Hello Waluis, Happy New Year. I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms the majority of your forms are sticking fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, but remember we’re aiming to avoid forms swelling continuously through their midsection like this one or making the ends significantly different sizes like this one.

Simple sausages with two round ends of equal size, connected by a bendy tube of consistent width, make very useful building blocks for insect and animal constructions, so try to stick to those properties consistently when practising this exercise in your warmups.

It is good to see that you’re making a deliberate effort to shift the degree of your contour curves. Some of them do look a touch stiff and hesitant, so remember to prioritise a smooth confident execution of your lines first and foremost.

When deciding which end(s) of your forms to add small contour ellipses to, 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 first and foremost, remember you should be sticking to the principles of markmaking throughout this course. The linework on your louse demo draw-along is pretty good, but all the constructions done from your own choice of reference have issues with scratchy and/or wobbly lines.

It is entirely normal to find drawing constructions from your own choice of reference more challenging than following the demos. With the demos Uncomfortable has already observed the reference, identified the basic forms, and reconstructed it step-by-step. Following along with those steps is a relatively straightforward task, but coming up with your own constructions is far more cognitively demanding, and it looks like all the extra thinking about observation and construction pulled your conscious efforts away from the the linework.

It looks like there are areas where you were combining thinking about what you want to draw, with the physical act of making the mark, resulting in slowing down the execution of the line (so it gets wobbly) or making choppy little strokes from the wrist instead of one smooth line. In order to make sure you stick to the principles of markmaking and make each line with a clear purpose, make sure you are employing the ghosting method for every line. One huge advantage of using the ghosting method is that is separates each line into phases. Before drawing the mark we need to plan what kind of mark we want to draw, and where it will go. This is where your decision making happens. We want to avoid thinking on the page, as this quickly leads to constructions becoming messy and confusing. Once we’ve decided what line we want to draw, using the preparation phase to build up temporary muscle memory allows us to complete the final execution phase smoothly, with confidence. If any of this sounds at all unfamiliar, I strongly recommend revisiting the instructions for the ghosted lines exercise, where the ghosting method is introduced.

Another thing that can help with linework is to draw bigger. You’re generally drawing reasonably large already, but I noticed a few constructions, such as your rhino beetle and your scorpion demo, had a lot of blank empty space left on the page that could potentially have been used by drawing larger. Doing so tends to make it easier to engage the shoulder and draw smooth linework, as well as giving you more space to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these constructions.

The next point I need 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.

We can see this happening quite a bit in your submission. For example, I've marked on your shrimp and your ant 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 some of the smaller of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that there would be gaps between the lines passing around your ellipses (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 leaves 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 your 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 think this is happening in the legs too, but it is pretty unclear what you’re intending to do due to some of the linework being broken or drawn multiple times.) 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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of 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 this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

Finally let’s touch on the topic of texture and detail. I think this weevil probably has the best application of texture out of the set. Here I can see evidence that you’re starting to be more intentional and specific with your textural marks, and they are looking more like small cast shadows which imply the little bumps and holes we see running along the surface of your larger constructed forms. On the majority of your pages you're getting a bit caught up in 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 and it is not necessarily going to give the viewer any 3D information.

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.

All right, I think that should cover it. I’m reluctant to assign revisions if looking at bugs makes you uncomfortable, but I honestly think the constructional challenges of the next lesson are going to be a bit overwhelming for you if we don’t address some of the issues I’ve called out here first. I am going to ask you to complete some additional constructions to demonstrate your understanding of what I’ve discussed here. Remember you can stick to crustaceans like crabs or lobsters, if they are less unsettling for you to look at. It is also perfectly fine to be selective about the kinds of insects/arachnids you choose for reference material. For example sometimes students have difficulty looking at scorpions or spiders, but are okay looking at bees, ladybirds, or butterflies.

Please complete 1 page of organic forms and 3 pages of insect, arachnid, or crustacean constructions.