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

Starting with your sausage forms it looks like you may need to revisit the exercise instructions more frequently, to refresh your memory of what is required.

• Firstly, for this exercise we’re looking for forms that stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and while this isn’t always easy, there’s a big difference between aiming for these characteristics as we see in your first page, and experimenting with more arbitrary shapes as we see on the second page. Focusing on those simple properties for each form helps us to capture the illusion of solidity for each one, which in turn is very valuable in using these sausages as one of the core building blocks of our constructions.

• Secondly, you’re consistently skipping step 2 of the exercise instructions. A flow line is useful for helping to keep the contour curves/ellipses aligned correctly, because we can aim to have each curve cut into two symmetrical halves by the central line.

• You’re doing pretty well at drawing the forms themselves with smooth confident lines, but I noticed that a significant proportion of your contour curves are stiff, breaking the second principle of markmaking introduced in lesson 1. As discussed here your first priority for the contours is a smooth confident stroke, so make sure you get that down before worrying about the accuracy. Looking through your previous submissions, I see prioritising a smooth confident stroke has been brought up a few times, so I think you might find it helpful to read through this comment from Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation, and how we use the ghosting method to eliminate it. Another factor that can cause lines to become stiff, is limiting your range of motion switching to drawing from the wrist or elbow instead of engaging your whole arm. If you need a refresher on how to use your arm, you can find the instructions on this page of lesson 1.

• I noticed on the second page that you’d stopped hooking your contour curves around the form. While this isn’t necessarily a mistake on its own, and Uncomfortable does talk about gradually reducing the overshoot, your narrow curves are falling into this common issue so I’d strongly recommend you continue to hook your contour curves around as you did on the first page.

• As introduced here in lesson 1 we insist on students drawing 2-3 circuits around all ellipses freehanded in this course, because it helps to keep them smooth and even. This applies to the small contour ellipses on the tips of your forms.

• This last point is a lower priority, but still worth pointing out. Keep in mind that as discussed here 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions the issue with stiff linework continues to occur intermittently. Not everywhere, but frequently enough to cause concern. As discussed above, being very deliberate about going through the 3 phases of the ghosting method and engaging your whole arm is important for all of your construction lines (the stiff precision we get from drawing from the wrist is useful for texture) but I want to explain two other factors that may be making drawing smooth confident lines more difficult for you than it really needs to be.

How we use the space available to us 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. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing.

I think, because ThatOneMushroomGuy already instructed you to draw bigger, and you’re clearly having a hard time gauging how big is big enough, the best course of action for you will be to stick to one construction per page, and try to fill the space available to you with that single construction. As the constructions get more complex and demanding later in the course, drawing larger will be an advantage, especially for fiddly areas such as legs and heads.

The second factor that is negatively impacting the quality of your lines is that sometimes you over-use additional line weight. For example, if we look at the two ants at the top of this page it looks like you’d pretty much traced back over all the lines that you wanted to assert as visible. While this approach is a perfectly valid strategy for drawing in general, as discussed in this section of lesson 2 this is firmly discouraged throughout the course, because it tends to take initially smooth and confident lines and make them wobblier.

Instead of tracing back over extensive sections of existing linework, the approach for additional line weight that is most useful is what you’ll find in this video from lesson 1. By using line weight specifically for clarifying overlaps between forms, and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur, it can be applied with a single confident super imposed stroke.

Moving along to the constructional aspect of these exercises, I’m happy to see that you start each construction off with simple forms that can easily be perceived as solid and three dimensional, and you’re pretty conscientious about drawing through and completing your forms, including the parts we can’t see, which shows that you’re understanding how the entire form sits in space, good work.

Keep in mind that when you place those first forms on the page, you are laying down a foundation for the rest of the construction. Each piece we add to the construction should attach to what is already in place with a specific relationship. We build up the construction in successive passes, gradually working our way from those big simple forms to smaller and more subtle additions, without adding more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given point. For example if we look at the head of this beetle you’d established a solid ball form, but then appear to have largely ignored that ball when you went on to draw “the actual head.” There are no clearly defining elements that explain how the simple starting form is supposed to support the finished head, so the construction falls flat.

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 its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form that 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 stonefly nymh in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of a form you had already drawn. On this beetle 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 fine 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 constructions 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 with 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 want to cover 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 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 the base structure or armature that captures that captures both the solidity and gestural flow of the 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 build up the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this ant leg demo. Try to stick to the specifics of the sausage method for constructing insect/animal legs in future, to the best of your current understanding and ability.

The last point that needs to be discussed is the approach to texture and detail, once the construction phase is complete. I can’t tell which 4 pages were supposed to be your construction only pages, as you seem to have added texture to all of them. Not a big problem in itself, but it does suggest you should be more careful when going through the assignment instructions. Right now it looks like you’re getting distracted by the idea of decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

All right, I think that should cover it. This critique is (by necessity) very dense, so give yourself plenty of time to go though it all carefully, and inspect the linked sections of lesson material and additional diagrams I’ve shared. Once you’ve given yourself time to absorb this information, I’d like you to complete some additional pages to address the points discussed here.

Please complete the following:

• 1 page of sausage forms with contour curves.

• 2 pages of insect constructions with no texture.

• 2 pages of insect constructions which may include texture if you wish, but if you’d like to stick to construction only that’s fine.