DIO

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

Starting with your organic forms, on the second page you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, with a few more irregularities (such as ends of different sizes, or bloated middles) being present on the first page.

You’re keeping your linework smooth and confident here, which is great. Keep striving to have your contour curves fit snugly against the sides of the forms, there are a few that are floating inside the form, or drifting outside their bounds.

I can see that you’re experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves, and you’re off to a good start. 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, these are looking very strong. You’ve clearly put a lot of though into how the forms you draw exist not just as shapes on the page, but as solid forms in 3D space. You’re often fitting the various pieces of your constructions together specific relationships, such as contour lines where they intersect, helping to actively reinforce the 3D illusion as you build complexity, which is excellent.

Normally as part of lesson 4 critiques I introduce students to the following rule to help to only take actions “in 3D.”

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.

Now, you’re already sticking to this rule remarkably well, and checking your previous submission I see that ThatOneMushroomGuy already brought it up in your lesson 3 feedback.

The only places I spotted where you had cut back into the silhouette forms you had already drawn are probably accidental, and came down to the fact that there would be gaps between the lines of your ellipses (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. I’ve marked with red a couple of instances of this which I noticed on your beetle. 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.

On the same image I marked in blue 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. Often these happen where you had overlapping forms and cut them off, only drawing the visible sections. I encourage you to “draw through” and complete your forms where possible, so you can establish how they fit together in 3D space.

So, 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.

I noted on your beetle in green an example where you’re already applying this tactic really well to build the horn onto the existing construction, but I’ll go ahead and share a couple of examples of this in practice which you might find useful.

- 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. It looks like you were striving to use the sausage method for the majority of your leg constructions, as well as experimenting with some other strategies, particularly for the limb segments furthest from the bodies. 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, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

The last thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly. 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.

Okay I think that covers it. You’ve done a fantastic job and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, keep up the good work.

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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

I can see you’ve started experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves, just 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, your work is honestly excellent, and there isn’t much to criticise. You’re making good use of the techniques shown in the demos, starting with simple solid forms and gradually building up complexity piece by piece. You’re also establishing specific relationships between the new additions and the existing structures, which is helping your constructions feel solid and believable. You’re demonstrating a strong understanding of how your forms exist in space and fit together in 3D, especially where you’re wrapping various pieces of segmentation around the curving surfaces of the underlying ball forms.

I have a couple of points to talk about that should help you get even more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

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 cut back inside your forms’ silhouettes very much at all. I think the spots where I’m seeing this are accidental, and come 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. I’ve marked some of these in red on your bee. 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.

On the same image I marked in blue an area on the leg 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.

Instead, (as you’re already doing in a lot of places) 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 other point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I’m happy to see that you’ve stuck to the specifics of the sausage method of leg construction throughout the set, and are exploring building onto these sausage armatures with additional forms to arrive at a more characteristic representation of the specific leg in question.

When it comes to building onto your initial sausage chains, there are some strategies that work better than others. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, (as we see on the hind leg of this cricket,) 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. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, 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.

We can see an example of how this method can be pushed even further in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

All right, you’ve done a great job so I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

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

Starting with your organic forms you appear to be drawing these with confidence, leading to smooth lines, which is great to see.

Some of your forms are sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, but you also have some with a bit of pinching or bulging through the midsection, or ends of different sizes, so make sure you keep striving to stick to the simple properties of two equally sized balls connected by a bendy tube of consistent width when practising these in future.

You’re doing a great job of varying the degree of your contour curves, which is an aspect of this exercise that is often overlooked.

I notice sometimes you place an ellipse on an end of the form that the contour curves tell us is facing 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, your work is coming together very well. You’re doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms, and gradually building complexity piece by piece. In many places you’re establishing clear 3D relationships between the various pieces as you fit them together, which is helping to reinforce the 3D illusion of the constructions as a whole.

