you're adding that additional mass, the ribcage and pelvis are already completely engulfed by the torso sausage, leaving no protruding forms or structures for the mass to interact with.

So instead, as shown here, that mass should not actually be worrying about the ribcage, but rather wrapping around the whole torso sausage. Thus, we do need to put some thought into the nature of the forms we're dealing with. Note that while I'm not wrapping them around the ribcage or pelvis, I am wrapping them around other masses of the shoulder (which I made a bit larger using a blue ellipse) and thigh, which is where we get a lot of bigger muscles that help the animal to walk around. We don't need to worry about this in terms of being anatomically correct, but they do serve a purpose to make the construction more solid by giving us something to press our other masses up against.

We’ve got a somewhat similar issue of unexplained complexity in the mass on the belly of your goat, except here there’s a sharper corner at an entirely arbitrary point on the torso sausage. I’m assuming this is in response to some form you saw in the reference, but as that form isn’t present in your construction the corner appears random. Remember that your construction should appear solid and logical, standing for itself without the reference image to provide additional context. The mass under the belly of the goat also seems to stop very abruptly where it meets the front leg. Usually I’d expect a mass in this location to pass between the legs, as I showed previously in these notes on your rhino.

Lastly, if you choose to add hatching to the far side legs to push them back, do so as a finishing touch after you have constructed all of your forms. On both pages there are sections of hatching on parts of the far side legs which aren’t visible, which will confuse the viewer and undermine their suspension of disbelief. Hatching lines should be given the same care and attention as your construction lines, even though they may seem less important. Aim to keep them parallel and give them clearly defined start and end points. There are a few spots where your hatching looks just a little bit haphazard.

You’ve done good work here, I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete so you can feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge.

Hello Jonathan, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms your linework looks smooth and confident, and you’re doing pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, except for a couple of the short stubby ones which are continually swelling through the middle and getting a bit bloated.

I can see that you’re making an effort to keep most of your contour curves aligned, and fitting them snugly against the edges of the forms, but I'm not seeing much in the way of signs suggesting that you're attempting to shift their degree. Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines 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. If you're unsure as to why that is, review the Lesson 1 ellipses video. You can also 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 these are coming together nicely. I’m happy to see that you’re starting all your constructions off with simple solid forms, and you clearly understand how these forms are positioned in 3D space, and not just as flat shapes on a piece of paper. I do have some advice for how to develop the construction, once those first forms are in place.

It helps to differentiate between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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.

The largest and most obvious example of this would probably be the head of this wasp where it looks like you placed a ball form for the head and then decided it was too big and drew a smaller one. This does leave an extra ellipse floating around the construction, which can confuse the viewer and remind them that the drawing is just lines on a flat piece of paper. Another example would be the section I’ve marked with red on your caterpillar where the cast shadow you’d filled beneath the insect appears to cut inside the forms you had already drawn.

Sometimes this can also happen accidentaly when there is a gap between lines passing around an ellipse (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. We can see this happening along the top of the head of your ladybug. This unfortunately does 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 the same caterpillar I also marked in blue an example where you'd extended off an existing form using a partial, flat shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how it actually connects 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’ll see on the caterpillar, in green, where I’ve made an adjustment to the spike on its butt to complete its silhouette and show how it attaches to the underlying structure in 3D space. 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 talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out a few different strategies for constructing legs. 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 too.

When adding lineweight try to follow the guidance from this video and reserve it as a finishing touch for clarifying overlaps between forms, limiting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. When additional lineweight becomes more widespread such as on this ladybug it tends to take what were once smooth confident lines and make them wobbly or scratchy, which is not what we aim for with the principles of markmaking.

The last thing I wanted to mention was the approach for texture and detail, once the construction phase is complete. Your Bumblebee drawing is very pretty, but you seem to be filling in large areas with solid black to mimic the yellow and black colour pattern we see on this type of critter. In effect, sometimes you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

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. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

Before we wrap this up I see you requested advice for assessing proportions and positioning the various parts more realistically. There are several methods for accurately measuring proportions, but unfortunately most of them encourage assessing the reference in two dimensions, which can be counterproductive to our goal of getting students to think about their constructions in three dimensions so it isn’t something we go into very much in this course. Always treat the reference image as a source of information - something you observe carefully and frequently to apply that information as well as you can, but not as the end-all be-all of what you're trying to draw. So, if you deviate from it despite your best efforts, that's not actually a problem as far as the course is concerned. What matters most of all is that you hold to the 3D structure you're building up, and that you do not undermine its solidity under any circumstances. If that means the end result not matching up perfectly in some ways with your reference, that's fine.

