Hello Blueslate, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms you're not far off the characteristics we're aiming for with simple sausage forms and it appears that any irregularity in your forms is due to a hesitant line, rather than a lack of understanding of the form you're aiming to draw.

This hesitancy is more apparent on your contour curves, I've made some notes on your work here. These sort of stiff, hesitant lines may occur either:

-When a student is prioritising accuracy over confidence, a wobbly line is a mistake, no matter how accurate, and a confident line will be correct, as with practice the accuracy will get better. Uncomfortable talks more about hesitation in this comment.

-When a student draws from the wrist or elbow instead of drawing from the shoulder.

-When a student doesn't take enough time to use the ghosting method to full effect. For these contour curves it may help to ghost the full ellipse and only place your pen down for the portion you wish to draw.

I can see that you're working on varying the degrees of your contour curves, which is good, but be aware that as a general rule of thumb these curves should get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This concept is shown in this diagram and is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. I think This diagram showing different orientations of an organic form may also help you, as it shows how to vary your contour curves.

Moving on to your insect constructions You're doing a good job of starting with simple forms and building your constructions step by step, well done. I do have some points to discuss that should help you to get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

In response to your query:

Not sure how much I should be drawing through the form.

The answer is wherever possible. Drawing the whole form instead of allowing them to get cut off when they pass behind something else will force you to think about how the form exists in 3D space, and will improve your spatial reasoning.

Between that and my adding detail the drawings seem to be getting pretty messy.

Remember that every drawing you do in this course is an exercise, so it doesn't matter if they look pretty or not. That being said, often what is making your drawings look messy isn't really due to the construction lines from drawing through your forms, but down to arbitrarily repeating your lines, shaky or wobbly lines, or lines that miss or overshoot where you intended them to go. The accuracy/overshooting issues are something that will improve gradually with mindful practice (make sure you're doing your warmups) but redrawing lines is a choice, and something that you can change right away. I've highlighted a couple of cases here just to be clear what I'm talking about.

I suggest you take the time to review the principles of markmaking as a reminder of what we're aiming for with every line we draw in this course.

Before I get into the meat of insect construction I have some reminders for the leaves you chose to draw on this page. Things like connecting the sides of your leaves to your flow line and not zigzagging edge detail are points Uncomfortable already raised in detail in your lesson 3 critique so I strongly urge you to go back and reread the feedback you have already received, and make sure that you're doing whatever you need to in order to apply that feedback.

Demos:

When you follow along with the demos make sure that you complete every step shown, and that you do so to the best of your current ability. For example in the last step of this shrimp demo Uncomfortable makes a point of showing that the spines on the back of the head and thorax are fully enclosed forms and looking at your work each spike consists of 2 lines instead of a complete form, and two of them are drifting away from the underlying structure. It is common for students to feel that smaller lines and details are less important that the larger forms, and so they rush them. Take your time to use the ghosting method for every line you draw, resist the temptation to get hasty with little details.

Another example of not following the demos as closely as possible would be this lobster which is missing a segment on the abdomen, a lot of additional forms on the legs, and the details on the claw are almost exactly what it says not to do in the demo. It's extremely important that you follow each of the demos directly. Do not cut them short, do not alter their steps. Follow them to the letter so you can understand the process Uncomfortable is employing, and then employ that process fully on your own.

The next point I wanted to talk about 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 your ant in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this happens if there is a gap between passes of your ellipses. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion.

On the same ant I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist in 3D space.

Another way you can accidentally remind the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat page is if you leave gaps in your silhouette, I've highlighted a couple of cases of this on the same image.

I've also marked on the head of this grasshopper in green where you drew complete forms, in blue some partial shapes, and in red some stray lines, to help you to tell the difference.

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.

Also some of the insect legs are quite thin, is it okay to draw them more like the stems in lesson 3 than as sausages?

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs. 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.

You were making progress with the sausage method in your demo work, but in your independent constructions I'm seeing a lot of partial shapes instead of complete sausage forms, as well as some forms that don't stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms. Try to follow the sausage method for leg construction as closely as you can.

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 the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

I think it is possible that the settings you're using to scan your work are making your lines look shakier and choppier than they really are. The settings appear to have compressed your drawing to black and white and the edges of your lines are pixelated. Could you try using a "photo" setting on your device next time? It looks like you may be using document, drawing, black and white, or some other setting that artificially cleans your image. A photo setting will make your lines look more natural, and I'll be better able to see any faint or tapering lines in your work. Thank you.

Conclusion Overall you've done a lot of good work here. However I would be a remiss to send you forward to the next lesson with unaddressed issues. 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'll be assigning 3 more pages of insect constructions.

I'll be looking for you to:

1 Stick to the principles of markmaking.

2 Apply the sausage method of leg construction.

3 Close your forms, don't leave any little gaps.

This is also an opportunity for you to continue to work on taking actions in 3D by adding forms to your existing structure instead of altering the silhouette by cutting back inside your forms or extending them with one-off lines or partial shapes.

Please take as much time as you need to draw these to the best of your current ability. Be sure to read through this critique thoroughly, and to refer back to it (and your previous critiques) as often as you need to in order to understand, remember, and apply all the information that has been presented to you. Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.