samieee

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

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.

You're doing a good job with keeping your linework smooth and confident, and the majority of your forms are sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

I'm happy to see that you're experimenting with shifting the degree of your contour curves/ellipses, as this is one aspect of the exercise that students often overlook.

Looking at the page with contour curves, it appears that the decision whether to include a small contour ellipse on the end of a form was an arbitrary one. 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 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, before I get to the meat of this critique, I did notice that according to the dates, a few of these pages were completed prior to your lesson 3 work being marked as complete. One of the requirements for students to submit for official critique outlined in this section of lesson 0 is that students should only move onto the next step when their previous work has been marked as complete by a teaching assistant or instructor. This allows students to apply the advice fom their critique to their work in the next lesson. Can't really do that if you had already completed the homework. This also allows TAs to work as efficiently as possible, by not needing to call out and explain issues multiple times.

Now, fortunately your contructions here are well done, so you won't need to redo any of this work. However the advice I'm going to give you here should be applied to your animal constructions as you move forward.

What I'm seeing in these pages is a pretty strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with tight specific relationships. I'm seeing evidence of you making use of techniques covered in the earlier lessons, such as the ghosting method, and it generally looks like you're making every effort to stick to the principles of markmaking introduced in lesson 1. On some of your pages your additional lineweight is heavy handed and distracting, being added in arbitrary places. I'm going to assume these pages were done prior to your lesson 3 feedback, and that you started to correct the issue on the later pages.

The next point I want 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.

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 where you cut back inside the ball of the head came down to the fact that your ellipse came out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you picked one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately left 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 you'd extended off existing forms using 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.

Now, as I noted on the above beetle image in green, this is something you're already applying quite well in some places. We'd like you to strive to always use complete 3D forms wherever you want to build onto organic constructions in this course. 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. I'm happy to see that you've by and large made an effort to stick to the sausage method of leg construction on most of your pages, although it looks like sometimes you're missing the contour curves at the joints which show how these forms intersect.

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.

I can see you've had a crack at building onto some of your sausage armatures to create a more characteristic construction of the legs of these insects. I've got some diagrams and demos to share with you which I think will help you to build onto your leg constructions more effectively in the next lesson.

• Here see how we can break a larger engulfing form into separate pieces so that each one's silhouette will make ample contact with the existing structure.

• These diagrams show examples of building onto existing structures with 3D forms instead of flat shapes or one-off lines.

• This ant leg demo shows how this approach can be pushed further to capture all sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that we might see in these kinds of structures.

• Finally this dog leg demo shows an example of how this approach can be applied to animal constructions. This is pertinent, as we'd like students to stick to the sausage method of leg construction throughout lesson 5 too.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your spatial reasoning skills are coming along well, and I think you're ready to face the challenges of the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.

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

Starting with your organic forms, I'm happy to see you keeping most of your linework smooth and confident, which does help support the solidity of your forms. You're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There's the occasional form with one end larger than the other, but they're not far enough off to be too concerning.

It is good to see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves, though you appear to be reluctant to push them past a certain width, so that's something to experiment with when practising this exercise in future. You can see an 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, on the whole I'm happy with how you're handling these, as you're demonstrating a strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. The application of segmentation on your abdomens for example, shows that you're thinking about wrapping these additional pieces around a real, solid form, and paying attention to the curvature of that surface in three dimensions.

So, you're doing a great job, and I have 3 main pieces of advice for you to apply as you move forward with the next lesson. The first of these concerns how to reinforce the 3D illusion of your constructions with each step you take.

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 a section of your mantis in red where it looks like you established a ball form for the head with an ellipse, but then drew the actual head inside that ellipse, leaving the hatched areas outside your final construction. On some of your constructions the areas where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn 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 mantis image I marked in blue some examples where you'd extended off the existing form of the thorax 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're already doing a good job of building your constructions in 3D in quite a few areas, though I'll go ahead and share a few examples that you may find helpful. 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. I'm happy to see that you've been striving to use the sausage method for most of your constructions. Be sure to remember to include a contour line for the intersection at each joint, which is an important step for reinforcing the solidity of your constructions. I can see that you've been exploring how to build onto your basic sausage armatures to capture the bumps, spikes and other complexities wee see in these kinds of structures. When you build onto your legs, work on adding complete forms instead of single lines or flat shapes, as shown here. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, 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.

We can push this method to develop the legs even further, as shown in this ant leg demo. I'll also share this example using a dog leg 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. I encourage you to keep a more consistent line thickness through the various stages of your construction, so that at each step we only add the parts that change instead of redrawing whole forms. For example it looks like you traced back over all the visible sections of your dragonfly's wings, taking your initially smooth confident lines and making them wobblier. During this course additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps, and restricted to localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can find an explanation on applying lineweight in this recently added video.

