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

Starting with your organic forms It looks like you're aware of the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here and some of your forms are reasonably close. There are others that are off by a notable amount, which suggests you may want to review these properties, or simply be more thorough when ghosting these, to give yourself the best chance of making the mark you intend to, with confidence.

I've noted some of the issues I'm seeing on specific forms here.

1 These forms are a bit bloated, swelling through their midsection instead of keeping a consistent width along their length. The large form at the bottom of your first page is a particularly prominent example, it is closer to being an ellipse than a sausage form.

2 These forms are a bit pinched in the middle. Again, aim for a consistent width.

3 These forms have one end larger than the other. Try to keep both ends the same size.

4 We want the ends of the forms to be rounded, like half spheres. Ends marked with a 4 are either getting a bit pointy, or flat.

5 This one isn't a mistake per se, but when you make the flow line completely straight this results in a stiff form. Incorporating a subtle curve introduces gesture to these forms, which will come in very useful when using these sausage forms as building blocks for your constructions.

6 You appear to have crossed out this form, and later on in your work also one of your insect constructions. For future reference, while working through Drawabox we do not cross out or attempt to cover up our mistakes. Mistakes happen. It is important to recognise when a mistake is made and why. Then, we move onto the next step, doing our best to work with what we have on the page instead of crossing things out and starting over.

Moving on to your contour curves, I'm happy to see that you're experimenting with varying their degree. There are a few ways that your contour curves could be improved and I've numbered them on this form

7 Sometimes when your contour curves are quite shallow you forget to accelerate these curves as they meet the edge of your form, and this undermines the illusion of the form having volume. In future it will help if you remember to hook your contour curves around the form a little.

8 Some contour curves are not as carefully aligned as they could be. We want them to be cut into 2 symmetrical halves by the flow line.

9 When we place an ellipse on the end of a sausage form, it's actually no different from the usual contour curves, aside from the fact that we're conveying the fact that this particular end is facing the viewer, allowing us to see the whole way around the contour line, rather than just a partial curve. I noticed on many of your forms your contour curves suggest that both ends of the form are facing the viewer and you'd only placed an ellipse on one end. Take a look at this breakdown 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.

10 When you do add a contour ellipse to the end of a form, remember to draw around it 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, as explained in this section of lesson1.

Moving on to your insect constructions jumping right in with 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. 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.

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. Your final page is a good example of drawing large enough and making good use of the space on the page.

You're doing a good job of starting your constructions with simple solid forms, and I can see you're thinking about how these forms exist in 3D space. I do have some advice that should help you to get more out of these exercises in future.

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 in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. 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 those new additions were 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.

There are places where you're attempting to draw three dimensional structures with a single line, such as the feet on this bee and the antennae on this butterfly. A single line is infinitely thin, and does not provide enough information for the viewer to understand how it exists in 3D space. Instead use one of the 3D forms that you have learned how to construct in this course. You may end up with something that looks a little different from the reference image. We aren't to focus on reproducing the reference image at all costs, but rather to treat is as a source of information that helps us determine the direction of our goal.

I'm noticing a tendency for you to redraw a lot of your lines. Sometimes to make corrections, sometimes to reinforce them with extra line weight. As mentioned in your lesson 1 feedback you should resist the temptation to redraw your lines to make corrections, as this will only make your make messy and confusing. Remember at no point during this course are we "sketching." You should not be automatically or arbitrarily going back over your lines to reinforce them, every mark you add to your constructions should serve a clear purpose. This is part of the planning stage of the ghosting method (which you should be using for every line you draw in this course) and if the line you are planning to make doesn't actually add anything meaningful to your construction then you should leave it out.

You appear to be tracing back over substantial portions of the silhouette of some of your constructions, as highlighted on this section of your centipede. Tracing back over the silhouette will make your initially smooth and confident lines more wobbly and hesitant, and make small alterations to your forms' silhouettes, which as discussed above will undermine the solidity of your construction. I find that the most effective use of line weight - at least given the bounds and limitations of this course - is to use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight. Also, remember line weight should be kept subtle, it is a whisper, not a shout. Usually one ghosted, super imposed stroke will be enough to get the desired effect.

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.

I've drawn examples of some of the various ways you're not quite sticking to the sausage method in this image

• Ellipses were used on parts of your tarantula.

• There are examples of partial shapes and complex forms on your centipede (among others.)

• Sometimes you draw complete overlapping sausage forms but forget the contour curve for the intersection at the joints, as highlighted in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram.

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.

Okay, I have given you quite a few things to work on here, so I will be assigning some revisions for you to apply this feedback. Take your time. I'm noticing that the first steps of your constructions tend to be smooth and confident and your line quality sometimes goes downhill as you get to the smaller structures and details, make sure you're giving every line as much time as it needs in order for you to draw it to the best of your current ability. Sometimes students get the impression that if they work on a drawing or a page of an exercise, then that drawing/page must be done by the time they get up. That of course doesn't really make too much sense when you think about it, since it would mean that how much time the drawing requires is entirely dependent on how much time you happen to have that day. Instead, in order to give each drawing as much time as it requires - and more than that, each individual mark as much time as it requires - we simply break our drawings up across multiple days as needed.

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

If anything that has been said to you here, or previously is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.