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

Starting with your organic forms it looks like you're aiming for the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and although you're getting some pinched middles and deformed ends here and there, these are an improvement from your first attempts in lesson 2. Form number 4 on this page came out well. Make sure you're using the ghosting method, engaging your whole arm, and rotating your page to find the easiest angle to draw these, to give yourself every chance to execute them to the best of your current ability. These are tricky, but with intentional practise in your warm ups they should continue to improve.

You're doing a good job of varying the degree of your contour curves, though in future I'd like you to make sure that you hook them around the forms a bit more. Right now, when your contour curves have a narrow degree they don't accelerate as they approach the edge of the form, which will make the form appear flat. You may find that it helps to ghost the motion of the entire ellipse for these curves, as this will ensure that the curves accelerate as they reach the sides of your forms.

I noticed that every form you've drawn in these two pages has both ends facing the viewer, while this isn't necessarily a mistake, I'd like you to take a look at this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived. Try experimenting with different orientations of your forms in future.

Make sure to draw around the small ellipses on the ends 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass, as explained in this section of lesson 1.

Keep in mind that the small ellipses on the end of the forms are 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. So these ellipses should be cut into 2 symmetrical halves by the central flow line, I'm seeing a tendency for you to skew them quite a bit.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're doing a good job of starting with simple forms, and building up complexity piece by piece, although there are some indications that you might not always be considering how all these pieces exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. With that in mind, I do 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:

1 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.

2 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. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside forms you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes on your ellipses. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion. 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. I also circled in purple where you'd left gaps between forms which I'm assuming are supposed to be connected together.

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.

Here we can see this applied to your construction, where I've redrawn some of the extensions I had previously marked in blue as complete 3D forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes.

Remember to draw through your forms when working through these constructional exercises. This is something you're doing well most of the time, but there are a few spots where I noticed you'd cut a form off where it passed behind something else, instead of drawing the whole form. Drawing each form in its entirety (like you have X-Ray Vision) will reinforce the 3D illusion of your constructions as well as helping you to develop your spatial reasoning skills.

Keep the curvature of the underlying structures in mind when adding segmentation to abdomens. Here you've done a good job of breaking the silhouette with these segments, but by drawing them straight across the underlying abdomen form you've made it look flat.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you have made an effort to try to use the sausage method to construct your 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, 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.

While I can see that you were attempting to use the sausage method, it is quite specific, and there are some things to keep in mind to apply it more effectively.

• Stick to simple sausage forms for your base armatures, as closely as you can.

• These sausage forms need to overlap on the 2D space of the paper, so that we can define a 3D connection where these forms intersect, using a contour curve, as highlighted in red here

• Once these sausages are in place we can use additional forms to build any complexity that could not be captured with simple sausage forms.

When it comes to texture and detail, remember that in this course we're using cast shadows to imply small textural forms on an object's surface. We're telling the viewer how that surface would feel if you were to pick it up and run your hands along it. Which, if you think about it, has nothing to do with what color that surface happens to be. So for the purpose of these exercises imagine the insect has been painted all one color and ignore any color patterns you see. So, for this tarantula we would not fill in the stripes with black. In addition to this, please avoid filling in large areas of your constructions with solid black, as not only does this not really follow the guidance for texture that was introduced in lesson 2, it also obscures the underlying construction, making it more difficult to asses your work.

On this cockroach the texture appears to be quite explicit, remember to design shadow shapes rather than drawing lines.

Be sure to review feedback from previous critiques, as I see that Tofu and ThatOneMushroomGuy have already given you some solid advice on this topic. These reminders are a good summary to check in with too. The approach to texture used in this course is both difficult and time consuming, and you are not alone in your struggles with it. I see you're a member on the Discord server, so I also recommend you take a look at the pinned messages in the lesson 2 channel, where you'll find links to a detailed explanation on texture from Uncomfortable, as well as videos of Scylla going through the texture exercises. If you're finding applying texture to your insects overwhelming I want to make it clear that going into texture is optional in this lesson, and if you wish to focus solely on construction that is fine. If on the other hand you want to get some extra practise, we do have the optional texture challenge that you can try doing alongside the main lessons.

Conclusion

Overall you're not that far from doing a great job with these exercises, but I think that right now, expecting you to be able to apply all the advice I've given you here, and tackle the additional concepts covered in the next lesson all at once is going to be a bit much. I'll be assigning some extra pages before moving you on to the next lesson. Please complete the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves. Try to keep your forms as close to simple sausages as you can, and remember to hook your contour curves around the forms.

• Draw along with the shrimp demo from the informal demos page, following each step exactly as shown, as closely as you can.

• 2 additional pages of insect constructions of your choice. Try to take actions in 3D as discussed in this critique, and use the sausage method of leg construction.