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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did two pages 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.

You’re linework appears smooth and confident, and you’re doing very well with sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

It is good to see that you’re experimenting with shifting the degree of your ellipses, tough I notice you usually draw them narrow in the midsection of the form and wider towards the ends. Keep in mind that barring any actual bending of the form, a sausage is essentially a cylinder which follows the same logic explained here in the ellipses section of lesson 1. This means that the degree of the contour curves 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. You can 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 overall you've done very well, but there are a few points I want to draw to your attention. The biggest of these is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had.

Starting with this main point, it's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the later forms respect and even reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

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 grasshopper in red a couple of areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Here are a few more examples on your wasp, and while I’m not entirely certain that you intended to cut inside the silhouette of the abdomen (or if the segmentation just doesn’t wrap all the way around the underlying form) on the head it is very clear.

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 the same wasp 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.

Here is an example of how we could connect the thorax and abdomen of your wasp together by constructing a complete new form, establishing a more three dimensional relationship between the pieces. 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 working with the sausage method in mind for some of your pages, as well as trying 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, 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.

Moving on, I think it is worth explaining that how we use the space on the page makes a big difference. 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. While there is a lot of variation in how effectively you use the space on the page, cases like this jumping spider which have tons of blank empty space around them are somewhat unwise. By drawing the construction larger, you could very well have allowed yourself much more room to explore the spatial problems with which you were grappling. Space really helps there - it gives our minds more room to think through the problems and engages the part of the brain responsible for spatial reasoning more effectively. It also allows us to engage our whole arm from the shoulder more easily, especially when we're not as comfortable with it. That would probably have helped with constructing all those little leg forms without the linework becoming cramped.

Lastly, when adding texture to a construction try your best to follow the process introduced in this section of lesson 2, as this will help ensure you get as much as possible from it, in terms of these constructions all being exercises in spatial reasoning. You’re definitely on the right track in some cases, I can see some very clear intentionally designed shadow shapes on the mantis, for example. There are other pages where you’ve thrown in a few one-off marks as decoration, or used hatching lines to create some form shading, for example on the jumping spider’s abdomen.

Now, all in all your work is coming together very well, and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you tackle the next lesson, they will continue to apply to animal constructions as well.