You’re demonstrating a strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space, and I have just a couple of points to cover that I hope will help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these is about how to make sure we build up the construction “in 3D” more consistently.

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 beetle in red 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.

On the same image I marked in blue an example where it looks 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.

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.

I noted on your beetle a couple of places where you’re already applying this tactic really well to build spikes onto the existing construction, but I’ll go ahead and share a couple of examples of this in practice which you might find useful.

- 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 second point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were making an effort to use the sausage method on the majority of your pages. The sausage method is quite specific about where to place the contour curves, and I’ve placed some notes on your beetle which I hope will help you when using this method in future. By reinforcing each joint with a contour curve to show how the two forms intersect, we make adding stand-alone contour lines to individual sausage forms unnecessary. Looking through the set, I do see places where the contour curves are applied correctly, just keep working on doing so consistently as you move forward.

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, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

I should mention briefly that I see your application of texture has improved from your lesson 3 work, as you are less reliant on filling in large areas in black, and more focused on implying small textural forms running along an object’s surface by drawing the little shadows that they cast, keep up the good work.

Okay, that should cover it. I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you work through the next lesson, they will apply to animal constructions too.

Hello Motheronion, thank you for responding with your revisions.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you’re doing a good job fitting them snugly against the sides of the form, and hooking them around so that their curvature accelerates as they reach the edges of the form.

I can see you’re experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves, which is great. 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 onto your insect constructions, it is good to see you sticking more closely to sausage forms for your leg armatures, and you’re showing a good understanding of how to apply a contour curve at the joints to show how the forms intersect- they’re not always present, but the ones that are there are done well. I’m happy to see that you’re being quite conscientious about “drawing through” and completing your forms where they overlap, so you can connect them together in 3D space, good work.

You’re still a bit prone to altering the silhouettes of forms that you have already drawn, and I’ve marked in red some places where it looks like you’d cut back inside forms you had already drawn on all 3 pages in this album. Most of these alterations are fairly small, and I think it often comes down to two things.

• Sometimes where there is a gap between passes around your ellipses, you’ll choose the inner line as the silhouette of the ball form you’re constructing, leaving stray lines outside the construction. We want to use the outer line of ellipses as the form’s silhouette, to avoid accidentally cutting back inside them.

• You seem to be starting your constructions off with fainter lines, then coming back at a later stage to trace over the lines you want to keep visible. This causes alterations to the form’s silhouettes, sometimes accidentally, where the initially smooth confident lines get wobblier as you draw over them, or sometimes as result of a more deliberate attempt to refine the forms as you go. Tracing back over the visible parts of the construction tends to switch a student’s focus from working in 3D and drawing complete forms, back to drawing individual lines and thinking about how they cross the flat 2D surface of the piece of paper. Starting with faint lines can also lead to students as treating their first foundational forms as less solid, or less real, than the later stages of construction, and can exacerbate the tendency to undermine their solidity by treating them as a rough guide. I strongly encourage you to maintain a more consistent line thickness through the various stages of construction, and at each step only add the parts that change rather than completely redrawing forms. Once you’ve put a form on the page, that’s essentially a problem you’ve solved. You don’t need to solve it again by redrawing it. Remember additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps, as discussed in the lesson 1 video I shared with you previously.

Now, all in all, you’re doing pretty well. I can see your spatial reasoning skills developing nicely and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please keep working on the points discussed here as you tackle your animal constructions, where they will continue to be just as relevant.

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

Human anatomy isn’t something we cover in this course, or something I’ve studied in detail myself. There are a lot of top quality anatomy courses available with our sponsors at New Masters Academy, and there’s a banner at the top of the page if you’d like to check them out. We also have an active Discord community, with a figure drawing channel, where you’re welcome to ask for advice and support. Many of our community members have studied anatomy with Proko, who has a free version of his course available on YouTube. I hope that gives you a few ideas of where you might learn human anatomy.

