Hello Megatherium2, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms these are sticking more closely to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here than your lesson 2 pages, well done.

There is some room for improvement with these though.

• Sometimes these forms have one end larger than the other, try to keep them evenly sized.

• Sometimes forms are slightly pinched in the middle, aim to keep a consistent width along the form's length.

• A few of these have some kind of deformation to the ends with them getting flattened, pointy, or lopsided. Think of drawing two balls connected by a bendy tube.

You've done a good job of varying the degree of your contour curves on the majority of these. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is generally coming along quite well. You're demonstrating strong observational skills and a good understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space. However there are a couple of ways you're undermining the solidity of your constructions and not quite achieving your full potential with these exercises.

First, I'd like to remind you of this section of feedback from your lesson 3 revisions:

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 louse in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of a form you had already drawn. On the same image I marked in blue where it looks like you'd altered the silhouette while tracing back over the silhouette to add line weight. During this course line weight should be reserved specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight.

I've marked some further examples of what appears to be cutting inside forms you had already drawn in red on this crab and in blue places where I think you'd attempted to extend the silhouette of your construction without really providing enough information for the viewer to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space. The little red question marks indicate areas where I wasn't sure if you were cutting, extending, or redrawing lines to make corrections, but whichever of these it is, it is undermining the 3D illusion we're trying to create , by forcing the viewer to interpret which line they think is correct. Whichever one they choose, there will always be the other lines on the page to contradict that interpretation and remind the viewer that they are just looking at lines on a flat piece of paper.

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.

On a related note, remember to "draw through" and complete your forms. A form doesn't stop existing in 3D space where it gets overlapped and obscured by another form. Figuring out how the whole form exists in 3D by drawing the parts you can't see (like you have X-Ray vision) will help you to develop your spatial reasoning skills, while also reinforcing the 3D illusion of your constructions. This is something you generally do pretty well, but there are a few places where you cut your forms off, such as the far side leg on this page.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you 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.

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.

I think you were working towards using the sausage method of leg construction on many of your pages, but this method is quite specific, so here's a few tips to get you a bit closer.

• Start with a chain of simple sausages with no pinching, bulging, or uneven ends.

• Be mindful of where to apply contour curves. We want to apply one contour curve for each joint, in the area where the forms overlap, as highlighted in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram. What we're doing with these contour curves is similar to the Form Intersections exercise from lesson 2, we're explaining how these sausage forms connect together in 3D space. Doing this makes adding extra contour curves along the length of the sausage forms obsolete.

• When you want to add complexity to these sausage forms, make sure you're adding complete forms with their own silhouettes, instead of trying to alter them with one-off lines.

The last point I need to talk about is texture.

If we take this construction as an example, you appear to be using hatching lines to describe form shading. As discussed here we do not include form shading in this course, and instead we focus on cast shadows. Each shadows shape should be individually designed, and drawn by outlining the shadow, then carefully filling it in as shown here.

Hatching lines serve a very specific purpose within this course. Within the technical exercises they can be used to indicate which side of a form faces the viewer as discussed here. For insect and animal constructions hatching can be used as a design choice to push the far side legs back, but it should not be used to describe shadows or to transition between light and dark.

So - I've outlined some things to work on, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete, just be sure to actively tackle these points as you handle your animals. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid). If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.