Hello MajorLee12, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms most of your lines look smooth and confident, which is great. It looks like you’re aiming to draw forms with the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, although there is scope for your forms to stick to those characteristics more closely. Quite a lot of these forms have some swelling though their midsections (in some cases it is subtle, and some are more obvious) making them bloated, which can cause the forms to become stiff. I think this is partially caused by a tendency to draw a lot of your forms very short and fat, try making them a bit longer and I think you’ll have an easier time keeping the width consistent along their length. Make sure you’re consciously aiming to keep the ends evenly sized too, there are a couple of forms on your pages with one end much larger than the other, which we want to avoid.

Looking at your contour curves I’m happy to see you drawing these with smooth confident lines, which is your first priority. There is a bit of room for improvement when it comes to fitting your curves snugly against the edges of the forms, but this isn’t a huge concern as your accuracy will gradually improve with practice, as long as you are mindful about what you are doing.

Looking at your pages, you seem to be placing a small contour ellipse on one end of each form, but the contour curves on some of your forms are telling us that neither end of the form is facing towards 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 on the whole you are approaching these with the right things in mind, you’re keeping most of your linework confident and purposeful, and you do a good job of establishing simple solid forms as a foundation for your constructions. It looks like you’re thinking through how your forms sit in 3D space, and I’m pleased that you usually “draw through” and complete your forms, instead of cutting things off where they are obscured in the reference. This is great as it shows you’re figuring out how the whole form sits in space, and fitting things together like a 3D puzzle, rather than just transferring 2D shapes from the reference photo.

So, you’re largely on the right track, although I do have a few points to discuss which I hope will help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises in future.

The first of these 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 work here in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that many 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 this ant 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. (I did see you trying to make the mandibles feel 3D by adding a bunch of contour lines to them, this is good thinking, but not quite the right tool for the job. I’ll discuss using contour lines later.) 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 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.

Circling back to contour lines, these fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want. The question comes down to this: "how many do you really need?"

Unfortunately, that first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns. The first one you add will probably help a great deal in making that given form feel three dimensional. The second however will help much less - but this still may be enough to be useful. The third, the fourth... their effectiveness and contribution will continue to drop off sharply, and you're very quickly going to end up in a situation where adding another will not help. I find it pretty rare that more than two is really necessary. Anything else just becomes excessive.

Be sure to consider this when you go through the planning phase of the contour lines you wish to add. Ask yourself what they're meant to contribute. Furthermore, ask yourself if you can actually use the second (form intersection) type instead - these are by their very nature vastly more effective, because of how they actually define the relationship between forms. This relationship causes each form to reinforce the other, solidifying the illusion that they exist in three dimensions. They'll often make the first type somewhat obsolete in many cases.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were aiming to use the sausage method for constructing your legs, although you had some issues sticking to simple sausage forms consistently. That’s fairly common, and it does get easier with practice. Make sure you are actively aiming to stick to simple sausages (with the same properties as for the organic forms exercise) for each limb section, I’ve marked out a couple of examples here where it looks like this may not have been a priority for you. You appear to be a bit intermittent about applying a contour line to each joint to define how the forms intersect. This is an important step for reinforcing the solidity of the construction, so make a note to ensure that you remember to include them consistently as you move forward.

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, 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 this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

The next point I need to cover is that I noticed a lot of liberal use of heavier line weight/cast shadows in ways that suggested you weren't necessarily distinguishing between the two. While they're similar in some ways, line weight and cast shadows have to adhere to different rules. Line weight can cling to the silhouette of a form, but has to remain very subtle and light, rather than getting super heavy and dark. It relies on relative changes in thickness that one's subconscious will notice. It's like whispering, rather than shouting. Cast shadows on the other hand do not cling to the silhouette of a form, and instead are cast onto a different surface. They can be much broader and heavier, but we can't have them floating arbitrarily in space without an actual surface to receive them. Also keep in mind that within the bounds of this course we use additional line weight for a specific purpose. As discussed in this video from lesson 1 we use line weight as a tool to clarify overlaps between forms, restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur.

The last thing I wanted to mention is just a reminder to try to keep your line thickness consistent through the various stages of construction. Sometimes you’ll start out with rather faint lines, which can encourage treating those first forms as guidelines or suggestions, rather than solid forms set in stone. It tends to lead to redrawing more, or tracing back over earlier lines to make them more visible, rather than allowing the parts of those first forms that can stand for themselves to do so.

All righty, there is a lot of information here, so you may need to read through it a few times to absorb it all, and it may help to take notes in your own words of key things to remember. Once you’ve done that, you’re good to move onto the next lesson, applying the points discussed here to your animal constructions. Keep up the good work.