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

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here when drawing the forms themselves, though there are several forms where your contour curves seem to be attempting to convey something other than two round ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. We can see an example of this with the form in the lower right corner of this page where the contour curves are more of a number 3 shape, than the visible portion of an ellipse as shown in the exercise instructions. This makes it look like someone stepped on the middle of the form and squashed it, so it no longer appears to be a simple sausage form.

As discussed here in lesson 0 to get the most out of the course you should be following the instructions as closely as you can, without modifications. While I appreciate that the exercises can get a little dull, and experimenting cam make them more interesting or challenging, as a student you’re not in a great position to know whether a particular change to the exercise will reduce its effectiveness, so it’s best to just follow the instructions a closely as you can.

Something we do want you to experiment with when doing this exercise, is shifting the degree of your contour curves. Keep in mind that barring any actual bending of the form, a sausage is essentially a cylinder which follows the same logic explained here in the ellipses section of lesson 1. This means that the degree of the contour curves 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. You can 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've done very well, and it is good to see that you’ve got the hang of starting your constructions with simple solid forms, then rebuilding the insect piece by piece, without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given step. There are a couple points I want to draw to your attention, and the first of these 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.

Starting with this main point, it's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the later forms respect and even reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

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

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

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

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

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out a few different strategies for constructing legs. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5.

To stick to the specific requirements of the sausage method:

• Each limb section should start with a sausage form, which sticks to the characteristics of simple sausages, as introduced in the organic forms exercise. Each sausage form should be complete- meaning don’t cut them off where they overlap.

• The second step is to apply one contour line to each joint, to define how the forms penetrate one another in 3D space, just like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise.

• Once the chain of sausage forms is in place, we can attach more 3D forms to develop a more characteristic representation of the leg in question. Use the diagrams and demos above to help you.

The last thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a few pages where you drew 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.

All right, I think that should cover it. I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete so you can move onto lesson 5. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you move forwards, they will continue to apply to animal constructions.