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

To ensure that the feedback we provide is as helpful to you as possible, in future please make sure the whole page is visible when taking photos of your work. There are a couple of pages like this one where parts of your work are being cropped off the image, which does make it more difficult to accurately asses.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment 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.

Something that is a problem however, is that you’re not drawing through your ellipses, which is discussed within the exercise instructions as a common mistake to be avoided. You’re also skipping step 2 from the exercise instructions, where we add a central flow line. The flow line can help students think about how to keep the contour curves/ellipses aligned perpendicular to the length of the form, so I’d like you to include this step when practising this exercise in future.

You’ve done a good job of drawing the forms themselves with smooth confident lines, and it looks like you’re aiming to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There are a couple of forms that either swell through their midsection or get slightly pinched, but not by very much, and I’m confident that your accuracy will continue to improve with practice.

I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with shifting the degree of your ellipses, but your contour curves rely more on flipping direction than actually getting wider or narrower.

Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines should be shifting wider as we slide along the sausage form, moving farther away from the viewer. This is also influenced by the way in which the sausages themselves turn in space, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb to follow. If you're unsure as to why that is, review the Lesson 1 ellipses video. You can also see a good 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 most of your linework continues to look smooth, confident and purposeful, which is great. Do remember to draw around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page, as this helps to keep them smooth and even. As discussed here in lesson 1, this is something we ask you to do for every ellipse freehanded in this course, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass.

I’ve got a few points to cover which I hope will help you to get more out of these constructions. Firstly, 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.

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 here and there 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.

Also, when following along with one of the demos, make sure you follow all of the steps as closely as you can. I noticed you cut your wasp drawing short, omitting the antennae, abdomen segmentation, and additional forms along the legs. By following all of the steps you’ll get a stronger grasp of the techniques Uncomfortable is using, and you’ll have a better chance at being able to apply these methods to constructions using your own choice of reference later.

You’re doing pretty well at starting your constructions off simple, rather than jumping straight into too much detail, which is great. When you place your first forms on the page it is really important that you “draw through” and complete them, instead of cutting some of them off where they pass behind one another. Take a look at the first step of the louse demo to see what I mean. See how Uncomfortable has drawn complete ball-like forms for the head, thorax, and abdomen, allowing his ellipses to overlap so he can show how the forms connect together in 3D. I noticed a few of your constructions, such as this beetle where you’re only drawing the parts of these basic forms that are visible, cutting parts of them off where they pass behind one another. These exercises are designed to help you develop a stronger understanding of how your forms exist in 3D, and drawing each form in its entirety is an important part of that process. If you only draw the parts that are visible, it is very easy to slip back into thinking in 2D, simply transferring the flat 2D shapes in your reference onto the flat 2D space of your piece of paper without fully understanding how things fit together in 3D.

Moving on, 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.

We can see this happening on quite a few of your constructions, 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.

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 this butterfly I also marked in blue some 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 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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were aiming to stick to the sausage method for the majority of your leg constructions, which is a good start. In addition to making sure you draw through and complete each limb section, don’t forget the contour line at each joint which we use to explain how the sausage forms penetrate one another in space (like the contour lines from the form intersections exercise) reinforcing the solidity of the construction.

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 we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5 too.

Now, there is quite a lot of information in this critique, so you may need to read through it a few times to absorb it all. Once you have done so, I would like you to complete some additional pages to address the points called out here. Please complete the following:

• 1 page of organic forms, half with contour ellipses, and half with contour curves. Remember to draw around your ellipses 2-3 times, and work on shifting the degree of your curves.

• Draw along with the shrimp and lobster constructions from the informal demos page, following each step as closely as you can.

• 3 additional pages of insect/arachnid constructions. You can also use crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters or shrimp for this lesson, some students find them easer to look at than bugs. Please upload the reference images (or share links to the images you used) when you submit these.