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

Starting with your sausage forms:

• You’re doing an excellent job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages.

• You’re also doing well at keeping your linework smooth and confident, both for the forms themselves and the contour curves. Make sure you don’t get into a habit of drawing your contour curves multiple times (as this makes the work messier, and unclear which line is supposed to be correct) and instead ghost the motion as many times as you need, then only execute the line once.

• You have a fair few contour curves which float inside or outside the form instead of fitting snugly against the edges. This isn’t a big problem as you’re keeping your lines confident (which is our first priority) and are clearly aiming to fit your contour curves snugly against the sides, so your accuracy should continue to improve with practice.

• Lastly, you’re demonstrating a good understanding of how to shift the degree of your contour curves, great work!

Moving on to your insect constructions honestly you've done a pretty good job overall. There are some small issues I want to draw your attention to, but overall you're showing a strong awareness of how every element of your construction is made up with simple, solid, 3D forms. As a result, your drawings tend to feel solid and believable as 3D objects rather than just a series of lines and shapes on the page.

The first point I want to talk about is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

Fortunately you don’t appear to cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn very much, and the one case I did spot (on the mandibles of your bee) you were very clearly thinking about how the cuts you made along that boxy form exist in 3D space. That said, I’d strongly encourage you to stick to working on your constructions by adding to the existing structures, instead of subtracting from them. While it's entirely possible to do this correctly in 3D space, I'm advising students not to work subtractively at all when building up organic structures within this course, just because students tend to be prone to doing it wrong without realizing, and then reinforcing 2D thinking instead. Sticking to working additively in 3D space will on the other hand be a lot harder to do wrong (as long as you're somewhat mindful of what you're doing), and will ultimately reinforce that 3D thinking and eventually help you subtract more effectively as well.

While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. On your moth I marked in blue some places where you'd extended off existing forms using one off lines or partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. While this approach worked for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

I’ve put together some diagrams on the moth to show how this could be applied to your construction. You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page. As Uncomfortable has been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is great that you’ve been working with the sausage method, as this 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.

You’re doing great at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages for your leg armatures and you usually apply the contour lines correctly. We apply one to each joint, to show how the forms penetrate one another in space (much like the form intersections exercise) which reinforces the solidity of the construction and makes adding any other contour lines to the middle of the sausages obsolete.

Once the sausage chains are in place we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as the sausage method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

The last thing I wanted to mention is to remember to observe your reference frequently throughout the construction process. While we’re not too concerned about reproducing the reference perfectly, we do want to make sure that each form we add is directly informed by what is present in the reference, rather than what we remember seeing. I didn’t see this much but I’ve pointed out on your beetle where one of the antennae was constructed curving in the opposite direction to what was present in the reference, suggesting it was drawn from memory.

On the same image I’d shown examples of how you could push your construction further to get a bit more out of the exercise. Carefully observing the reference to pick up on some of the smaller, more nuanced elements will allow you to develop your constructions into a more specific and believable representation of the particular subject matter.

All right, I think that should cover it. You’ve done a great job with this lesson and I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete. Keep up the good work.