Hello I'll be handling the critique for your lesson 4 homework

Organic Forms

-Starting with the organic forms I can see that you have kept them simple and easy to work with which is a strategy to produce good results, when it comes to the contour curves you are moving in the right direction, and you are aware of the degree shift as they move through space. Just keep in mind that the contours closer to us will have a narrower degree and the ones furthest away will be more wide, take a look at this diagram https://imgur.com/CfKiLtt. And lastly keep trying to imagine as if you were carving your pen along the surface of the sausage, this way you will start to get the little bits of nuance that help describe how this form exists in space.

Insects

-Okay moving on to the constructions themselves, the first thing I want to call out is that you seem to be leaving a lot of empty space on the page, by limiting the space available in the page you are also limiting your ability to engage in spatial reasoning and you are also making it harder to engage your whole arm when drawing. The best approach is to give each individual drawing as much room on the page as you can, only when that drawing is done you can assess if there is room for another, if there is not then it is perfectly fine to have only one drawing on the page as long as it is making full use of the space available.

-I also want to address your use of contour lines, keep in mind that they are a useful tool to describe how a form sits in 3D space but they can easily work against us by flattening our drawings, so it is better to use them sparingly. They work fine when you want to bring out the volume of any individual form, but they are not so good at describing how each one of these individual forms relate to one another, except for intersections.

This is where the additional masses come in, and in general you are moving in the right direction.

One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette. Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure.

You can see this processing demonstrated in this diagram, https://i.imgur.com/IINKdQA.png.

-Looking at your bee I can see that you slipped into cutting into the silhouette of the abdomen and thorax. You blocked in your abdomen but then you proceeded to cut into it, remember that we should avoid this as it reminds the viewer that we are looking at a flat drawing, you can read more about it here

-Moving on, I like to see what you have applied the sausage method well, in a way that captures both the flow and solidity of these limbs in equal measure, I'll just link you to this diagram because you will continue to use this strategy in lesson 5.

-And lastly keep looking for opportunities to push your constructions even further, specially the heads of the insects, try to add the facial features in a way that follow the plane of the structure and breaking everything onto simpler and smaller components rather than trying to capture a lot of things at once, you can see an example here (https://imgur.com/X4tx6KB).

Okayyy that should be about everything I wanted to cover, you can keep working on these issues on lesson 5 so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete (if any of the linked diagram doesn't work tell me and I will resend them to your associated discord account)