I should say that in regards to the proportion thing, it's both important and less important than you might expect. At the end of the day, observing our reference carefully and frequently will help make our drawings more realistic in a lot of ways - proportion only being one of them. It comes down to picking up on some of the more nuanced, subtler elements that play a role in an object, being able to identify the major structural elements, and then the smaller forms that may be attached after that, gradually whittling down from big to small, simple to complex.

All right, I think that should cover it. Overall you’re doing a good job and your spatial reasoning skills appear to be developing well. I've outlined some things to keep in mind, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete, just be sure to actively tackle these points as you handle your animals. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid).

Hello i_hate_drawabox, thank you for completing your revisions as requested.

These do indeed look more correct, good work.

I can see a concerted effort to address the various points called out in my initial critique, and there is a fair bit of growth occurring across this set of pages.

You’re being much more consistent about building things up in 3D, and making correct use of the sausage method of leg construction. I can see that you were working towards using the head construction method I directed you to, and your final head construction, the squirrel, is very well done. I’ll be marking this as complete, but before we wrap this up I have a few little pointers that I hope will help you when practising these constructional exercises in future.

• On your feline and canine constructions it looks like you tried to cut back inside the silhouette of the torso sausage along its underside. Understandable, as I’m aware Uncomfortable does this in the lesson intro video, but instead of undermining the solidity of the torso in this manner, we can construct an animal with a narrow “waist” by adjusting the size and tilt of the pelvic mass, as shown with this dog construction.

• You appear to be drawing two circuits around some of your sausage forms. We insist on students drawing around ellipses two full times because this leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions, and helps to execute them smoothly. As sausage forms require a different series of motions to draw, completing two circuits isn’t particularly helpful, and can lead to accidentality drawing an ellipse instead.

• Something that can help when dealing with eyes, is to construct each eyelid as a mass, as shown here. This pushes the idea of them wrapping around the eyeball in 3D space, more than drawing the eyelids as lines.

Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Hello Diniarcm, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you’re doing pretty well with your linework in this exercise. There are a few places where it looks like you had a second go at a line you had already drawn, but for the most part your lines are smooth, clear, and confident.

Most of your forms are simple enough to feel solid, which is a good start, but on the second page in particular you’re missing an important point from the first paragraph of the exercise instructions.

"It requires a grasp of the weight of these sausage forms, and how they might slump and sag where that weight is not supported."

If you take a look here you’ll see I’ve called out a few places where your forms appear unsupported, making them feel stiff and weightless. Think about these forms as being soft and heavy for this exercise, like well filled water balloons.

Another thing I want you to keep in mind is that for this exercise you should always be placing forms at the top of your pile - don't sneak them in underneath as you did along the largest form in the pile, because there's no way to have the sausages on top respond to a newly added presence, given that they've already been drawn.

Another point (which Tofu advised you of back in your lesson 2 feedback) is to draw through and complete your forms wherever possible, currently you cut them off where the pass behind one another, which allows us to bypass thinking through how the entire form sits in 3D space. Rewatch the video demonstration for this exercise to see an example of how to do it. Once all the forms are in place we can always clarify which ones are in front by using a little bit of additional line weight to localised areas where overlaps occur.

You’re doing really well at pushing your shadows boldly so that they are projected onto the surfaces below. Remember to keep a single consistent light source in mind for any give pile. I’ve marked with red here where two sections of shadow are being cast in completely different directions to all the others, which gives the impression that the light source is moving around, confusing the viewer and undermining their suspension of disbelief. You’re also skipping some of the shadows that should be projected onto the ground plane, making it unclear how the pile s supposed to be supported, giving the feeling of the pile floating around.

Moving on to your animal constructions, the actual construction process is coming along quite well, but you’re running into a pretty significant issue which has been called out several times in your various previous critiques.

