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

Starting with your organic forms, it is good to see you keeping your lines smooth and confident here, and most of these are sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. On this page some of your forms have one end larger than the other, so focus on keeping the ends more even in size when practising this exercise in future.

You're doing pretty well with experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves, and paying attention to their alignment, well done.

Moving on to your insect constructions you are by and large doing a great job. There are a few little things I'll draw your attention to, but as a whole I can see very clearly that you're thinking hard about building up your constructions one step at a time, from simple to complex, and striving to consider how all these pieces you draw exist not as lines on a flat piece of paper, but as solid forms in 3D space.

On the whole you're doing pretty well at building your constructions "in 3D" but I do have some advice to share with you that should help you with this as you move forward.

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 haven't cut back inside forms you have already drawn very much, but something I do see happening in a few places is extending off existing forms using single lines and partial shapes as highlighted on this spider leg. This doesn't quite give the viewer enough information to understand how these additions connect to the existing structure in 3D space, so they feel flat.

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.

For the most part you're doing a good job with building your constructions up with complete 3D forms, but I'll go ahead and share some demonstrations with this beetle horn demo, and 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 you've stuck with the sausage method for constructing your legs and are applying it quite well. When it comes to how we build onto these sausage forms to arrive at a more complete leg construction there are some strategies that work better than others. 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. This diagram shows another example of how to define clear 3D relationships between existing forms and new additions as we build things up.

We can take this much further, as shown in this ant leg demo which captures some of the complexities we see in these kinds of structures. I'll also share this example of the sausage method being applied to a dog leg as we'd like students to continue to use the sausage method to construct legs throughout the next lesson.

So! That about covers it. You're doing very well, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.