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

Starting with your organic forms, I cannot find these in your Imgur album. I’ll need to see these pages before I can mark this lesson as complete.

Moving on to your insect constructions these are starting off well, it is great to see that you’ve started each construction by establishing simple solid forms, and you’re clearly thinking about how these forms sit in 3D space. It is also good that you’re quite conscientious about “drawing through” and completing your forms instead of cutting them off where they overlap, as this gets you thinking about how the whole form exists in space, rather than just transferring 2D shapes over from the reference, nicely done.

There are places where you’re starting to establish specific relationships between your forms, showing how they fit together like a 3D puzzle. I think how you’ve connected the thorax to the abdomen on this page is very effective. You’d drawn two complete new 3D forms and used contour lines to define the intersections where they fit together, helping to reinforce the solidity of the construction in this area.

Make sure you always fully construct your forms end enclose them. On the same page the wings appear unfinished, with the lower edge missing. Another page that appears unfinished is this one, where the front legs are incomplete, and the middle and hind leg, as well as the large prominent antennae, have been completely omitted. Make sure you observe your reference carefully and frequently to find the forms that are present, and reconstruct as much of this information as you can so that you can get as much as possible out of the exercise.

Remember that throughout the course students should aim to stick to the principles of markmaking that were introduced in lesson 1, as closely as possible. Marks should be continuous and unbroken. There are places where your lines get scratchy or broken up which makes it unclear where the edges of your forms are supposed to be. By forcing the viewer into trying to guess how to interpret these marks, it reminds them that they are just looking at a bunch of lines on a flat piece of paper, destroying the 3D illusion we seek to create with these exercises. Be as clear and specific as you can with your linework, and make sure you’re employing the ghosting method for all of your marks, planning and preparing each one, before executing them purposefully, with confidence, from the shoulder.

The next point I need to talk about relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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.

For example, I've marked on your beetle in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this can happen accidentally when there is a gap between the lines passing around an ellipse (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. As marked with red on this wasp this unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

It is also possible to alter the silhouette of an existing form by extending off it with flat partial shapes, as marked with blue here, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how the addition actually connects to the existing structure 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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out a couple different strategies for constructing legs. There are quite a few pages where it looks like you were aiming to use the sausage method of leg construction, but had some issues sticking to simple sausage forms. In particular, remember sausage forms are not ellipses, and using ellipses to construct legs tends to make them way too stiff.

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 this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are showing plenty of promise, but we need to nip the markmaking issues in the bud before moving forwards. Please carefully read through this feedback and apply the information provided here to two new pages of insect constructions, to the best of your current understanding and ability.

Please submit

• The 2 missing pages of organic forms with contour curves.

• 2 additional pages of insect constructions.