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

Starting with your organic forms it is good to see you drawing these with a smooth confident stroke, and I can see that you're working towards keeping you sausage forms simple as introduced here. You do have a tendency to make one end of your form much wider than the other, such as this one. The goal with this exercise is to have both ends the same size and an even thickness throughout the length of the form.

On the same form I linked to there are a couple of contour curves that aren't quite hooking around the form which is something you did well on most of your forms.

A quick reminder here, remember to draw through the little ellipses on the ends of your forms two full times before lifting your pen. Even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass, we ask you to continue to draw through every ellipse you freehand in this course as explained here. It is all good practice.

In your lesson 2 feedback Tofu asked you to vary the degree of your contour curves more. I can certainly see some variation in your contour curves, but it is pretty subtle and it is not clear in your work whether this variation is made with intent and understanding. As a general rule of thumb these curves should get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This concept is shown in this diagram and is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. I think looking at this diagram may help you. It demonstrates how to vary your contour curves to show a form in different orientations.

I'll be asking for an extra page of organic forms at the bottom of this critique, so you can demonstrate an understanding of how to vary the degree of your contour curves.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms and building your constructions step-by-step. You're showing an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. 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 weevil in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this happens due to the looseness of 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.

On the same image I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist 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.

Something that is undermining your efforts to construct a 3D illusion is your tendency to "sketch" your lines. This occurs in two ways, the first being that in some of your constructions you drew your earlier stages with a much fainter line, and used thicker or darker marks for the later stages. Doing this can lead students into thinking of their primary forms as a loose guide or a rough underdrawing, instead of something solid and three dimensional. Drawing your first forms lightly also forces you into going back and tracing over the parts that you wish to keep. This is something Uncomfortable calls a "clean up pass" and while this is a valid approach in general, it is one we firmly avoid in this course, as discussed here in Lesson 2.

The other way your drawings get a bit sketchy is by redrawing your lines. I'm not sure if you're making corrections, or if it is simply a habit, but either way it makes your work messy and confusing. Take the time to plan every line you want to draw, and use the ghosting method to practice the movement until you're confident, only then do you place your pen down and draw the line once. It can get a bit overwhelming as the exercises get more taxing, with all these things we need to draw in these constructions, but if you take your time with every step and remember what you learned and practised in the earlier exercises you'll do just fine. Take another look at the principles of markmaking section, we're aiming for lines that are smooth, continuous and unbroken. Redrawing lines "breaks" them and can look scratchy. I've circled a couple of cases of redrawn lines on your ant here just in case it is unclear what I am referring to. I also made some notes on ellipses, remember to draw through them 2 or 3 times, with 2 being ideal. Only going around once can make them deformed or hesitant, and going round 4 or more times makes it unclear what ellipse you intended to draw. Looking at some of your past homework I see that you can be quite consistent with this, in an isolated technical exercise, so please do apply this to your constructions in future.

Sometimes your repeated lines look like an effort to apply line weight to your constructions. For these constructions you should reserve extra line weight for clarifying overlaps as explained here. It is usually best to do this in the final stages of your construction, and there is no need to redraw the whole silhouette to reinforce it. Line weight should be kept subtle, usually one extra super imposed line is enough to get the desired effect.

Continuing on, one fairly minor concern is that I do see you throwing contour lines around a bit freely (and without too much thought to how they're being executed). For example, we see quite a few on the head of this ant. Every mark you put down, and every tool you employ, must be used with an awareness of what its purpose is meant to be. That's what the ghosting method's planning phase is for - ensuring that we understand what we're trying to do, and to spend a bit of time considering whether our instinctual choice is really the best one.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like tried out lots of 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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

It is great that you included a shadow underneath your insects, this is a good tool to help your constructions feel grounded. In future I would prefer if you left these "drop shadows" underneath your insects as an outline, like Uncomfortable does in the demos for this lesson, instead of filling them in. There are places around the edges of your insects (particularly the legs) where there are some little white gaps, and it is hard to tell if you changed your mind about how thick you wanted the legs to be, or just got a bit sloppy with filling in the shadows. Either way, it's not doing you any favours.

Finally let's touch on texture and detail. Remember that when using texture in this course you should be using the shapes of cast shadows to implicitly describe the smaller forms on an object's surface. You're telling the viewer how that surface feels. This has nothing to do with what color the surface happens to be. For the purpose of these exercises you can imagine your insects are all one color. So for example looking at stripes and eye on this wasp there would be no reason to fill them in with black. It is unlikely that the top of the abdomen is in cast shadow, there's nothing there to cast it, so it is quite likely that you filled them with black because they have a dark local colour. I'd recommend giving these reminders on how to approach texture in this course another read.

Overall I do get the sense that you're thinking in 3D, but I would like you to address the concerns I've raised about sketchy lines before moving forward to the next lesson. These lessons build on each other so if I send you forward with unaddressed problems they may get compounded or the increased difficulty may be overwhelming.

I'll be asking you to complete 2 pages of insect constructions. Take as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark.