Hello Chy, congrats on tackling the insect and arachnid constructions.

I see you had some comments and questions, so let’s take a look at those before we get to the meat of the critique.

1- Whoops! As it is a mistake that only affects a single page it isn’t a big problem.

2- When assessing these constructions I look to see if they feel solid and believable in their own right, so if they don’t match the reference perfectly that is usually okay. We treat the reference as a source of information, rather than something to replicate at all costs. Sometimes part of an insect or animal is obscured in the reference (it is very common with animal feet in the next lesson) and when this happens a good strategy is to find another reference of the same species where that part is more clearly visible, and use that information to help fill in the missing pieces.

3- Sometimes. If you realise you’ve made a piece of the construction too small you can add another 3D form to it to bulk it out a bit, such as being generous with the volume of segmentation to build upon an undersized abdomen.

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of your linework looks smooth and confident, nicely done.

I noticed with this form that you’d added a small contour ellipse to the end of the form that faces away from the viewer, and omitted the ellipse that should be present on the near end. 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 diagram 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. Also don’t forget to draw through the ellipses, even when they’re small.

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 the diagram linked in the previous paragraph.

Also, don’t forget to hook your contour curves around the far side of the forms a little bit. This helps to ensure that their curvature accelerates correctly as they approach the edge of the form. If we look at this form for example, some of the contour lines aren’t quite turning enough.

Moving on to your insect constructions this is a really solid submission. You’re doing a good job of starting with simple forms that can easily be perceived as three dimensional, and patiently building things up in stages, while clearly thinking about how all these elements are supposed to fit together in 3D space. There’s a fair bit of growth occurring across the set, so I can see that your spatial reasoning skills are developing nicely. Overall you’re on the right track, and I’ve got just a couple of pointers for you to keep in mind as you continue forwards.

For the first point, I think it is best to quote something ThatOneMushroomGuy mentioned back in your lesson 3 feedback:

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 often. I did notice one example, which I’ve marked in red on your cat faced spider. Sometimes this can happen accidentally, when there is a gap between lines passing around an ellipse (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 does 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.

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 it looks like 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’re already using this approach a lot throughout your submission, which is fantastic, and I’ve called out some good examples with green on your spider. I’ll go ahead and share a couple of examples of this in practice which you may find helpful.

• beetle horn demo

• 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 stuck with the sausage method, and you’re pretty successful at sticking to the properties of simple sausage forms for your leg armatures. There are a few places where it looks like the contour line at each joint may be missing. These little contour lines might seem insignificant, but they are a very useful tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction, as we use them to show how the forms penetrate one another in 3D space, much like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise back in lesson 2.

It is great to see that you’ve taken a swing at building onto your sausage armatures quite frequently, adding the sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that you observe in these structures, arriving at a more characteristic representation of the leg in question than what can be achieved with the sausages alone. I have some diagrams to share with you that I hope will help you to build onto your leg structures “in 3D” more consistently as you move forwards.

• These diagrams show how we can add to the construction with complete 3D forms instead of flat shapes and one-off lines.

• This diagram shows how instead of fully engulfing an existing form within a new one, we can establish a clearer relationship between the existing form and the new addition by breaking it into two pieces.

• This ant leg demo shows how we can take the sausage method and push it further, adding all kinds of lumps bumps and spikes to the sausage armature.

• I’d also like to share this dog leg demo with you, which shows how the sausage method can be applied to animal legs. This is important, as we’d like you to continue to stick with the sausage method of leg construction when tackling your animals in the next lesson.

Alrighty, your constructions are coming along really well, and I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete. Keep up the good work.