This issue is that you’re not adhering to the principles of markmaking consistently, which you should be striving to follow throughout this course. You sometimes chicken scratch your lines, or go back over them without a clear purpose, breaking the first principle of markmaking. Some pages are a bit better than others, but the issue is present on all of them, and there is no trajectory of improvement across the set. If we look at this frog from near the end of the set, it looks like you went back over a lot of those lines. I went over the problems this causes and how to address it in quite some detail in your lesson 4 feedback, and when I marked your revisions as complete I made it clear that this is something you needed to keep working on and stay on top of.

This issue is not about a lack of ability, your organic intersections clearly show that you are entirely capable of ghosting your lines and sticking to the principles of markmaking. This is about the choices you make. We need you to choose to ghost every line before you draw it, and it is clear in your constructions that this is only happening intermittently.

There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. The 20-30 minutes you seem to spend on each construction isn’t entirely unfeasible, but it is not unusual for students to spend and hour (or more) on one of these constructions, and given the amount of texture and detail on some of these pages it is pretty clear that you weren’t giving each individual mark as much time as was really required. As these exercises become more demanding and require more lines/forms it is not all that uncommon for students to slip into investing less time into each individual mark. As discussed here in the ghosted planes exercise that approach is incorrect. No matter how many lines you need to draw to complete the exercise, every one must be done intentionally using the planning and preparation stages of the ghosting method to ensure it is the result of a conscious decision. This is of course very tedious, but it is part of what makes these exercises effective as a learning tool.

As for space, you may recall this piece of advice. “The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.”

This is obviously not the approach you used throughout the set. None of your constructions use more than half the space available to them and some like this one are absurdly tiny, with tons of blank unused space around them. Drawing so much smaller than the space on the page allows makes your job unnecessarily difficult, and exacerbates your linework issues.

My previous instruction “Fill up the space on the page. I recommend you do this by drawing larger, which will make drawing smooth confident lines and fully constructing your forms easier.” is a fairly simple one, and again, not a problem with skill, but in the decisions you make. Some people do naturally feel more comfortable drawing smaller, but exercising a conscious choice to draw larger does get easier with practice.

Moving on, on the whole you’re doing a good job at following the construction process, and I’m quite pleased with your progress in building things up in 3D space.

When you lay out the major masses for your core construction, remember that the ribcage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso, as introduced here. You tend to draw it as a sphere, so sometimes it is slightly too short. Also, don’t forget to construct a simple tube for the neck. You usually do this well, but it looks like you skipped this step on the rhinos, and as I’ve called out with red here jumping straight into a wobbly complex form makes it more difficult to understand how it is supposed to sit in 3D space, so it is more likely to feel flat.

On the same image I noted in blue a few spots where you took a quick action in 2D space by extending off existing forms with partial shapes. Your work generally demonstrates a good understanding of how to build up your constructions using complete new forms and establishing specific 3D relationships between them, but just in case, here are a couple of amendments for the foot and 2D additions under the neck and belly.

Speaking of feet, as a bit of a bonus I’d like you to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between the different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define those edges themselves - to lay down a structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. I think you may have had similar ideas in mind for some of your feet, but the linework is so cramped it is sometimes hard to tell.

Also, if you run into a situation where the feet obscured in the reference, a good strategy is to find another reference of the same species where the feet are visible and use that information to help you fill in the missing pieces, instead of amputating the feet off your construction.

The next point I wanted to talk about is additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses liberally throughout your constructions, and in some cases their design is coming along well. If we come back to this rhino you’ll see I’ve traced over with green an example of a mass that I think was well done. Here you’ve clearly thought about how the mass would wrap around the existing structures of the torso, thigh, and red additional mass, and it feels convincing and solid.

One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.

Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.

I think you’re off to a great start at building upon your legs with 3D forms to develop the specific character of the leg in question. It is not uncommon for students to leave the legs at the simple sausage stage, so it is really nice to see you taking your leg constructions as far as you can. I noticed a lot of these additions focus primarily on forms that actually impact the silhouette of the overall leg, but there's value in exploring the forms that exist "internally" within that silhouette - like the missing puzzle piece that helps to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. Here is an example of what I mean, on another student's work. Uncomfortable has blocked out masses along the leg there, and included the one fitting in between them all, even though it doesn't influence the silhouette. This way of thinking - about the inside of your structures, and fleshing out information that isn't just noticeable from one angle, but really exploring the construction in its entirety, will help you yet further push the value of these constructional exercises as puzzles.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, and how Uncomfortable is finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here in this informal head demo.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eye sockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.

