Hello VirenDidNothingWrong, I’ll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your Organic Forms exercise, you’ve done a great job keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here. though there are a few cases where you have one end larger than the other, such as the two on the right side of this page. Your contour curves are well aligned and I can see you've been careful to vary the degree of them too, good work. Some of your curves show signs of hesitation so make sure you are taking as much time as you need to use the ghosting method to full effect for these.

All of your forms have one end visible, which is fine, but I'd like you to take a look at this diagram which shows how to draw organic forms with both ends facing the viewer and with neither ends facing the viewer.

Moving on to your insect constructions the first thing I want to call out that is hindering your potential to complete these constructions to the best of your ability is that most of them are tiny. I'm going to repeat something Uncomfortable said to you in your lesson 3 critique "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." You appear to have made a conscious decision to draw 2 insects on every page, and in many cases those constructions are not making effective use of the half a page of space you have allocated for them. Perhaps you were thinking that if doing 10 constructions would be good enough, then somehow doing 20 would be better. This is simply not the case, as we need you focus on quality over quantity, giving each construction as much time and space as it requires for you to complete it to the best of your current ability.

In drawing smaller and 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. For example looking at this wasp which I'm fairly sure was your attempt at the wasp demo, I can see that your construction got so cramped that you weren't able to complete all the steps in the demo. Either that or you weren't following it very carefully.

Looking through your work I can see you've generally done a good job of starting your constructions with three simple forms for the head, thorax, and abdomen as explained in this section of the lesson page. The most notable exception would be this ant where the irregular quadrilateral you used for the head is a flat shape instead of a 3d form, and the thorax started way too complex. It's fine for you to use your ingenuity and start some sections with a box or a cylinder if you feel they fit a particular insect better than the organic forms shown in that section of the lesson. However they must be simple and solid. If you can't think of the name of the form you're drawing at this stage, stop and ask yourself "Is this a 3d form or a 2d shape?" and "Am I skipping steps and starting too complex?"

One of the aims for this lesson is to develop an understanding of how the forms you’re drawing exist in 3d space and connecting them together with specific relationships. We want you to be able to fool the viewer into thinking it's 3D.

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.

I've marked in red on a page of your work here some places where you cut back into your silhouettes.

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.

Looking at how you've handled the construction of your insect legs, I can see that you're aware of the sausage method of leg construction and have made a good attempt at applying it. Some of your leg sausages are starting too complex, or have wobbly lines, but I think that has a lot to do with the small scale you're drawing at.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method, 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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is important for tackling animal constructions too.

One last thing before I wrap this up, additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you may end up just creating further issues on top of them.

I'm going to be asking you for some specific revisions. The first thing I'd like you to do is to draw along with the shrimp demo. Draw it big. As big as you can without going off the edge of the paper. It's the only thing you're going to draw on this page and I want you to make the most of the space available to you. Take your time. Carefully follow every step in the demo to the best of your current ability and make sure you use the ghosting method for every mark you make.

I know you can do this and I look forward to seeing your work.