Starting with your organic intersections, this page is the stronger of the two, I can see that you’re thinking about how gravity will affect your forms, and piling them up in a manner that helps them to feel stable and supported. On the other page your forms appear to float in space. Something that will help you to establish more clearly how the pile is supported as a whole, is to include the shadows cast by the forms onto the ground plane.

It is good to see that you’re keeping a consistent light source in mind for each pile. I do think you could project your shadows a little more boldly, right now some of them seem to cling to the forms like heavy line weight.

Moving on to your animal constructions, you mentioned thinking you had trouble with birds. It is not uncommon for students to feel like birds are a struggle. If the pages are done in the order that they are assigned then the birds will be some of the first pages, where you’re just starting to learn the ropes of animal constructions. I look at the set of construction pages as a whole, and analyse the work for trends, focusing the bulk of the critique on things that appear to be a consistent issue, rather than a one-off mistake.

Overall there’s quite a bit that I think you’re handling well. You’re laying out the major masses of the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis, and connecting them together in 3D space, and I’m happy to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method of leg construction for most of your pages. I can see plenty of places where you’re making an effort to build your constructions “in 3D” by constructing complete new forms where you want to add to your constructions, and establishing relationships between the various pieces.

Remember in your lesson 4 feedback we talked about the importance of giving each construction as much space and time as it needs, in order for you to be able to get as much as possible out oof each one.

You are drawing larger than your initial lesson 4 submission, but you do still tend to leave a lot of blank space on the page, and in some cases such as this page I believe this is making things more difficult for you than they really need to be. Drawing smaller than the space con the page allows makes it more difficult to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these constructions, and can exacerbate markmaking issues by making it more challenging to execute lines smoothly, using the whole arm. This becomes particularly apparent when constructing smaller elements, such as heads and feet.

As for time, there’s a sketchiness to some of your linework that suggests you may not be fully employing the ghosting method, or at least, not consistently. By going through all 3 phases of the ghosting method for every line, we make sure all our thinking is done before the pen touches the page, making each line the result of a conscious decision, drawn with clear intent. When students try to combine the thinking and the drawing all in one step, we generally see haphazard marks that don’t serve a clear purpose, or wobbly, hesitant lines where a student was thinking through the line as they drew it. We can see example of haphazard marks on the head of this shark where some of the lines have been redrawn repeatedly, making the construction messy and confusing. It is important that students make every effort to stick to the principles of markmaking throughout this course. Lines should be continuous and unbroken. If we look at the eye sockets of this cat for example, they have been drawn with broken, dashed lines, and sections of the muzzle are drawn with chicken scratch. Its possible that this might be the result of switching to drawing from the wrist for shorter lines, make sure that you continue to use your whole arm for constructional lines, only switching to the wrist for textural marks. We also want to prioritize making a smooth, confident mark. We can see examples of wobbly, hesitant lines with this additional mass on your deer construction. Long story short, to complete these constructions to the best of your current ability I think you’re going to need to invest more time into ghosting your lines more consistently, ensuring that everything you do to your construction is the result of a conscious choice, rather than the result of relying on your instincts.

When it comes to the constructional aspect of these exercises, there are 4 topics I need to talk about. Those are leg construction, foot construction, additional masses, and head construction.

Leg Construction

It is great to see that you’ve made an effort to stick with the sausage method for most of your leg constructions, and that you usually remember to apply a contour line at each joint. The orientation of these contour lines is significant, as they show how the two sausage forms interpenetrate, much like how we used contour lines to define the intersections between forms in the form intersections exercise from lesson 2. They’re on the right track on this rhino but on your elephant they’re running vertically, making the relationship between the sausage forms a little confusing.

Something else I noticed with your legs is that you seem to leave them at the simple sausage stage, without attempting to build any additional forms onto these armatures. 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, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo.