• This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.

• We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eye socket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. Once again drawing your constructions larger will make it easier to follow. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but as shown in in this rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Unfortunately I am going to need to assign some revisions for you to tackle the points called out here. Your constructions are coming along fairly well, so I’ll only be asking for 2 pages to encourage you to take your time and ghost all your lines. I strongly recommend that you draw bigger to make better use of the space available on the page, and make it easier to engage your whole arm and draw smooth confident lines. Please don’t add texture to these pages, I don’t want to accidentality interpret fur texture as scratchy linework.

Please complete the following:

2 pages of organic intersections.

2 pages of animal constructions.

Hello Ivan, welcome back.

It is perfectly fine, and not all that uncommon, to take a break from the course and a couple of months isn’t long enough to cause any problems. When students take a year or more away we recommend rereading (but not redoing) all the previous lessons up to the point where they left off, to rerfesh their memory and ensure they’re up to date with any changes which may have been made to the lessons during that time.

Starting with your organic forms, you’ve done a much better job of sticking to simple sausage forms this time. The feedback points for hooking your contour curves and shifting their degree were aimed at the organic forms exercise, rather than your insect constructions, which may be the source of your confusion. You’ve done a good job of applying both points here.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I see you have quite a few questions.

• 1 While it is entirely possible to do this correctly in 3D space, I'm advising students not to work subtractively at all when building up organic structures within this course, just because students tend to be prone to doing it wrong without realizing, and then reinforcing 2D thinking instead. Sticking to working additively in 3D space will on the other hand be a lot harder to do wrong (as long as you're somewhat mindful of what you're doing), and will ultimately reinforce that 3D thinking and eventually help you subtract more effectively as well. For your example of a ladybird, this can be done by starting with a smaller ball-like form for the abdomen, and then once it is in place constructing additional forms for the wing casings wrapping around it.

• 2 Do not start over, redoing work is considered grinding, and if you start over every time you feel you’ve made a mistake, you might get burnt out before you finish a construction, which is the last thing anyone wants. Make sure you invest as much time as you need into observing your reference and planning each form before drawing it, so its size and placement is estimated to the best of your current ability. We inevitably draw things differently from how we intend, due to us not being robots who can make every mark perfectly each time. So, you will inevitably deviate from your reference image. Always treat the reference image as a source of information - something you observe carefully and frequently to apply that information as well as you can, but not as the end-all be-all of what you're trying to draw. So, if you deviate from it despite your best efforts, that's not actually a problem as far as the course is concerned. What matters most of all is that you hold to the 3D structure you're building up, and that you do not undermine its solidity under any circumstances. If that means the end result not matching up perfectly in some ways with your reference, that's fine.

• 3 Use the outer line of the ellipses, even if you feel like it was the least accurate one. See the previous point for why. So for example with the abdomen of your mosquito, you did a lovely job of using complete additional forms to construct the segmentation, but by constructing them around the inner line of your initial ellipse you left a stray line outside the construction, which does undermine its solidity somewhat.

• 4 Yes, the solution here is to draw bigger. Doing so will give you more room to think through the spatial reasoning challenges presented by these constructional exercises, as well as making it easier to engage the whole arm and draw from the shoulder. The jumping spider in particular has loads of blank empty space around it that could have been used for drawing larger. Neither of the areas you noted look particularly confusing to me (they’re pretty well constructed) although parsing through those overlapping lines is something that gets easier with practice and at this point I’ve analysed thousands of constructions. Stick with it, even if drawing your lines boldly and drawing large feels uncomfortable. Picking and choosing which instructions to follow to make things feel easier for you right now reduces the effectiveness of the exercises, so you’ll get less out of them in the long run, as well as getting another slap on the wrist from the TA in your next critique (which is something we’d like to avoid).

Okay, In addressing your various questions I think we’ve covered most of the points I wanted to talk about for your insect constructions.

There are just a couple of other points, which I’ve noted here on your mosquto.

• You’re doing much better at sticking to sausage forms for your leg armatures. Aim to have a healthy overlap at the joints (which you usually do) so you can apply a contour line to show how the forms penetrate one another in 3D space. Drawing the forms next to one another gives a weaker connection between them. Also, remember to add complete 3D forms to the legs when you want to modify them. Currently you’re adding partial shapes, which is the mistake in the lower set of these diagrams. All of this should be considerably easier to apply to animal’s legs in the next lesson, as they tend to be wider than insect legs, so the construction is less fiddly.

