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

Staring with your organic forms with contour curves, you've done a splendid job of keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here. And you've done a good job of varying the degree of your contour curves too. Remember the contour curves should get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. There are just a couple on your second page where the curves are getting narrower as they get further away.

I do need to point out here that some of your lines are noticeably wobbly. This is usually caused by either- drawing from the wrist/elbow instead of drawing from your shoulder or- by not making full use of the ghosting method causing hesitation during the execution phase. I would recommend that you read this comment from Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation. I am aware that you suffer from shaky hands and may have been having a bad day with them when you did this exercise. I don't expect you to uphold some unobtainable standard with your exercises, but I do need to call out what I see and encourage you to keep working on it.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is coming along well. You're building your constructions step by step, starting with simple forms and adding complexity to them where you need to. You're demonstrating a developing understanding of how your forms exist in 3d space and connect together with specific relationships.

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 don't actually cut back inside your forms much but I've highlighted in blue on your spider a few little places where you altered your silhouette by extending it instead. This can happen by accident when you add line weight. To reduce the occurrence of this remember to reserve line weight for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

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.

I thought the abdomen on this insect from the future was particularly successful. You made good use of the natural contour lines of the segmentation, adding each one as its own complete form and wrapping them over your existing structure. You also wrapped the wings over and around the abdomen in a way that emphasises the 3d form instead of undermining it, great work.

Looking at how you've approached the legs of your insects I can see that you're aware of sausage method of leg construction and have made a good attempt at applying it. Some of your leg sausages are starting too complex, or have wobbly lines. There's a few places where leg sections aren't complete, fully enclosed forms or the contour line to define the intersection where they join together is missing but I do think you're on the right track.

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 important for tackling animal constructions too.

Overall you're showing a good understanding of this lesson and your work is improving nicely. I'm happy for you to continue to the next lesson. Please refer back to this critique frequently as lesson 5 builds on the concepts covered here and the diagrams I've shared with you should be useful. Keep up the good work.