Hello again NathanP.

With regards to the contour curves on your organic forms I perhaps could have phrased my feedback better. This diagram shows the 4 typical orientations I would expect to see for this exercise, demonstrated on bendy organic forms instead of the tube in the photo I sent before. This is also shown in this image and this image of a banana that I set up for another student. Your reasoning is correct though. If one end of that organic form is facing almost directly at the viewer and it bends quite strongly like that banana then the contour curves at the far end would be narrower than the contour curves at the near end.

What I wrote for you was designed to make sure that you are aware of how the shift in degree operates on cylindrical forms, not to admonish you for experimenting with them. And you are quite right that you should never redraw your lines to correct them, but to leave them and move on.

For the contour lines at the joints of legs. I’m going to say yes, you should still add them, even if they won’t be visible on the surface of the finished construction. The two sausage sections are not adjacent, and they are not just overlapping on a 2d piece of paper, they are occupying the same 3d space, and you should define the contour of where they intersect just like we do for the form intersections exercise from lesson 2. Sometimes this contour line for the intersection will be very close to the outer contour of one of your sausage forms, but I still want you to add it as it will help you to think in 3d. I know it’s a bit fiddly, you can make it easier by making sure you have a generous overlap with your sausages.

“Should we add contours to bulges on legs if they break the silhouette?” and "when adding forms is the intersecting line (where the forms meet) generally enough?”

Yes, you will to add a contour line when you break the silhouette, that contour line will be the intersection where the new form meets or wraps around the existing one. That will usually be all you need.

Contour lines themselves fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want. The question comes down to this: how many do you really need?

Unfortunately, that first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns. The first one you add will probably help a great deal in making that given form feel three dimensional. The second however will help much less - but this still may be enough to be useful. The third, the fourth, the fifth... their effectiveness and contribution will continue to drop off sharply, and you're very quickly going to end up in a situation where adding another will not help. I find it pretty rare that more than two is really necessary. Anything else just becomes excessive.

That is why Uncomfortable discourages adding random extra contour lines along the length of leg sausages.

For the bulge on the spider leg where I’d remarked “nearly!” in green and made an edit. This was not intended to be discouraging, how you approached it is entirely within the realms of what is expected for this lesson, given the instructions and information in the lesson material. It was meant to encourage you and to show you how a little edit to your additional forms would allow you to achieve the bulge you wanted without having to go back and add more single one-off lines to smooth things out. It is the same approach as what was used in the ant leg and dog leg demos I linked in my critique, and is probably much clearer in those demos.

"are you specifically saying I should only darken the lines at the point of overlap and not the entire form that overlaps?” Yes. It’s fine for your added line weight to go beyond the overlap a bit, but there’s no need to add it to the entire form. Your question implies that you may not be aware that you sometimes trace back over sections that are nowhere near any overlaps so I’ve highlighted one such line you drew twice here just to be sure that there’s no misunderstanding here.

"I have made corrections to my constructions per your feedback” The next steps I gave you were to move on to lesson 5. I made a judgement call whether additional work was required from you so it’s not appropriate for you to be sending this in for additional feedback. I understand where you're coming from here but unfortunately we do have a lot of critiques to get through and Uncomfortable does require us to focus on what is necessary only, as that is what he pays us for. It might be worth re-watching this video from lesson 0 about how to get the most out of Drawabox. It will discuss what is needed from you as a student, and what you can expect from a critique.

I understand that you’ve done this to check that you’re understanding the information given to you and to learn as much as possible, and while I don’t want to discourage your enthusiasm and good attitude I will ask you not to send in unsolicited revisions in the future.

Given that I’ve just spent an hour answering all your other questions I will be brief when looking through these.

Okay, you’ve done a good job of correcting where you’d cut back into your louse, and adding a contour curve for intersections on leg joints. You’ve mostly edited where you’d added single lines to extend the silhouette of an existing form to be complete, fully enclosed forms but I think you missed a few on your beetle some of which I completed with a single additional mass, and others I’ve shown how you can use multiple masses together, as these were quite big extensions to play with. You will get much more instruction on how to use additional masses as you go through the lesson 5 demos.