Foot Construction

I noticed a couple of pages, such as your hybrid and your hippo, where you omitted some of the feet. I’m guessing what happened is that the feet were obscured in the reference, so you weren’t sure how to draw them. If you encounter a similar situation in future I recommend searching for a second reference of that species, where the feet are visible, and using that information to help you to construct the missing pieces.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

Additional Masses

It is good to see that you’ve explored building onto many of your constructions with additional masses. Something to remember, is that each mass must have its own, fully enclosed silhouette. I noticed some places such as here on this hippo where you’d added to the construction with a one-off line, then tried to make it feel 3D by adding some contour lines. Another thing to note in regards to these additional masses is that adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasize the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships, and they also suffer from diminishing returns where a bunch may not be any more impactful than just one.

Instead, we focus on making these masses feel 3D by leveraging purposeful design of the masses' silhouettes. 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.

So, here I’ve applied this logic to the masses on your hippo. The additions on the head and neck now have their own complete, fully enclosed silhouettes. I’ve included a thigh mass, with the blue ellipse, where the hind leg connects to the side of the body. This is very similar to the idea of the shoulder mass, which you had constructed successfully for the front leg. These bulky shoulder and thigh masses make very useful protrusions which we can use to help anchor additional masses to the construction. Notice with the additional mass on top of the rump, that I’ve pulled it down around the side of the torso and pressed it against the top of the thigh, creating a specific inward curve where the forms meet. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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. 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.

Something that stood out with the head of your hippo, and to a lesser extent with this cat was that you’d asserted the cranial ball and eye sockets as facing somewhat to the left, at a three-quarter angle, then built the muzzle facing directly towards the viewer. This inconsistency gives the impression that the head is bending in space, or facing different directions simultaneously. Carefully observe which way the head is tilting before you start constructing the features, then stick to that direction consistently for the whole head.

As there are a number of areas where I'd like you to demonstrate your understanding, I will need to assign some revisions. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark using the ghosting method), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.

No problem. Sounds good, good luck!

Hello KingCactus, thank you for replying with your revisions.

All righty, you’re sticking much more closely to sausage forms for your leg constructions, and I’m happy to see you establishing how they fit together by applying a contour curve at the joints. I think you've made a good start with building onto your sausage armatures with additional forms but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these 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.

You’re making progress with the design of your additional masses. On the first couple of constructions It looks like you were struggling to come out of the tendency to draw rounded blobs, but I do see you thinking through how to establish relationships between your additional masses and the existing structures as you went through the set. I think there are 2 main points I’d like you to keep in mind when designing additional masses in future.

• We want all complexity in the silhouette of an additional mass to be a direct result of interacting with the structures that are already present in the construction. In blue I’ve circled a few places where you appear to be introducing arbitrary corners to the additional masses on this goat. I’ve made a few adjustments to these masses here. On the front leg and under the tummy, the corners were just a bit offset, and I’ve moved them to the edge of the underlying form. I also took the opportunity to tuck the purple mass under the chest between the front legs, using an inward curve where it passes underneath the shoulder. Towards the rump, I’ve made your elliptical thigh mass larger (in blue) to give the additional masses something to press against.

• Once you have drawn an additional mass, it becomes part of the “existing structure” and any more masses you draw on top of it should wrap around it in 3D space. I noticed with the masses along the back of your leopard that the masses wrap around the torso sausage nicely, but ignore one another. Take another look at the stag draw over form the initial critique. The red masses were drawn first, then when the purple masses were added, they wrap around the existing red ones, rather than passing through them.

I can see that you’re working towards using the head construction method shown in the informal head demo I shared with you. Your gazelle is probably the closest out of the set, notice how you’ve drawn those pentagonal eye sockets with a point facing down, and how that makes a nice wedge shape to fit the base of the muzzle snugly against. On most of your other pages you’d got the pentagonal eye socket upside down, making it more difficult to fit the pieces of the head construction together like a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

When adding cast shadows, keep in mind that for a cast shadow to exist, there must be both a form to cast a shadow and another surface to receive it. If you’re drawing a shadow on the form where the surface faces away from the light, that’s a form shadow. You can find an explanation on the difference between form shadows and cast shadows in this video. Remember to keep a single, consistent light source in mind when designing any shadows you wish to add. I noticed on the feet of the leopard you’d added shadows to both sides, giving the impression that the light source is moving around.

