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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did two pages of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both to be contour curves. It's not uncommon for students to submit 1 page of each, as this was what was assigned in lesson 2. The fact that both of these are ellipses instead of curves means I will need to assign an extra page, with the contour curves, so that I can assess how you're doing with them.

You're generally doing a good job of keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here. Sometimes one end of a form will be slightly larger than the other, but you're pretty close. The forms themselves are smooth and confidently drawn, and so are your ellipses.

I can see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour ellipses, good job. The idea we're trying to get across here is that these ellipses/curves should generally get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form as is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. You can see a good example of how to vary the degree of your contour curves in this diagram which shows a form in various orientations.

Moving on to your insect constructions on the whole, I can tell you're not far off doing a really good job here. I can see that you're developing an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space. You're doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms, and adding things step by step, and I'm happy to see you drawing through your forms like you have X-Ray vision. This helps you to develop your spatial reasoning skills.

Right now there is some thing that is undermining your efforts somewhat, and that is the manner in which you're approaching your linework. In your submission I'm seeing a tendency for you to "sketch" your lines. By that I mean that you'll put down a line or a form onto the page, then either decide that what you really wanted to draw was something different, and you'll draw it again, or you'll automatically go back over your lines and draw them again to reinforce them. This is not the approach that we want you to use in these constructional exercises.

Everything you add to these constructions- every form, every mark, needs to be the result of a conscious decision. If I were to point to something in your construction and ask "why did you do this?" the answer should not be "I don't know". The answer can be wrong, in the sense that your thinking was wrong, but as long as you're thinking it through and have some reason you can give, correct or not, that shows you thought about it.

So, for every line you draw, you must use the ghosting method in full. Every line should be planned and practised before being executed. This will ensure that your thinking occurs in your head and not on your page. And, as has been stated in your lesson 1 and 2 critiques, you should not be redrawing lines to correct them.

Here is one example of a leg form where there are five lines present instead of one. This provides the viewer with five possible interpretations of the silhouette of this leg form, and whichever one they choose, there will always be a bunch of other lines there on the page to contradict that interpretation and remind the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat piece of paper instead of a 3D construction.

This ties into my next point, which relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

1 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.

2 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 work here in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Due to the redrawing of your lines, it's not always easy to tell where your silhouette is supposed to be. Here is an example.

On this image I've marked in green where you've done a good job of drawing a 3D form, then in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist in 3D space. The area in red appears to be a collection of lines.

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.

Sometimes you accidentally make small alterations to your silhouette when you add line weight across multiple forms at once. This allows your line weight to "bridge" from one form to another, smoothing out the silhouette, here is an example. Instead, line weight should be added to one form at a time, and should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're working on using the sausage method for constructing legs. 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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

So, for leg construction please use sausage forms.

You have a tendency to use ellipses for your leg forms, which makes them stiff. You want to be aiming for the characteristics of simple sausage forms that were introduced in the organic forms exercise. You don't need to draw around your sausage forms twice. Drawing through your ellipses twice is useful because it leans into the arm's natural tendency to make elliptical motions, but it is not actually helpful when we're trying to draw these sausage forms.

You're doing pretty well at using a contour curve to reinforce the intersection at the joints, just make sure you add them consistently, They're important. And you're starting to explore the use of additional forms to build on your base armature, which is good.

One more thing before I wrap this up. I noticed that you drew 2 constructions on every page. 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 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.

Now, I have given you a number of things to work on here, so I will be assigning some revisions. Each lesson builds upon each other and I'd like to make sure you understand a few of these concepts a bit more so we don't potentially create more problems in the future.

Please complete the following:

1 page of organic forms with contour curves, not ellipses.

3 pages of insect constructions.