Hello Byte5115, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Sometimes one of the ends will get just slightly pointy, so that is something to keep an eye on.

You're doing a good job of keeping your lines smooth and confident in this exercise, though you appear to have a habit of redrawing your lines sometimes. Leaving the mistakes alone allows us to come back after the page is complete to assess where the mistakes occurred, and how we might do better in the future. On the other hand, redoing a line generally just makes the work messier.

You're showing that you understand that the contour curves should be cut into two symmetrical halves by the central flow line, although there are cases like this where your curves are significantly misaligned. Take your time with every curve, aligning it to the best of your current ability.

The majority of your contour curves are sticking to a similar degree which is a common mistake. 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.

I noticed on a couple of forms, including this one, that you'd added a contour ellipse to a tip of the form that faces away from the viewer. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.

Moving on to your insect constructions I can see plenty of potential here, as you're starting to develop a sense for how the forms you draw exist in 3D space. However there are a few issues which are bringing down the quality of your work and undermining your efforts to learn from these exercises.

The first point that stood out is that you're not following the principles of markmaking which were introduced here in lesson 1. Your ellipses are coming out well, but a lot of your other marks are scratchy and/or wobbly. Sometimes students will do a good job with their markmaking in the first couple of lessons, and then lapse into old habits when they get to constructing "real things" in lesson 3 onwards. The thing to remember is that every drawing we do in this course is an exercise, and every mark we make should be the result of a deliberate, concious decision. Throughout this course we work to train our instincts, by drilling the techniques down to a subconscious level. The exercises are far less effective if we try to rely on our instincts to complete them (sketching loosely, making marks without thinking) so to get the most out of these constructions you'll need to think through each mark you make, and use the ghosting method for every line.

This issue is compounded by the tendency to redraw your lines and/or add lineweight in arbitrary places. The only places a line should appear twice is ellipses (which we draw around two full times before lifting the pen off the page) and when using additional line weight to clarify overlaps between forms, restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur and applying it with a single ghosted superimposed stoke. You can find an explanation and demonstration of how to apply line weight in this video.

When you repeatedly redraw your lines we end up with several lines representing the edge of a single form, giving the viewer a number of possible interpretations. Whichever line the viewer chooses to follow, there will still be others present on the page to contradict it, undermining the viewer's suspension of disbelief and reminding them that they are just looking at lines on a flat piece of paper.

Something that I think will help with the linework issues you're experiencing is to draw your constructions larger. Right now it appears that you are (to some extent) 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. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

It's extremely important that you follow each of the demos directly. Do not cut them short, do not alter their steps. Follow them to the letter so you can understand the process Uncomfortable is employing, and then employ that process fully on your own. For example you included drawings done along with the wasp demo and the louse demo, but neither of your draw-alongs show correct application of the sausage method of leg construction as introduced here. Unfortunately this issue gets perpetuated across the whole set, as you're frequently constructing your legs using ellipses (which are not sausage forms) or partial flat shapes.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method 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.

The next point I want to talk about relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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 crab in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that some of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image I've marked with black a few examples of 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. I also marked a few spots with a question mark a few places where I couldn't tell where the silhouette was supposed to be (due to redrawing lines) but the silhouette of an existing form had been altered with a single line, flattening it out.

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.

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.

Leaving forms open-ended (like the hind leg of the grasshopper on your second page) makes it unclear where the edge of the form is supposed to be and flattens it out. If your construction won't fit on the page you can "cap off" your form with an ellipse, just like we close of the ends of branches in the branch exercise.

The last point I need to call out is that if you choose to add texture to a construction you should strive to apply it in the manner introduced in the texture section of lesson 2. In particular, do not use hatching to indicate form shading and do not scribble. You'll also find these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

Now, I am sure you have every ability to do a great job with this lesson, but I cannot move you onto the next lesson until you stick more closely to the principles of markmaking. I will be assigning some revisions for you to address the points we've covered here.

Please complete the following:

• 1 drawing done following the shrimp demo. Take care to follow each step as closely as you can.

• 3 pages of insect or arachnid constructions using reference of your choice.