• In cases where a form is partially visible, such as the leg sections I’ve drawn over with red, I’d recommend constructing them fully instead of cutting them off. This will ensure that the visible sections line up properly and feel like part of the same strucutre. This also helps to make sure that we fully understand how the whole form sits in space. Sometimes when students only draw the visible sections they can switch back to thinking in 2D, copying the visible 2D shapes from the reference over onto their 2D piece of paper.

These pages show a good understanding of how your constructions sit in 3D space and I think you’re ready to tackle the next lesson. Please make sure you refer to this feedback as you move forwards, the points discussed here will continue to apply to animal constructions.

Hello Carpediem, 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, and drawing the forms themselves with smooth confident lines, well done.

Looking at the contour curves there are a few stiff hesitant lines creeping in. Remember as introduced here in the principles of markmaking, that we want to be prioritising a smooth confident stroke over accuracy, for all exercises in this course.

There are a few other things that you should keep in mind for your contour curves.

• Aim to have each curve aligned so that is is perpendicular to the length of the form. This means it should be cut into to symmetrical halves by the central flow line. If we look at this form for example, the curves are fairly well aligned at the lower end, but the top end has a few consecutive curves that are significantly misaligned which suggests you may have forgotten about this requirement.

• Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines 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. If you're unsure as to why that is, review the Lesson 1 ellipses video. You can also see a good example of how the degree of contour curves change in this album of photos of a slinky.

• On this form I also noticed that you’d placed a small contour ellipse on the tip of the form that faces away from the viewer. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But, in this case if the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.

Moving on to your insect constructions something that stood out right away with this wasp, this grasshopper, this fly and this beetle is that you’ve cut off some of your major foundational forms where they overlap instead of constructing them fully. This is the same mistake ThatOneMushroomGuy called out previously on your plants here and here, so it seems you may have misunderstood the issue he was identifying.

Please take another look at this section of the lesson intro page where Uncomfortable discusses the importance of working with solid forms. Notice with the left example, that where the forms overlap, each one has been drawn in its entirety, so that we can fully understand how they sit in 3D space. This is something you applied correctly when drawing along with the demos for your louse and housefly, but it is worth discussing why drawing through the forms is necessary for these exercises.

I’d like you to examine these notes on your grasshopper Where I’ve traced over your first major forms for the head, thorax and abdomen, then separated them to see if they stand up as solid 3D forms in their own right. You’ve done a good job with the head, by starting with an ellipse we can easily perceive this as a ball-like structure. Notice how the blue shapes of the thorax and abdomen feel very flat by comparison, by leaving the forms incomplete, it is unclear where the edge of the form is supposed to be. The thorax is also skipping ahead into too much complexity. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer, and more importantly you, to understand how it is supposed to sit in 3D space, so the more likely it is to feel flat. To avoid this problem, as discussed back here in lesson 2 the process we use for constructional drawing hinges on breaking the subject into the simplest forms possible, then gradually rebuilding it on the page by adding complexity bit by bit, in successive passes. I’ve shown how to get started with your grasshopper, sticking to simple forms for the thorax and abdomen, and drawing them in their entirety. Once in place we can use a contour line to show how the forms penetrate one another in 3D space, welding them together like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise.

The next point I need to talk about relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, once those first simple forms are established, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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 your grasshopper in red an example where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. 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 image 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 talk about is leg construction. It looks like you’ve made an effort to stick with the sausage method, which is a great start. There’s a lot of variation in how closely you stuck to the characteristics of sausage forms for your legs, on some pages such as this mantis a lot of them are quite deformed. It doesn’t look like this was intentional, so my advice for you here is to take your time going through the planning and preparation stages of the ghosting method to ensure that all your thinking is done before the pen touches the page, and that you’ve built up some temporary muscle memory by ghosting the mark you intend do make.

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 too.

If we circle back to this grasshopper for a moment you’ll see I’ve called out a couple of examples where it looks like you redrew lines or forms, presumably to make corrections. In ending up with different lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing.

Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasizes the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to execute each mark.

