Hello Min2000,

Starting with your organic forms there are some notable improvements.

These are sticking more closely to the characteristics of simple sausages.

You've included more variation in the degree of your contour curves.

You're correctly placing ellipses on the ends of the forms that face the viewer.

In future remember that you should be drawing around every ellipse you freehand in this course two full times before lifting your pen off the page. This includes the small ellipses on the ends of the forms too.

Also remember that when you draw the flow line completely straight it will make your forms stiff, which isn't really what we want to achieve with this exercise.

Moving on to your insect constructions your markmaking is quite a bit better. I can see you're drawing continuous lines and resisted the temptation to use chicken scratch or arbitrarily redraw lines. You've mostly stopped using line weight to correct or hide mistakes, or indicate the shadow side of forms, which is a good step in the right direction.

There are, however, a number of points from my initial critique that I don't see being applied here.

I'll try to keep this as brief as possible. The issues that have been previously called out are as follows:

• Draw through your forms. You did this correctly for this fly but your other 4 constructions all have various forms being cut off where they pass behind something else. Here I've drawn through your forms for you on your millipede.

• Draw around your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page. You've done this correctly with the ellipses you drew on this beetle but not on this bee.

• Make sure you fully enclose your forms. You've left forms open-ended on your crab, and your millipede (and possibly the bee, but it is hard to tell because the drawing extends outside your photo). Here I've circled some examples of open-ended forms on your millipede.

I also need to reiterate the two main pieces of new information I provided for you in my initial critique.

• Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. I've highlighted in red here some places where it looks like you have cut back inside forms you had already established, and in blue here where this construction was extended with flat partial shapes instead of complete 3D forms. Note that if you had drawn through your forms as shown here then these 2D additions I've marked in blue would be complete 3D forms.

• Apply the sausage method to construct legs. I think you're attempting to use the sausage method on some of your constructions, but you're only following the first step of the 3 step process I provided for you to use. This crab isn't showing any attempt to use the sausage method of leg construction as instructed.

While I cannot speak specifically to why these issues continue to arise in your work, I can tell you that for most students who have issues arise repeatedly is that it comes down to how much time the student is investing - both in actually approaching the construction at hand, and in reviewing the feedback they've received. The feedback students receive is, by necessity, quite dense especially when there are a lot of points that need to be covered. This means that a fair bit falls into the student's lap to process that information, to take notes on it, or to do whatever it is they need in order to ensure it is applied.

There are two more points I need to cover before I can give you your next steps.

Be sure to always start your constructions with simple solid forms as introduced here. Think of balls, or sausages. On this beetle and this crab some of your initial forms are too complex. It looks like you've drawn the silhouettes of the 2D shapes you observed in your reference image, then drawn contour curves/ellipses on them afterwards to try to make them feel 3D. This isn't really the constructional approach we're aiming for with these exercises. I suggest you reread this section where Uncomfortable introduces the process we use for constructional drawing. Make use of the various diagrams and demos I shared with you previously, as they show how to start with simple forms and build up complexity piece by piece by attaching new forms to your basic structures.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. In effect, you're getting 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 - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

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, at minimum.

Keep in mind that part of your (very limited) responsibilities as a student here is to follow the instructions as closely as you can, consistently. This does not mean picking and choosing which instructions to follow and which to ignore. Once issues have been called out in a critique the ball is in your court to take the steps necessary to address these points. Due to the very low price of feedback we offer, it does mean that we can only do so much in ensuring that it is all applied. I will be assigning another round of revisions, for you to take a swing at following the advice that has been provided here.

First, please draw along with the shrimp demo and the lobster demo following each step exactly as shown, as closely as you can.

Then complete 3 additional pages of insect constructions of your choice.

For these I'd like you to continue 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.

If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.