All right, I think that should cover it. I’ve outlined a few things for you to keep in mind when practising these constructional exercises in future, but you’re making good progress and I’m happy to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Hello Byte5115, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections your forms are reasonably well done, you’re keeping them simple which helps them to feel solid, and you’re capturing how they slump over one another with a sense of weight.

My main concern with this exercise is your shadows, which are clinging to the forms like lineweight, and appear to have been hastily applied by scribbling, instead of by outlining the shape of the shadow and then carefully filling it in. You can see Uncomfortable demonstrating this process in the video that accompanies this exercise.

On a more minor note, remember to draw around the small ellipses on the tips of the forms 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page,which we ask students to do for every ellipse freehanded in this course, as introduced here.

Moving on to your animal constructions, 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. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. I strongly recommend that you stick to one construction per page and draw it big enough to make use of the space available, as I believe this will make it easier for you to tackle the other issues I’m about to call out.

In all honesty, it looks like you may be underestimating how much time these constructional exercises require, and the biggest issue comes down to your markmaking. It looks like you’re not using the ghosting method (or at least, not fully, correctly, or consistently) as there are a lot of places where your lines are loose and sketchy, wobbly, or chicken scratchy. Every effort must be made to adhere to the principles of markmaking throughout this course. By going through all 3 phases of the ghosting method for every line, we force ourselves to be very intentional with every line we draw. By making sure each mark we draw in this course is the result of a conscious decision, we eventually drill these concepts down to a subconscious level and train our instincts, so that when we want to rely on our instincts and sketch more loosely and freely outside of the exercises we do here, we can achieve a stronger result. If we try to rely on our instincts to complete the exercises, we won’t train them, we just end up with a mess. I can see from some of your larger ellipses and torso sausages that you can draw smooth, continuous lines, and maintain tight, specific relationships between them, but we really need you to be doing this consistently across the whole construction.

The markmaking issues have been called out several times before in the various rounds of feedback on your previous submissions, and you have been invited to ask questions if anything said to you in a critique is unclear or confusing. In cases where a student is repeatedly missing instructions or having extensive difficulty in applying things that have been called out several times already, we often hit the limit on how much we're able to help and will notify a student that we've gone beyond what we're able to, and recommend instead that they look for another course that may be able to commit more resources to them. I don’t think we’ve hit that limit yet, but we do need you to do more to ensure that you apply the feedback you have been given.

Another point that stands out as having been called out multiple times before is leg construction, where you’re mostly constructing your legs using ellipses, which results in them being too stiff. The characteristics of sausage forms are shown in the sausage method diagram and you demonstrated in your last round of lesson 4 revisions that you can construct these forms quite well, as long as you keep these specific properties consciously in mind. I’d like you to reread your lesson 4 feedback for the information you need on leg construction, as well as a more thorough explanation on why it is so important to stick to the principles of markmaking.

One thing I do see that you’ve applied really well from previous feedback, is that you’ve respected the solidity of your forms by avoiding cutting back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, which does help your constructions to feel 3D.

Continuing down to feet, I think you may find it helpful to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

In lesson 4 we talked about how to use complete new forms to build onto our existing structures, and the importance of establishing how the pieces connect together in 3D space. In lesson 5 we introduce the tool of additional masses to help students to design their additional forms in a way that feels solid and believable. I’m happy to see that you’ve explored using additional masses to build onto a number of your constructions, though as noted here you have a tendency to leave these forms incomplete. We want each additional form to have its own, complete, fully enclosed silhouette.

Another point I noticed with your additional masses is that you often pile a ton of additional contour curves onto them, possibly to try to make them feel more 3D. Unfortunately this kind of standalone contour curve running along the surface of a single form only really helps to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3D and clarify it. They don’t fix the problem at hand, which is the lack of clear 3D relationship between the existing structures and the new form. This is something we aim to achieve by clear, intentional design of the mass’ silhouette.

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.

With this in mind I’ve redrawn some of the masses on your camel, notice how every form has a fully enclosed silhouette, and I haven’t used additional contour lines as a cure-all to make them feel 3D. The red mass (which was drawn first) has been pulled down around the side of the body, and pressed against the top of the protruding shoulder mass, producing a specific corner and inward curve. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. Once the red mass is on the page it becomes part of the “existing structure.” The purple mass was added next, notice how it wraps around the red one in 3D, rather than being cut off where they overlap. Finally the green masses were added. With the large mass under the belly I moved the sharp corners from arbitrary places on the side of the torso, to the edge, where they hook around and give the impression that the additional mass is gripping the torso sausage, wrapping around its surface in 3D, rather than being pasted on like a flat sticker.

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. 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.

All right, there’s a fair bit that you’re handling quite well, in terms of starting with simple forms, and thinking about how these forms exist in 3D space. This is being undermined by the persistent markmaking issues (in places it is so messy that it is hard to tell what you were trying to do, which drastically undermines the 3D illusion) and I will be assigning some revisions for you to address the points that have been called out here. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Stick to one construction per page, making every effort to use as much of the space available as you can.

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete:

• 1 page of organic intersections

• 5 pages of animal constructions

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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are spot on. You're forms are simple enough to feel solid, and you're piling them up in a manner that has them feel stable and supported. You're generally doing a good job of showing how the forms wrap around one another in 3D space, rather than just stamping flat shapes in front of one another. You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the forms below, and appear to be keeping a consistent light source in mind.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your work is top notch. I'm happy to see that you're keeping your linework smooth, confident and purposeful, and that you've actively tackled the points discussed in your lesson 4 critique, making a clear effort to take actions on your constructions "in 3D." There's honestly not that much to criticise, but I do have a few pieces of advice that I hope will help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises in future.

I can see that you're taking steps to build your constructions up in 3D by drawing complete new forms and establishing how they connect to the existing structure with specific relationships. Just make sure you're building complete new forms wherever you want to add to the construction, as I do see the occasional spot where you'd made a quick extension with a one off line, such as this example which doesn't quite provide enough information for us to understand how it connects to the existing structure in 3D.

Your additional masses are coming along quite well, and I'm seeing places where you're doing a good job of designing them so they wrap around the existing structures in a way that feels convincing. 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.

So with that in mind I've made a few alterations to the masses on this bear. Along the legs I've taken a couple of places where it looks like you'd extended the construction with one off lines and built additional masses instead. I was very happy to see that you'd experimented with layering and overlapping your additional masses along the top of the back, and had allowed your masses to do so in 3D space. This approach is great, as it allows you to keep your masses simple, instead of trying to achieve too much with a single mass and having it fall flat. I made some fairly subtle changes to the purple and blue masses, to allow the blue mass to stay simple where it is exposed to fresh air, consisting of a an outward C curve, rather than the more complex S curve you had along the top there. With the red mass I've shown how we can introduce some specific complexity to its silhouette, by pressing it against the top of the protruding shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I'm happy to see that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction and are applying it quite effectively. I think you've made a great start with building onto your sausage armatures but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these 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.

As a quick bonus on constructing paws, 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, forms 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. This is something you've already done pretty well on some of your constructions, but we can take this a stage further by using similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

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. I can see that you're working through a similar process for some of your heads, such as the deer, but bring it all together in the way the demos shows, and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise. 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.

