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

Starting with your sausage forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment for lesson 4 was for both pages to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

You’re doing a great job of keeping your linework smooth and confident for this exercise.

In these pages you’re getting a mixture of some forms that stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and some that swell through their midsections. Make sure you’re actively aiming to keep the width of the forms consistent along their length, and your consistency should continue to improve with practice.

You’re doing pretty well at fitting your curves snugly against the edges of your forms, and I’m pleased to see that you’re experimenting with shifting their degree as we slide along the length of the forms, as this is an aspect of the exercise that students often overlook. This is actually something Uncomfortable explains in more depth in the updated video for this exercise which was released a few days ago. I’d recommend giving it a watch before you next tackle this exercise in your warmups.

Moving on to your insect constructions, I should address your submission comment. No you should not be submitting additional pages. As you noted yourself, this would demand extra time from the individual providing feedback, but it would also be considered grinding, which we discourage.

I want to stress what Uncomfortable mentions in this video from Lesson 0. When assigned a certain number of pages of work, you should only be doing what's asked. It's not uncommon that when we have students feeling the need to complete more pages, that they tend to focus less on executing each individual instance of the exercise to the best of their current ability - taking the time to execute each mark, draw each shape, and construct each form as well as they reasonably can (regardless of how much time that takes them), and more on simply getting the exercise done in quantity - but not necessarily to the best of their ability.

Drawing more itself isn't a bad thing on its face, but it's about how it impacts the manner in which we engage with the work. You will always have more opportunities to practice these exercises in your warmups - the quantity we assign is not with the expectation of seeing growth and improvement over the set, but just to judge whether your understanding of what you're meant to be doing with the exercise is correct, or whether it requires clarification. Can't really judge that too well if you're spreading the time, energy, and effort you could have dedicated to a single page of a given exercise over multiple pages.

There is one loophole to this. As explained in the homework assignment we strongly recommend that you draw along with the demos, but it is up to you whether you wish to include them as part of your homework submission. So you could have swapped out your demo drawings for up to 3 additional pages of constructions from your own choice of reference.

Speaking of demos, make sure you follow them closely and complete all the steps so you can understand the process Uncomfortable is employing, and then employ that process fully on your own. In most cases you’ve done this well, but your wasp demo is missing several pieces.

One thing you did really well with the wasp demo, is drawing it quite large, because how we use the space available to us on the page makes a big difference. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now you often draw quite small, and there are pages like this one where it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

So for example, this spider has room to either be drawn double the size, or for another construction to be added. Having one small construction on a page surrounded by tons of blank empty space is unwise. It is either robbing you of the space you need to complete the construction to the best of your current ability, or the practice you could get by adding another.

As to time, just be sure to give each drawing as much time as it requires - not just for drawing, but for observing your reference as well. There are cases such as this page where you oversimplify a little too much in ways that it suggests you could probably benefit from pushing yourself to spend more time looking at your reference (specifically doing so continuously throughout the drawing process, rather than only up-front). The specifics of where those things occur isn't really that important - just something to keep in mind. Sometimes students may feel rushed to complete some drawings faster, simply because they only have a certain amount of time in a given sitting. If you ever feel yourself pressured to work faster than you need, remember that you can always set a drawing down and pick it up another day. No need to call it done the moment you get up.

Generally your constructions are off to a good start. You’re doing very well at starting each construction off with simple forms that can easily be perceived as three dimensional, and I’m happy to see that you usually draw through and complete each form where they overlap, which will help you develop a stronger understanding of how the entire form sits in space.

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.

Fortunately you don’t appear to cut back inside forms you have already drawn very much, and I’ve marked out one (fairly small) example with red on your spider where it looks like you tried to cut back inside the silhouette of an existing form.

While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. On your Hercules beetle I marked in blue several places where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. While this approach worked fine 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.

Another point worth mentioning with those shrimp and lobster demos, is how the segmentation on the abdomens wraps around the underlying forms in three dimensions, almost like contour curves that have their own volumes. I noticed a few places such as the abdomen of the wasp demo, where the contour curves/segmentation don’t accelerate as they approach the edge of the form which flattens the form.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is great to see that you’ve been striving to stick with the sausage method throughout the set, and by and large you’re doing very well at laying out chains of simple sausage forms and applying a contour line to each joint to show how the forms penetrate one another in space.

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 off to a good start, but this feedback has been (by necessity) quite extensive, so I think the best next step for you will be to complete a couple of additional pages so you can apply this information before moving onto the next lesson. This is not a punishment, I believe addressing the issues I’ve called out here will help you get more out of the next lesson once we do move you forward.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 3 pages of insect constructions.