Hello Chieftang, just dropping by to give you some feedback on your bugs. This might be a tad shorter than my usual critiques, but that’s mostly because you’ve done such a good job that there isn’t much to criticise.

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing a good job of keeping your lines smooth and confident, and sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

Your contour curves are looking confident and well aligned too, and it is nice to see that you’re experimenting with shifting their degree. As a little bonus I’d like to share this diagram with you, showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived. You’re doing great at expressing your forms in a variety of orientations, the point I wanted to make here is that when one end of a form faces the viewer 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. I think perhaps you’ve understood that already, as I saw you shifting them correctly on the form at the bottom of this more recent image.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is similarly well done. I can see you using the methods shown in the demos, sticking to the principles of markmaking (smooth, confident purposeful lines) and the principles of construction (starting with simple solid forms and building your construction up gradually piece by piece) and there is a fair bit of growth across the set.

I can see that you’ve put a fair bit of thought into how your forms exist in 3D space, and how to connect them together with specific relationships, and your constructions are coming out quite solid and convincing as a result.

You’re very much on the right track, although I am going to go ahead and use a piece of prewritten text that I share with many students to help them to build up their constructions in 3D more consistently.

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.

Fortunately I didn’t notice any areas where you’d cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn, and that’s fantastic. While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. For example I’ve marked with blue on a section of your moth a couple of spots where you drew a one-off mark bridging from one 3D structure to another, enclosing the hatched area. But this hatched area exists only in two dimensions - there is no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how it is meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. While extending the silhouette of leaves or insect’s wings with single lines works fine, this is because they are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

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.

I’m really happy to see that you’re already exploring this kind of additive 3D construction quite liberally in some of your pages, your mantis and crab have some really good examples.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out a few different strategies for constructing legs, but I’m happy to see that you were using the sausage method for your later constructions and getting the hang of applying it well.

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.

I’m happy to see that you’ve taken a swing at building onto your sausage armatures on many of your pages, adding the sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that you observe in these structures, arriving at a more characteristic representation of the leg in question than what can be achieved with the sausages alone. I have some diagrams to share with you that I hope will help you to build onto your leg structures “in 3D” as you move forwards.

• These diagrams show how we can add to the construction with complete 3D forms instead of flat shapes and one-off lines.

• This diagram shows how instead of fully engulfing an existing form within a new one, we can establish a clearer relationship between the existing form and the new addition by breaking it into two pieces.

• This ant leg demo shows how we can take the sausage method and push it further, adding all kinds of lumps bumps and spikes to the sausage armature.

• I’d also like to share this dog leg demo with you, which shows how the sausage method can be applied to animal legs. This is important, as we’d like you to continue to stick with the sausage method of leg construction when tackling your animals in the next lesson.

If a part of your construction won’t fit on the page, such as some of the legs of this spider you can retain the solidity of these forms by capping them off with an ellipse, rather than running them off the page as a pair of lines and leaving them open ended. You will see Uncomfortable using this technique in the tail of his “running rat” demo on the informal demos page of lesson 5.

Before I wrap this up I should touch briefly on texture. I think that the texture you added to your tick is excellent. You’ve told the viewer that the exoskeleton has little pits or holes along its surface, implicitly, by drawing cast shadows rather than outlining the holes themselves, great job. The texture on your moth was a little less in line with what the texture section of lesson 2 describes. I suspect you filled in the eye because it looked dark in the reference, rather than because it is sitting in cast shadow. This gives the eye the look of a flat shape or a hole, rather than that positive bulging form I’d expect from a bug’s eye. The detail on the wings is also looking a bit explicit as you seem to be outlining a pattern, rather than describing a texture.

Anyway, overall you’ve done an excellent job with this lesson and I’ll tag it as complete. You’ll need a couple of agrees to trigger the badge, but I don’t expect you to have any difficulty getting them.