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

Starting with your organic forms, you're doing a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, good work.

It is good to see that you're experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves. 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. When we can see one end of your forms you tend to draw this degree shift reversed. 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, your work here is honestly great. I've been using these lesson 4 critiques as an opportunity to share with students the distinction between actions we take in 2D space - where we're just thinking about drawing lines on a flat page and not necessarily considering whether or not they directly impact the illusion we're trying to convey - and actions we take in 3D space, where we are actively thinking of every new addition as a complete, self-enclosed form, that exists in 3D space with the other forms around it. Actions we can take that respect and reinforce the illusion, rather than contradicting and undermining it.

Where I run into trouble, however, is when a student... already considers the vast majority of their actions in three dimensions. It's not a problem because it leaves me without something to say (though that can be a problem), but it puts me in a position of weighing whether not mentioning it may cause such issues to come up later, since it was never directly addressed (especially as Uncomfortable is overhauling the lesson material, eventually planning on incorporating it but for now really just addressing this as a "free preview of future concepts" for those on the official critique track).

You are indeed doing this correctly, and it's great to see- but I am going to take a moment just to make sure you understand why it's correct. And for that, I'm going to use some prewritten text:

"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."

Fortunately you've avoided cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn, which is great. I did spot a few small areas where you'd added a small extension to a form's silhouette with a one off line or partial shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how these additions actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I've marked some of these extensions in blue on this section of your spider construction.

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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I'm happy to see that you've been using the sausage method as introduced here, pretty consistently and effectively. 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.

I do have one more note for you, and it is fairly minor. When it comes to capturing fine details such as the veins on the wings of this dragonfly this would have been an excellent place to use implicit drawing techniques, focusing on capturing the shadows cast by those textural forms, rather than drawing them all explicitly.

Overall you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.