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

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing pretty well at drawing these with smooth confident lines, but as far as I can tell you’re not paying nearly enough attention to actually sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

If we look at this page for example, the form at the top left is spot-on, but three of the others have significant pinching through their midsection, which is noted as something to avoid in the “none of these” section as well as something Uncomfortable specifically addressed in your lesson 2 feedback.

By sticking to two round ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width, these forms become very useful building blocks for insect ad animal constructions, because they allow is to create a solid form that also has some gestural flow it it. When the forms get more complex, with pinched middles and ends of different sizes, they lose some of their solidity, and are likely to result in constructions that feel a bit flatter.

Your contour lines also look pretty smooth, but make sure you don’t get into a habit of redrawing them. There are a couple of spots where it looks like you've gone back over a contour curve, presumably to correct it. In this course it is best to leave mistakes alone rather than attempting to correct them. Correcting a mistake will create the impression in our brain that the mistake was addressed, whereas really addressing the mistake would involve reflecting upon why it may have occurred and adjusting our approach to try and avoid the mistake in the future - something we usually do by giving ourselves more time to think through the actions we take while doing the work. Leaving the mistakes alone allows us to come back after the page is complete to assess where the mistakes occurred, and how we might do better in the future. On the other hand, redoing a line generally just makes the work messier.

Keep in mind that barring any actual bending of the form, a sausage is essentially a cylinder which follows the same logic explained here in the ellipses section of lesson 1. This means that the degree of the contour curves 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. You can 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 overall you've done very well, It is clear that you’re thinking about how your forms sit in 3D space, and how they fit together like a puzzle. Your application of abdomen segmentation shows an understanding of volume as these pieces wrap around the underlying ball/sausage structures in a war that feels very believable.

With regards to your stag beetle (page 8) you’re quite correct, that their legs don’t all attach to the thorax, and some of them seem to connect to the underside of the abdomen instead. You can go ahead and attach the hind limbs to the abdomen, that’s fine. The issue is, that the legs in your construction appear to get cut off where they overlap the body, instead of connecting together in three dimensions. Throughout this course it is going to be beneficial to you to draw through your forms wherever possible. By drawing each form in its entirety we can then establish how these pieces fit together, like building a 3D puzzle. If we only draw the visible sections, this can lead to slipping back into thinking in 2D, transferring shapes over from the flat reference image onto our flat piece of paper, without fully understanding how the structure is supposed to exist in three dimensions.

While we’re on the topic of legs, it looks like you tried out a few different strategies for constructing them. 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, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5.

The next point I wanted to discuss is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had. It's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the later forms respect and even reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

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 shrimp in red an area where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of a form you had already drawn. On the same image I also marked with blue an area where that same form had been extended using a partial, flat shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how it actually connects to the existing structure in 3D space. While this approach worked for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

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.

Finishing off with a look at texture, by and large I do think you’re heading in the right direction. I can see for the most part you’ve been using intentionally designed shadow shapes to further clarify your construction, or to provide information about the small textural forms running along the surface of the insect.

Keep in mind that areas of solid black should be reserved for cast shadows. It looks like you’re usually working with this in mind, though sometimes there are form shadows being added too. A form shadow occurs where the surface of the form faces away from the light source, but for a cast shadow to occur there needs to be one form blocking the light from hitting another surface. Here is a visual example showing a form and cast shadow with the context of a sausage form, then how cast shadows can be used in the context of texture- implying small bumps running along the the sausage form casting shadows onto its surface, without having to outline all of the little bumps explicitly.

We also need to be mindful of where our light source is. For example, if you look here, you'll see that you've got the shadow being cast both to the left and the right of the leg. This suggests an inconsistent light source. It should be casting left or right, but not both simultaneously.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are coming along pretty well, but I would like to see you take another swing at the organic forms exercise before we mark this as complete.

Please complete 1 page of the organic forms with contour curves exercise, sticking as closely to the characteristics of simple sausages as you can.