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

Starting with your organic forms, it is clear that you're aiming to sick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of your forms are pretty close.

You're executing the majority of your lines reasonably smoothly, though there is the occasional wobble (more so on the contour curves than the forms themselves) so keep pushing to prioritise a smooth confident stroke over an accurate but wobbly one.

Most of your contour curves are sticking to a similar 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, I can see some places where your spatial reasoning skills are starting to shine, and areas where you're thinking about how your forms exist in 3D space, but right off the bat there are some points that stand out, as they were previously discussed in your lesson 3 critique. Keep in mind that the feedback provided in these critiques is designed to be applied by the student as they move forward through the course, so that issues do not need to be called out repeatedly. It is often necessary for students to take their own steps in ensuring that they do what they need to in order to ensure they're addressing the issues that have been called out. It's very easy to simply come back from a break and continue forwards with the next lesson without consideration for what issues may have raised (or perhaps having them more loosely in mind, but without specifics), and each student needs to decide what it is they need to apply the information they're given as effectively as they can. For some that means reviewing the past feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely. I'd recommend you re-watch this video which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox, and what your responsibilities as a student are.

The first point that was discussed previously is how you're arranging your constructions on the page. You are unfortunately doing yourself something of a disservice in this regard, and making things harder than they need to be. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. For example here and here your constructions are so tiny that you didn't give yourself a fighting chance at constructing the legs correctly, the linework is just too cramped.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

As part of your lesson 3 critique you were introduced to the following rule, to help you to only take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion we seek to create.

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 ant and dragonfly 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 some 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 some examples 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.

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.

A little reminder- please make every effort to follow the principles of markmaking throughout the constructional process. You're doing well with those first big simple forms for most of your pages, but I'm noticing your lines tend to get a bit stiffer as you work towards adding smaller elements, which suggests you may be switching to drawing from the wrist, or perhaps not making full use of the ghosting method. Be sure to utilize your whole arm, and use the ghosting method for every form you draw, not matter how small or insignificant it may seem.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you 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 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.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled.

• There are places where you're copying colour patterns such as the butterfly on this page as well as filling in a lot of the eyes, presumably because they look dark in the reference.

• You're quite frequently mixing up form shadows (which we do not include) and cast shadows, which we can use to imply smaller textural forms running along an object's surface. Please re-watch this video which goes over the difference. You can also take a look at these diagrams using the example of a sausage form. The top diagram shows the difference between a form shadow, on the sausage form itself, and a cast shadow, cast from the sausage form onto another surface. The lower diagram shows how this applies to adding texture. Rather than drawing the shadow cast by the sausage (which we have already described with construction, and would require filling a large area with black) we draw the shadows which are cast by small textural forms on the object's surface, implying their presence.

In effect, you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review.

Now, I have outlined a number of areas to work on, and I will be assigning some revisions for you to address these points. Please complete the following:

• 2 pages of insect/arachnid constructions, construction only.

• 2 pages of insect/arachnid constructions, which may include texture if you choose. (Texture is optional in this lesson.)

For these I'd like you to stick to one construction per page, to encourage yourself to draw bigger.