Okay, I think that should cover it. You've done a great job and I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Please be sure to apply the points discussed in this critique to your animal constructions, so we can build upon them in the next lesson.

Hello Can_I_Use_A_Random_Name_For_This, 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. There are a couple of slight inconsistencies but it is very clear that you're aiming for simple sausages, good work.

Most of your contour curves look smooth, with only the occasional wobble, and I'm happy to see that you're experimenting with varying 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, on the whole these are coming along well. I can see you're following the constructional process of starting with simple solid forms and gradually building things up piece by piece, without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given stage. It looks like you're paying attention to figuring out how all these pieces fit together in 3D space, and I'm happy to see that you've been quite conscientious about "drawing through" your forms and including the parts we can't see. This will help you develop a stronger understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space, so please keep up the good work.

So, you're on the right track, but I do have a few pieces of advice that I think will help you to get more out of these exercises in future.

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. I noticed a few pages such as this beetle and this cricket where your construction was rather small, and a great deal of empty space was left on the page. In artificially limiting how much space you gave these two constructions, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. 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. Once 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.

As to time, just be sure to give each drawing as much time as it requires - not just for drawing, but for observing your reference as well. There are some cases here and there where you oversimplify a little too much in ways that it suggests you could probably benefit from pushing yourself to spend more time looking at your reference (specifically doing so continuously throughout the drawing process, rather than only up-front). The specifics of where those things occur isn't really that important - just something to keep in mind. Sometimes students may feel rushed to complete some drawings faster, simply because they only have a certain amount of time in a given sitting. If you ever feel yourself pressured to work faster than you need, remember that you can always set a drawing down and pick it up another day. No need to call it done the moment you get up.

I notice the reference image you shared for your shrimp is very small. If this is the full size image you were using I urge you to find larger reference images to work from in future. Working from low resolution images is going to make it unnecessarily difficult to observe your subject and pick out the more subtle, nuanced elements that will lead to more believable drawings.

The next point I wanted 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.

Fortunately you haven't cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn very often, and when you did, as marked in red here, it usually 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.

Another way we can alter the silhouette of forms we have already drawn is by extending them with partial shapes, as marked in blue on this cricket. This doesn't provide the viewer (or you) with enough information to understand how these additions actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space, so it reminds us that we're just looking at lines on a flat piece of paper.

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 last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I'm happy to see you've mostly been working with the sausage method, though there are a couple of pages such as this shrimp where it looks like you experimented with other strategies. 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.

All right, I think that should cover it. On the whole you're moving in the right direction and I think you should be good to continue working to adhere as strongly as you can to the idea of working in 3D space as you tackle the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Just be sure to keep these points in mind, and refer back to this feedback periodically to ensure that you can apply it all as you move forwards.

Hi there Ericna, I have passed along this information to uncomfortable and he should be getting back to you. For now I'll be going over your boxes so let's get started!

Now you have made some serious progress throughout this challenge. Your line quality is better, your sense of space is better, your feel for the convergences of lines is right on by the end of it. Overall, this is what we hope for by the end. Not necessarily the ability to draw boxes super well, but growth from a mindful approach to this challenge, and I am definitely seeing this and the fruits of it here. You have done a pretty good job varying up your orientations and rates of convergences of your boxes resulting in efficient practice and growth, and you have done a good job extending your lines to check your convergences and use that to improve from page to page. One thing that you are still struggling with is your line weight around the silhouette. You have the right idea that you could be making your outer lines heavier to give your form more solidity, but the execution is what is lacking. Remember that applying line weight is just an applied version of the super imposed lines exercise from lesson 1. When you are applying weight to a line, you are not tracing the line but rather confidently drawing a new line on top of the old one. It is that confidence and mindset of drawing a new line that helps avoid shakiness.

Regarding your convergences and such, by the end of the challenge you are not having many issues. Your lines aren't skewing much and everything is more or less heading to the same target. Nevertheless, I will be showing you the infographic uncomfortable has made for the sake of being thorough. The main take away from this is about how we must look at all parallel lines in tandem as we draw them because they are all related to one another by the vanishing point and the location of said point is what determines the angles between these lines. You did a really nice job of keeping everything in mind while you are drawing your boxes and therefore don't have much in terms of your back lines getting skewed, but if you have any questions regarding this infographic please let me know.

With this, your 250 box challenge will be marked as complete. Keep practicing super imposing lines during your warm ups, and don't neglect boxes either. The next few lessons are very organic and you don't want to get rusty by the time you get to lesson 6. Additionally you may want to try drawing larger boxes (one to two per page scale) as they those pose their own unique set of problems and solutions, but are needed for the later lessons.