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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There are one or two forms with some subtle swelling through their midsection, or one end a bit larger than the other, but on the whole these are great.

It is good to see that you've made an effort to vary the degree of your contour curves on some of your forms. 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, these are showing quite a lot of potential. You're doing a good job of starting your constructions with simple, solid forms, and you generally build your constructions up piece by piece, without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given point. It is good to see that you've been conscientiously drawing through your forms (drawing the whole form, even if parts of it are obscured in the reference) as this will help you to develop your understanding of 3D space.

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:

• 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.

• 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 mantis 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 your grasshopper's abdomen I've drawn over your (solid, 3D) ball form in green, then I marked in blue where you'd extended off this existing form using a partial shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how it actually connects 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.

Here is an example of how we might apply this to your grasshopper, and here I've noted in green where you had done a good job of building onto this construction with complete additional forms, and with blue a few smaller areas where you'd extended the silhouette of existing forms with a one-off line.

Keep in mind that as we build our constructions we want to maintain tight, specific relationships between each phase of construction. Drawing loose, disconnected lines as we see here behind the wasp's head does not convey 3D form, the only way for the viewer to interpret this is as a collection of lines on a flat piece of paper. Drawing dashed, or sketchy lines in this manner also breaks the first principle of markmaking introduced back in lesson 1.

I noticed a number of your constructions ended up too big to fit on the paper, resulting in some of your forms running off the edge of the page as a pair of lines and being left open-ended. I do like that you're drawing your constructions quite large, as giving your construction plenty of room can make it easier to think through the spatial reasoning problems involved, as well as encouraging drawing from the shoulder. In future, if part of your construction won't fit on the page, rather than running your forms off the paper (which makes it unclear where the edge of the form is and flattens it out) it helps to maintain the solidity of your construction by "capping off" these forms with an ellipse, as shown here.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I can see that you were employing elements of the sausage method on the majority of your pages, though there are a couple of ways you're deviating from this method- it is quite specific.

• You're drawing around quite a lot of your sausage forms twice. We insist on students drawing around ellipses two full times because this leans into the arm's natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute them smoothly. As these sausage forms require a different series of motions, going around them twice isn’t actually helpful, it just tends to make the construction messier.

• It looks like you're experiencing some confusion with what to do at the joints. You appear to be either drawing balls on top of them, or leaving them bare. As highlighted in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram we draw a contour curve at each joint, to define how the two sausage forms connect together in 3D space, much like how we drew intersections back in the form intersections exercise from lesson2.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method, 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.

On this rhino beetle I'm seeing some use of heavier line weight/cast shadows in ways that suggested you weren't necessarily distinguishing between the two. While they're similar in some ways, line weight and cast shadows have to adhere to different rules. Line weight can cling to the silhouette of a form, but has to remain very subtle and light, rather than getting super heavy and dark. It relies on relative changes in thickness that one's subconscious will notice. It's like whispering, rather than shouting. Cast shadows on the other hand do not cling to the silhouette of a form, and instead are cast onto a different surface. They can be much broader and heavier, but we can't have them floating arbitrarily in space without an actual surface to receive them.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. On some of your pages, such as this lanternfly, 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, at minimum.

Overall I can see that your spatial reasoning skills are coming along well. I've outlined some things to work on, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Please be sure to actively tackle these points as you handle your animals. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid). If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.