Hello SamChan, 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.

It is clear that you're working towards the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of these came out well. There are a few irregular ones, such as the two in the lower left corner of the first page, but they're mostly on the right track.

You're doing a good job of keeping your lines smooth and confident in this exercise, although I did notice some places where you'd redrawn a line to make corrections. 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.

It is good to see that you're experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves. 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. You can also see a good example of how to vary your contour curves in this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

When adding the little ellipse to the end(s) of your forms remember to draw around it two full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, as introduced here in lesson 1.

Moving on to your insect constructions, before I get to the meat of this feedback I'd like you to watch this video from lesson 0 which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox. It was released after you began the course so you may have missed it.

With that in mind, be aware that I am going to mostly ignore your self-critique notes until I have written your feedback, and will read them afterwards and answer any questions I find.

Now, jumping right in with how you're arranging your constructions on the page, you are doing yourself something of a disservice in this regard, and making things harder than they need to be. 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. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing.

I strongly encourage you to make your drawings larger, the best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

The next point I need to discuss 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 this page 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.

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.

Another way you're accidentally undermining the 3D illusion of your constructions is by redrawing lines. Either to make corrections, or to automatically reinforce them. 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. Be sure to use the ghosting method for every line you draw. By going through the planning and preparation phases before executing each line you can be sure that the line you're drawing is the result of a conscious decision, and actively contributes something to your construction, rather than an unconscious reaction and force of habit. You may also need to refresh your memory of the principles of markmaking that should be followed throughout this course. Most of your lines are smooth (not wobbly) but some of them are a bit scratchy. We're aiming for lines to be continuous, and executed using your whole arm.

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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs, such as these flat partial shapes. 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.

Before I wrap this up let's take a look at your questions. In future, if will help if you limit your comments to questions you would like answered, as it does take time to parse through the notes, and can lead to questions getting missed if there is a lot to go through. This may not seem like much but with the number of students we provide feedback to it does add up quite quickly.

• Page 2 "How to draw the shadow?" Page 6 "How to draw the shadow when the image is top down?" Similar question on page 8. If the ground plane is flat it may help if you consider the shadow shape to be a projection of the silhouette of your construction. There are more precise ways of plotting cast shadows, but they are not well suited to organic subjects. For the purpose of these exercises it is perfectly fine to just make your best guess, as these are an optional finishing touch.

• Page 4 "How to draw when you can't see it?" Page 5 "How do we draw the missing leg?" When a form is partially visible we ask students to "draw through" and complete it, by including the parts they can't see. This can be difficult at first, but by thinking about how the whole form exists in 3D space and connects to the rest of the construction this will help to develop your spatial reasoning skills. I noticed you've drawn through your forms quite successfully in a number of areas.

• Page 4 "Not sure how to draw shadow line since it's on a flower- do we draw it on the flower?" If the shadow is falling on a complex surface it is fine to leave it out.

• Page 9 "Maybe should draw shadow in a different colour?" Please stick to the same pen throughout the construction. You may use a brush pen to fill in cast shadows (such as in the Organic Intersections exercise from lesson 2) and we use coloured pens to extend our lines in the 250 box and cylinder challenges.

• Page 8 "How to do wings without it taking forever and looking like a pattern, not texture?" The method we use for handling texture in this course is incredibly time consuming by nature.

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.

Conclusion

Your drawings show a great deal of potential, and I can see you've put a considerable effort into them by your careful observations and analysis. Unfortunately by drawing small and getting sketchy with the mark making we haven't quite got the solidity of the constructions working just yet. Fortunately, these two factors are both a matter of approach, rather than ability, so should be relatively easily addressed.

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. 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.

Please complete 3 additional pages of insect constructions. When you submit them I'd like you to also share your warmup pages, as a bonus checkup. With there being such a long time between homework submissions it can be easy to forget some exercise instructions and accidentally reinforce bad habits.