Hello Min2000, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

You're drawing your forms with fairly smooth confident lines, which is good, and this form is sticking pretty close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

Unfortunately, your forms are somewhat erratic. This suggests that either you're not reviewing the instructions often enough to remember what you should be aiming for, or you're not taking enough time to apply the ghosting method and execute these to the best of your current ability.

I've marked some specific deviations with letters on your work here.

A- These two forms are bloated. They continually swell through their midsection, with the one on your second page being closer to an ellipse than a sausage form.

B- This one has pinching and bulging along its length.

C- Quite a few of your forms have one end larger than the other, in some cases it is subtle, but others quite significantly so.

D- This one isn't necessarily a mistake, but is still worth pointing out. Part of what makes these organic forms so useful as building blocks for organic constructions is that we can introduce gesture by having a subtle curve along the length of the form. Keeping the flow line (and by extension the form) straight and rigid does eliminate that feeling of movement so I suggest avoiding this when practising these organic forms in future.

Remember to draw around all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page, you tend to do this for the ellipses in the middle, but not on the ends. Drawing around your ellipses twice will help you to draw them smoothly and confidently, and is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, you can read more about this here.

I noticed that you placed an ellipse on an end of one of your forms where the contour curves tell us is facing away from the viewer, I've crossed it out here and added in some that were missing. 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, in this case if 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.

Some of your contour curves look just a touch hesitant, remember to prioritise making a smooth confident stroke over accuracy.

Your contour curves appear to be mostly sticking to the same degree. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is well observed, and I like that you're making full use of the space on the page. Drawing quite large like this gives you room to think through these constructional puzzles, as well as encouraging you to engage your whole arm and draw from the shoulder.

There are a few things that stand out, as they are covered in earlier lessons, and have been called out in previous critiques.

• The principles of markmaking that are introduced in lesson 1 should be followed throughout this course. If we take this scorpion as an example, the majority of these lines are being scratched together from lots of choppy little marks. Some of the lines also have noticeable wobbling. We want to be drawing smooth, continuous lines, using the ghosting method, from the shoulder.

• There are some places where it looks like you've redrawn lines to make corrections. In ending up with multiple lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing. Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises 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 executing each mark to the best of your current ability.

• There are places where you've added quite aggressively thick line weight to places that seem to be a bit arbitrary. The most effective use of additional line weight, given the bounds and limitations of this course is to reserve it for clarifying overlaps as explained here, and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. What this keeps us from doing is adding line weight to more random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes with additional line weight. Keep your line weight subtle, usually a single confident, ghosted, super imposed stroke will be enough to create the desired effect. Sometimes I think you're using thick line weight to indicate the shadow side of a form. Areas of black should be reserved for cast shadows only, I recommend reviewing this video where Uncomfortable explains the difference between form shadows and cast shadows.

• Never leave a form open-ended. ThatOneMushroomGuy advised you of this in relation to branches, but it applies to all forms you draw in these exercises. If we take a look at this mosquito I've circled where you've left gaps in the silhouette of a leg and a wing, and some places where your lines get loose, and disconnected, which will not convey 3D form. Remember at no point in these lessons are we sketching. We are constructing, and you need to clearly state where the edges of your forms are, don't leave things vague and ambiguous. This again comes down to taking as much time as you need to use the ghosting method to plan and prepare each mark, and to execute them to the best of your current ability.

• I already mentioned this on your organic forms, but you should be drawing around your ellipses 2 full times in your constructions too.

• There are a lot of places where you're not drawing through your forms. This was something ThatOneMushroomGuy called out three times in your lesson 3 critique and subsequent revisions. It is important that you draw the entirety of each form, including the parts that get overlapped or obscured by something else in your reference. This will reinforce the 3D illusion of your constructions and help you to develop your understanding of 3D space. To make things as clear as possible, I've drawn through the forms on two of the legs of this scorpion to show you what we're asking you to do.

This next point is something of a hunch, so please forgive me if I am barking up the wrong tree, but I suspect that some of these constructions were sketched in lightly first (possibly with pencil) and then traced over with pen the parts you wanted to keep visible. This is something Uncomfortable refers to as a rough underdrawing and clean-up pass. While this is a perfectly valid method of drawing in general, it is something we firmly discourage in this course, as discussed here in Lesson 2. It may just be that the faint extra marks I can see are random smudges, or lines showing through from the other side of the page, but if it is the case that you've used pencil and subsequently erased it, I would like you to read this article where Uncomfortable discusses why we use ink in this course, and also remind you that one of the hard requirements for submitting for official critique is to work with the recommended tools.

Moving on to new information, I have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

1 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.

2 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 ant in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

On the same ant I marked in blue 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.

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.

In green I've marked on your ant some places where you did a good job of building on your construction with complete 3D forms.

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, 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.

Once again, to make things as clear as possible, here is the sausage method applied to one of your scorpion legs.

Conclusion Unfortunately, by not consistently employing methods and techniques taught in earlier lessons, or applying past feedback, you're falling short of what you're really capable of here. I encourage you to re-watch this video which explains how to get the most out of this course, and what your responsibilities as a student are.

This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and I'd like you to take as much time as you need to read it thoroughly, as well as reviewing the relevant sections of lesson material and your lesson 3 critiques. You may also want to take some notes in your own words to remind yourself of what to work on. Once you've done that I'd like you to complete some extra pages to address the points I've raised here. For these I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 1 page of organic forms with contour curves and 5 pages of insect constructions. If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.