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

Starting with your organic forms it looks like you're working towards keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here. there is a tendency for you to draw one end larger than the other, or have them pinched in the middle slightly. I've drawn over your work here to show you how the shape of your organic forms could be improved, as well as pointing out one form where you did a very good job.

Looking at our contour curves, they are well aligned and I can see that you are varying their degree. Nicely done.

When it comes to the little contour ellipses on the ends of your forms, I get the impression that you don't fully understand what they are for, just yet. These ellipses are also contour curves, we can see the entirety of the ellipse because it's facing towards us - this also happens to serve as a very effective visual cue. This diagram shows how to arrange your contour curves (and the ellipses on the ends) to describe a form with one end facing the viewer, both ends facing the viewer, and neither end facing the viewer.

Moving on to your insect constructions You're doing well at starting with simple forms and building complexity where you need to. I can see you're working on maintaining specific relationships between each stage of your construction. You appear to be developing an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together. There are a few pointers I have to give you that should help you continue to get the most out of these exercises.

The first of these is 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.

To illustrate this, I have marked in red on your work here some places where you appear to have cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One way this can happen is if there is some looseness to an ellipse and you choose the line you like best for the base of your construction, or hop around between different passes instead of sticking to just one of them. Where there is a gap between passes of your ellipse, you should base your construction on the outer line, to prevent any stray lines going outside of your silhouette.

On this image in blue I've noted some places where you attempted to extend your silhouettes without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space. (I also noted where you did a really good job of drawing some spikes as complete 3D forms too, good job with those.)

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.

It looks like you included some drawings you did following along with the demos, which is perfectly fine. I did notice that with this shrimp you didn't include step 6 from the demo. Try to follow these demos as closely as you can, even when they get difficult, pushing yourself to include all the pieces will help you learn.

There are a few places where it looks like you're redrawing or going over parts of your constructions to add line weight to the silhouette, for example with the visible parts of the ellipse for this spider's abdomen Students going back over their work with a slow, belaboured stroke trying to be careful generally causes their drawings to become stiff and undermines the solidity of their forms. Be aware that additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here

The last point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're trying to use the sausage method for constructing your legs. That's great, it's what we'd like students to do for this lesson.

Sometimes the forms you use for your leg construction start a little too complex, like this, try to stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here.

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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is what we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

Conclusion I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. Each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you may end up just creating further issues on top of them.

Please complete 1 page of organic forms with contour curves and 2 pages of insect constructions.