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

Starting with your organic forms some of these are sticking closely to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, though I noticed sometimes your forms have one end significantly larger than the other. Focus on keeping the ends evenly sized for this exercise.

Nice work experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves, which is an aspect of the exercise that is often overlooked.

Moving on to your insect constructions overall you're doing a really good job. You're starting your constructions with simple solid forms, and building up complexity one step at a time rather than trying to achieve too much in one go. You're also doing very well at establishing how these new additions connect to the existing structures in a way that feels solid and 3D, by keeping clear, specific relationships between most of the various elements at play. For example, the spikes on the abdomen of this spider are working well, as you've drawn them as complete new forms and defined how they attach to the existing ball form in 3D space, rather than just stamping them onto the drawing as flat shapes. This is great to see, and I have some advice that should help you to stick to this 3D approach more consistently as you move forward.

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 beetle in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that most of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

As well as cutting back inside forms we have already drawn, it is also possible to alter their silhouette by extending them. On your grasshopper I marked in blue where you'd extended off existing forms using one-off lines or partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space.

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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're working on applying the sausage method as introduced here, although on some constructions it looks like you may have drawn a circle at each joint, then connected them together, rather than drawing a chain of sausage forms and then applying a contour curve at each joint to show how the forms intersect in 3D space. This might seem like a subtle difference in the results, but the latter involves much more consideration for the legs as 3D forms as you construct them.

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 can see you've made an effort to build onto your leg structures, although there are some strategies that work better than others. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined as shown here.The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made. We also want to make sure each addition is a complete form, instead of working with single lines as shown here. We can see this process being pushed even further in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

The idea of breaking additions into pieces rather than fully engulfing an existing form applies to the bodies of the insects too. If we take a look at the blue iterations on this page notice how with each one you'd essentially taken the ball form and completely replaced it with a larger, more complex form, without establishing a clear relationship between them. The ellipse floats arbitrarily somewhere in the middle of the new structure. Instead, we'd want to break the addition into pieces, allowing each addition to stay simpler, and establishing how it connects to the existing ball structure.

Something else I noticed is that while you're not necessarily relying on contour lines to make your constructions feel 3D, you do sometimes use a lot of them. Contour lines fall into two categories. The first type is the contour line that runs along the surface of a single form, which is how they were introduced in the organic forms with contour curves exercise, and the second type defines how different forms connect to one another, as was introduced in the form intersections exercise. The first type is generally easier for students to understand and apply, but it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasise the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships, and they also suffer from diminishing returns where a bunch may not be any more impactful than just one. The second type only really allows us to add one contour line for each intersection, and they do a better job of defining how the forms fit together, helping to reinforce the solidity of the construction as a whole. Using the second type will often make the first kind somewhat obsolete- as we see with the sausage method of leg construction. Long story short, when you're planning what contour lines to add, be sure to ask yourself what each one is contributing to the construction, and whether there are there any other marks that are already accomplishing this goal.

The last thing I wanted to mention is a request for next time you submit your homework. If you have multiple constructions on one page, please submit the whole page like this instead of cutting off some of your work like this. This makes it easier to check how many pages you've drawn, and how you're using the space available to you on each page.

Okay, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are coming along well and I think you're ready for the challenges presented by the next lesson. Please make sure you refer to the advice in this critique as you tackle your animal constructions, so we can build on the points discussed here in the next lesson.