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

Starting with your organic forms most of these are sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, good work.

You’re doing well at experimenting with shifting the degree of your contour curves, and fitting them snugly against the edges of your forms. There are a few that look just a tiny bit stiff and hesitant, so remember to prioritize a smooth confident stroke first and foremost. You also appear to have redrawn a few contour curves on the second page. The ghosting method emphasizes the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to execute each mark.

When deciding which end(s) of your form to add a small contour ellipse 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 on the whole you’re doing pretty well, you’re starting with simple solid forms and demonstrating an understanding of how your forms exist in 3d space. For example the segmentation on your scorpion’s abdomen feels satisfyingly voluminous as you’ve wrapped it around the underlying boxy form as though it is a real, solid 3D object, and not just 2D shapes on a flat piece of paper.

I noticed something which is making your job more difficult 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. You have a bit of a tendency to draw your constructions quite small, (more so on some pages than others) which can limit your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. For example this treehopper is surrounded by loads of blank empty space which could have been used for making your construction larger.

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 antlion 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.

It is also possible to alter the silhouette of an existing form by extending it. For example I’ve marked in blue on this mantis where it looks like you’d tried to extend off the existing ball form of the head using a partial shape, which doesn’t quite provide enough information for us to understand how the addition connects to the surface of the ball form in 3D.

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 were working with the sausage method in mind for most of your leg constructions, though I noticed sometimes you draw around your leg forms twice, which can lead to the forms becoming elliptical, swelling through the midsection and becoming stiff. Just draw around your sausage forms once in future, so you can stick more closely to the characteristics of simple sausages.

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, 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 last point I want to mention is that when adding line weight to these constructions, it works best to reserve it for clarifying overlaps between your forms, and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur as discussed in this video. It looks like you understand this concept, but will sometimes add line weight to large sections of the silhouette as well. Going back over large sections with additional line weight can take your initially smooth and confident lines and make them wobblier, which undermines the solidity of your forms a little bit.

Okay, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are coming along well and I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete. Please apply the points discussed in this critique to your animal constructions in the next lesson, where they will continue to be relevant.