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

Starting with your organic forms it looks like you're working towards sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of them are coming out fairly well. There are a few places where one end of your form will get flattened or pointy, instead of being smoothly rounded like a ball. Sometimes one end of is larger than the other, or there will be some (very slight) pinching or bulging in the middle, which we want to avoid, so keep that in mind when you practise these in your warmups.

You're doing a good job of flipping the direction of your contour curves when you want to draw a form with both ends facing towards the viewer. When you draw a form with one end facing towards the viewer you tend to keep their degree quite similar. 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 see a good example of how to vary your curves in this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

There are a number of contour curves that are missing the sides of the form, instead of being snugly pinched between the edges of the organic form. I know it isn't easy to get them to fit snugly and draw them confidently, but keep working on it, and make sure that you're using the ghosting method to full effect to give you the best chance of executing the mark you intend to make, with confidence.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're doing a good job of starting your constructions with simple solid forms, and I'm happy to see that you're generally "drawing through" and completing your forms by drawing the parts you can't see, like you have X-ray vision. This approach will help to reinforce your understanding of 3D space, nice work.

I think you may have misunderstood how to apply additional line weight to these constructions. Right now, you seem to be going back over all (or most) of the silhouette of some of your drawings to reinforce it with extra line weight, sometimes multiple times. Here is an example. Tracing back over your lines like this causes your initially smooth and confident lines to get wobblier. The most effective use of line weight, given the limitations of this course is specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight. Line weight should be added with a single, confident, ghosted, super imposed stroke, as shown here.

I'm noticing a tendency to start your construction off lighter, and then increase the weight of your marks as you progress. This can encourage us to redraw more of the structure than we strictly need to. I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight as discussed above only towards the end.

There's also a more generalised tendency to arbitrarily repeat or redraw your lines, I've noted some examples here. As introduced in the principles of markmaking section of lesson 1, lines should be smooth, continuous and unbroken, so avoid scratching lots of little marks together to form one line.

Also remember that at no point in this course are we "sketching," every line you draw should serve a clear purpose. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to use the ghosting method for every line you draw in these exercises. As part of the planning stage, ask yourself what the line you are about to draw will contribute to your construction.

Another consequence of redrawing lines, in ending up with all of these different lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing.

My next point 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. On the same image I marked in blue where it looks like 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. I've marked another example on this beetle in blue, where you'd added some partial shapes which don't have a three dimensional connection to the underlying leg structure. In green I wanted to point out that you'd done a great job with these additions, which are complete 3D forms and feel convincing and solid.

So, 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 tried out a few different strategies 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 as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

I think it is likely that you're trying to use the sausage method to construct most of your legs, but there are a few pointers I can give to get you a bit closer to applying it correctly.

• On this page most of your leg forms are more like stretched ellipses than sausage forms, they're pointy at the ends and bulging in the middle. Sausages have rounded ends and a consistent width along their length.

• If we look at the hind leg of this bee some of the forms are getting a little too complex. There's one with flattened ends, and another with one end much larger than the other.

• A lot of your leg constructions are missing the contour curves for the intersections where these sausage forms join together. You can see them highlighted in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram. These contour curves might seem small and insignificant but they do a great deal to explain how your forms connect together in 3D space, so be sure to include them in future.

In a lot of ways you're not far off doing a great job here, but I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. The concepts taught in these lessons build on each other, so If I send you forward with unaddressed issues they may just become exacerbated in the next lesson.

Please complete 2 pages of insect constructions.

If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.