The last point I need to talk about is the optional application of texture, once the construction phase is complete. Looking at this spider I think you may have underestimated how much time and attention texture requires, because the darker area at the front of the abdomen is relying on randomness, which is a big no-no. This beetle has detail which appears more deliberate and intentional, and the texture on the abdomen is heading in the right direction. On the head and thorax you’ve used hatching to create form shading which is a perfectly valid technique for drawing in general, but not part of how we tackle texture in this course.

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. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

All right, there’s a lot of information here, so I think it is going to be in your best interests to complete some additional pages to address the points I have discussed. Please complete 3 pages of insect/arachnid constructions.

Hello Chy, congrats on tackling the insect and arachnid constructions.

I see you had some comments and questions, so let’s take a look at those before we get to the meat of the critique.

1- Whoops! As it is a mistake that only affects a single page it isn’t a big problem.

2- When assessing these constructions I look to see if they feel solid and believable in their own right, so if they don’t match the reference perfectly that is usually okay. We treat the reference as a source of information, rather than something to replicate at all costs. Sometimes part of an insect or animal is obscured in the reference (it is very common with animal feet in the next lesson) and when this happens a good strategy is to find another reference of the same species where that part is more clearly visible, and use that information to help fill in the missing pieces.

3- Sometimes. If you realise you’ve made a piece of the construction too small you can add another 3D form to it to bulk it out a bit, such as being generous with the volume of segmentation to build upon an undersized abdomen.

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of your linework looks smooth and confident, nicely done.

I noticed with this form that you’d added a small contour ellipse to the end of the form that faces away from the viewer, and omitted the ellipse that should be present on the near end. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this diagram of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away. Also don’t forget to draw through the ellipses, even when they’re small.

Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines 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. If you're unsure as to why that is, review the Lesson 1 ellipses video. You can also see a good example of how to vary your contour curves in the diagram linked in the previous paragraph.

Also, don’t forget to hook your contour curves around the far side of the forms a little bit. This helps to ensure that their curvature accelerates correctly as they approach the edge of the form. If we look at this form for example, some of the contour lines aren’t quite turning enough.

Moving on to your insect constructions this is a really solid submission. You’re doing a good job of starting with simple forms that can easily be perceived as three dimensional, and patiently building things up in stages, while clearly thinking about how all these elements are supposed to fit together in 3D space. There’s a fair bit of growth occurring across the set, so I can see that your spatial reasoning skills are developing nicely. Overall you’re on the right track, and I’ve got just a couple of pointers for you to keep in mind as you continue forwards.

For the first point, I think it is best to quote something ThatOneMushroomGuy mentioned back in your lesson 3 feedback:

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.

Fortunately you don’t appear to cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn very often. I did notice one example, which I’ve marked in red on your cat faced spider. Sometimes this can happen accidentally, when there is a gap between lines passing around an ellipse (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 does 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 the same image I also marked in blue some places where it looks like 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’re already using this approach a lot throughout your submission, which is fantastic, and I’ve called out some good examples with green on your spider. I’ll go ahead and share a couple of examples of this in practice which you may find helpful.

• beetle horn demo

• 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 talk about is leg construction. I’m happy to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method, and you’re pretty successful at sticking to the properties of simple sausage forms for your leg armatures. There are a few places where it looks like the contour line at each joint may be missing. These little contour lines might seem insignificant, but they are a very useful tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction, as we use them to show how the forms penetrate one another in 3D space, much like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise back in lesson 2.

It is great to see that you’ve taken a swing at building onto your sausage armatures quite frequently, adding the sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that you observe in these structures, arriving at a more characteristic representation of the leg in question than what can be achieved with the sausages alone. I have some diagrams to share with you that I hope will help you to build onto your leg structures “in 3D” more consistently as you move forwards.

• These diagrams show how we can add to the construction with complete 3D forms instead of flat shapes and one-off lines.

• This diagram shows how instead of fully engulfing an existing form within a new one, we can establish a clearer relationship between the existing form and the new addition by breaking it into two pieces.

• This ant leg demo shows how we can take the sausage method and push it further, adding all kinds of lumps bumps and spikes to the sausage armature.

• I’d also like to share this dog leg demo with you, which shows how the sausage method can be applied to animal legs. This is important, as we’d like you to continue to stick with the sausage method of leg construction when tackling your animals in the next lesson.

Alrighty, your constructions are coming along really well, and I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete. Keep up the good work.