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

Starting with your organic forms these are excellent, most of your lines are smooth and confident and you've done a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

Your contour curves are pretty well aligned and it is good to see that you've experimented with varying the degree of these curves too.

What you have here is very good, but something you can try in future is experimenting with varying the sizes of your forms a bit more, they're all quite similar in these pages.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work here is honestly very well done. Your markmaking is clear, confident and purposeful, and you're following the constructional steps from the lesson, starting with simple solid forms and gradually building complexity piece by piece. Your constructions feel solid and three dimensional, but I think it is worth discussing why that is, and for that I'm going to make use of a piece of prewritten text:

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.

So, fortunately you're already sticking to this rule pretty well. I'm not sure if you have an intuitive sense for how to take actions on your constructions in 3D or if you've been reading other students' critiques to get an idea of what the most common pieces of advice given to students are. Either way, you're doing a good job here, and we'd like you to continue to stick to this rule when handling your animal constructions in the next lesson.

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.

Although you're already putting this into practice in many places, I will still share a couple of examples with this beetle horn demo, and this ant head demo, which may be of use to you.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. When it comes to using the sausage method and building upon it, I can see that you are sticking to it pretty well, although there are some approaches to building up structure on top of those base sausage armatures 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, (as seen on this ladybird for example) 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. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, 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.

On this spider you're running into these hotdog-bun type situations where you wrap additional forms lengthwise around a given sausage segment (giving the impression of a sausage inside of a bun). Running lengthwise in this manner gives us a more limited opportunity to really "wrap" the new masses around the existing sausage. Instead, if we twist those new masses around the existing structure, as demonstrated in this ant leg demo, we can focus much more on how the silhouette of the new mass interacts with the existing structure. Here we can actually design that silhouette, rather than just stamping down a flat shape on the leg. Although in the context of this spider construction, it may make sense to simply start with wider leg sausages for some sections, as you've ended up extending them quite uniformly along their length.

As we'd like you to continue to use the sausage method in the next lesson I'll also share this dog leg demo which shows how this method can be applied to animals.

Before I wrap this up I have a couple of little nitpicks you may want to think about.

• On the abdomen of this fruit fly you used contour curves on your basic form that tell us the front end of the form is closer to the viewer, but the curvature of the segmentation you've wrapped around this form tell the opposite story, these additional forms suggest the rear end of the abdomen is closest to the viewer. This contradiction could confuse the viewer and undermine the 3d illusion somewhat.

• Insect wings are often paper thin forms flowing though 3D space, and are well suited to the leaf construction method introduced in lesson 3. You've managed to keep your lines smooth and confident even though you appear to be drawing your wings all in one go, but I'd like you to keep the idea of starting with simple flow lines and building complexity piece by piece in mind in future, especially if you want to capture more complexity in their edges.

So! All in all, great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.