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

Starting with your organic forms, I'm happy to see you keeping most of your linework smooth and confident, which does help support the solidity of your forms. You're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There's the occasional form with one end larger than the other, but they're not far enough off to be too concerning.

It is good to see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves, though you appear to be reluctant to push them past a certain width, so that's something to experiment with when practising this exercise in future. You can see an example of how to vary your contour curves in this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

Moving on to your insect constructions, on the whole I'm happy with how you're handling these, as you're demonstrating a strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. The application of segmentation on your abdomens for example, shows that you're thinking about wrapping these additional pieces around a real, solid form, and paying attention to the curvature of that surface in three dimensions.

So, you're doing a great job, and I have 3 main pieces of advice for you to apply as you move forward with the next lesson. The first of these concerns how to reinforce the 3D illusion of your constructions with each step you take.

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 a section of your mantis in red where it looks like you established a ball form for the head with an ellipse, but then drew the actual head inside that ellipse, leaving the hatched areas outside your final construction. On some of your constructions the areas where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (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. 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.

On the same mantis image I marked in blue some examples where you'd extended off the existing form of the thorax using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect 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're already doing a good job of building your constructions in 3D in quite a few areas, though I'll go ahead and share a few examples 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. I'm happy to see that you've been striving to use the sausage method for most of your constructions. Be sure to remember to include a contour line for the intersection at each joint, which is an important step for reinforcing the solidity of your constructions. I can see that you've been exploring how to build onto your basic sausage armatures to capture the bumps, spikes and other complexities wee see in these kinds of structures. When you build onto your legs, work on adding complete forms instead of single lines or flat shapes, as shown here. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. 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 push this method to develop the legs even further, as shown in this ant leg demo. I'll also share this example using a dog leg as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

The last thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves. I encourage you to keep a more consistent line thickness through the various stages of your construction, so that at each step we only add the parts that change instead of redrawing whole forms. For example it looks like you traced back over all the visible sections of your dragonfly's wings, taking your initially smooth confident lines and making them wobblier. During this course additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps, and restricted to localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can find an explanation on applying lineweight in this recently added video.

Okay, I think that should cover it. You've done a great job and I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Please be sure to apply the points discussed in this critique to your animal constructions, so we can build upon them in the next lesson.