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

Before I get to critiquing your work, I just wanted to quickly note that having your scanner set to process your drawings to only black and white like this is not ideal. When it comes to scanning, the reason it's better to avoid anything that performs additional processing like this on your images is that it can make it a lot harder to determine whether the linework itself was executed poorly, or if it's the software deciding to throw out a lot of extra marks that help give the ones that did show up context. It is better to have the scanner set to a photo, or full colour mode, or if that is not possible then the cameras on most phones will work fine, especially if the photos are taken in indirect sunlight, which really helps to maximise the potential of that hardware.

Anyway, I'm going to be critiquing the work based on what I see - so do keep that in mind in case what you've submitted doesn't accurately represent what the pages look like in real life.

Starting with your organic forms, it looks like you're aiming to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. They're getting a bit more consistent than your lesson 2 attempts at this exercise, but there are still cases where you've got subtle swelling or pinching through the middle of the forms, or ends that are a little lopsided or flattened. Keep striving to stick to the properties of two equal sized balls connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. Make sure you're giving yourself ample time ghosting each one and executing the line with confidence once your pen touches the page.

Your contour curves are getting smoother and more confident than your previous pages, which is great.

Your curves are mostly sticking to the same 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, looking at your demo drawings you've done a good job following most of the steps closely, and the only real concern I have with the demo pages is that you don't seem to have used the sausage method of leg construction, as introduced here. Now, in all fairness, the sausage method isn't actually used in the older house fly demo, which is a little outdated in this regard. The louse demo looks to be your best attempt at leg construction, as you'd drawn chains of overlapping sausage forms, and just got a little mixed up on where to place the contour lines. We want to place the contour lines at the joints, to clarify how the sausage forms intersect (like the form intersections exercise) rather than along the surface of individual sausage forms (like from the organic forms with contours exercise).

The strategy you seem to have employed for the majority of your legs looks like you'd drawn circles for the joints, then connected them with lines, as noted on this analysis of your bee. 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.

Moving on to an analysis of the constructions done from your own references, things are a little mixed. You've got some pages, such as this fly where you're clearly thinking about those ball forms of the head and abdomen as volumes in 3D space, and others such as this shrimp which feel like a series of 2D shapes stamped onto a flat piece of paper. I'd like you to take some time to compare the approach you used for your shrimp construction with this demo of a similar species from a similar angle. Notice how with the first step Uncomfortable establishes simple solid forms for head, thorax and abdomen, and that he allows these forms to overlap, using contour lines to define where these forms intersect in 3D space. You'd kept your first step nice and simple, which is great, but you'd drawn a series of flat geometric shapes (triangles and rectangles) adjacent to one another, rather than solid organic forms (ellipses to represent balls, or sausage forms) which overlap. As discussed in this section of the lesson intro page we want to perceive our first simple forms as solid and 3D prior to moving forward.

I did also notice a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly, especially when blocking in ellipses for the head/thorax/abdomen. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves.

The last 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 bee 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 where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, or one-off lines, 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.

Conclusion

I want to make it clear that there is a lot that you're doing really well. It looks like you're using the ghosting method and making every effort to stick to the principles of markmaking introduced in lesson 1. It also looks like you've done your best to follow the demos and apply those methods to your own constructions. I'm a little concerned that for some of your original constructions you may not believe your own lie quite yet. This is an ongoing process, and I think spending a little more time doing a couple of extra pages here will make the next lesson much more manageable for you. Please read through the feedback above carefully and apply the points discussed here to the following:

• Draw along with the shrimp demo, following each step as closely as you can.

• 2 pages of insect constructions using references of your choice.