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

Oh, but there’s a lion wearing sunglasses on the underside of this cricket which I thought was cool. Jokes aside, you’re welcome to practice with crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, shrimp etc) instead of insects and arachnids, if you find them less icky.

Starting with your organic forms it is good to see you drawing these forms with smooth confident lines. You’re getting a mixture of some forms which are sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and a few which have ends of different sizes or swelling through their midsection. Keep striving to stick to those simple properties when practising this exercise in your warmups, as this is what makes these forms so useful as building blocks for insect and animal constructions.

You’re doing pretty well at shifting the degree of your contour curves, although you do appear reluctant to push them past a certain width, so keep experimenting.

I noticed that you’d placed small contour ellipses on both ends of all of your forms. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. In most cases you were correct to place the ellipses on both ends, but the form on the upper left of the first page is an example of placing the ellipse on and end that faces away from the viewer. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions these are coming together well. I can see that you’re putting a lot of thought into how your forms exist in space, and fitting the various pieces of your constructions together like a 3D puzzle. This is what we hope to see from students in this lesson, so the majority of this feedback is going to be additional advice to help you get even more out of your constructions in future, rather than calling out mistakes.

The first thing I want 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.

Fortunately you don’t cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn very much, although I did notice one example, which I have marked in red on this page. Here it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the ball form you had established for the thorax. Sometimes this can happen accidentally, when there are gaps between lines going around your ellipses (which is totally normal) and we then pick one of the inner lines to serve as the silhouette of the ball form. This does unfortunately leave a stray line outside the construction, which does create some visual issues. We can avoid this by always using the outer line of ellipses as the form’s silhouette.

On the same image I marked in blue a couple of spots where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes or one-off lines, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. For the antennae, a single line doesn’t quite provide enough information to understand how it sits in space, so we’ll want to construct a complete form, even if it results in the construction not matching up with the proportions in the reference perfectly. This is much like how we always use the branch construction method for drawing branches and stems in the previous lesson on constructing plants, even for branches that are very thin.

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.

As I’ve marked with green on your work, you’re already doing a good job of building up your constructions with complete 3D forms in many places, but I will still show a couple of examples with you that you may find helpful. 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 is great to see that you’ve made an effort to stick with the sausage method, and you’re doing quite well at laying out chains of simple sausage forms. You appear to be a bit inconsistent about applying a contour curve to each joint, and I’ve added them in purple to the front leg of this construction. These little contour lines might seem insignificant, but defining how these forms intersect (like in the form intersections exercise from lesson 2) is a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction, so make a note to include them in future.

It is good to see that you’ve been building onto your sausage armatures, to add the lumps, bumps, spikes and other complexity that we see in these structures. I’ve got a couple of diagrams to share with you that I hope will help you when approaching these sorts of additions in the next lesson. This diagram shows how to work with 3D forms instead of flat shapes and one-off lines, and this diagram shows how it is more effective to break an addition into pieces than to fully envelop an existing form within another one. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

We can see how this approach can be pushed further with this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

All right, I think that should cover it. You’ve done a good job with this lesson so I’ll go ahead and mark it as complete. Please refer to the diagrams and demos I’ve shared with you here as you go through the next lesson, they should help you tackle your animal constructions.