On a fairly minor note, one thing that can help specifically when dealing with eyes, is to draw the eyelids themselves as their own separate additional masses (one for the upper lid and another for the lower lid). This can help us better focus on how they're actually wrapping around the eyeball itself, as shown here, much moreso than trying to draw the eye lids with single lines.

All right, I think that covers it. You've done a great job and I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

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

Starting with your organic forms it looks like you’re drawing your forms with confidence, and most of your line work is smooth. You're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Occasionally one of your forms will swell through the midsection and become bloated, such as the form on the bottom right of this page, so that’s something to keep an eye on when practising this exercise in your warmups.

I can see you’re working on varying the degree of your contour lines, although it is quite subtle and could be pushed much further. 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 you’re doing a good job. You’re starting your constructions off with simple solid forms, and gradually building them up piece by piece without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given step.

I have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these 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.

For example, I've marked on your lobster in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already drawn for the abdomen. One thing I did notice is that a few 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.

On the same image I marked in blue some of the 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.

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.

To help you to take actions on your constructions in 3D I urge you to “draw through” your forms and complete them, even if they may be partially obscured in your reference image. You’re doing well with the ball forms of your head, thorax, and abdomen, but often cut off the legs where they overlap one another. By drawing these forms in their entirety you will be able to gain a stronger understanding of how they exist in 3D space, and be able to connect them together with believable relationships.

If a part of the construction won’t fit on the page, instead of running it off the edge of the page as a pair of lines which leaves the form open-ended and vague, it helps to “cap off” the form, much like we did with the branches exercise in lesson 3. I’ve shown how to do this with purple ellipses on your lobster.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I’m happy to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method of leg construction for most of your insects and are off to a good start with it.

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, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

When it comes to texture and detail, I can see that you’re putting thought into designing shadow shapes, rather than simply decorating your drawings, which is great. You do appear to be getting a bit mixed up between form shadows, which we do not include, and cast shadows, which we can include. I recommend that you rewatch this video which explains how to differentiate between the two. You can see these two kinds of shadows using the example of a sausage form in this diagram which also shows how this would apply to texture, implying small forms running along the surface of the sausage by drawing the shadows that they cast. In future please avoid filling in large areas with solid black, such as the abdomen of this ant. This doesn’t really provide the viewer with new information about the surface texture, it actually removes information by obscuring the underlying construction.

The last 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.

Let’s finish off by taking a look at the questions you had.

if there is anything I can do shading wise to communicate depth with the legs/spindly bits

We don’t really get into “shading” in this course, as outlined in this section of lesson 2. Instead we can communicate depth with texture. By being careful to mind the curvature of these forms we can show how their surfaces turn in space, helping to reinforce the illusion that they are 3D. We can also enhance the illusion of depth by using implicit markmaking to control the detail density. One more thing we can do, with legs specifically, is to deliberately flatten the far side legs by applying straight parallel hatching lines to them, as discussed in this step of the spider demo. By flattening the far side legs, we make them appear to recede, so the near side legs come forward in comparison.

I wonder if standalone contour lines are needed considering how segmented and angular bugs tend to be, a lot of the demos don't seem to rely on them, so I wasn't sure how needed they were for my constructions.

Those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it. In truth, they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line, but in practice their usefulness is somewhat limited. You were correct in refraining from using a bunch of standalone contour lines on your constructions, as it is not uncommon for students to pile them on as a cure-all for making their constructions feel more 3D. Instead there are two main tools we have at our disposal when building up our constructions with new forms, and making those forms feel solid and 3D:

• Purposeful design of the masses' silhouettes. This is the tool to use if you're adding something that wraps around the existing structure.

• A contour line more similar to those used in Lesson 2's form intersections - which defines the joint or seam between two intersecting/interpenetrating forms. This is the tool to use if you actually have forms that are being "welded" together, like how the individual sausage segments in the sausage method have their joints defined with a contour line.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are coming along well and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please refer to this critique and tackle the points discussed here as you go through the next lesson, the points I’ve covered will continue to be relevant to animal constructions.