Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 4o homework.

Organic Forms

-Starting by the organic forms the shape of your sausages is moving in the right direction, however I did notice many cases where one end is bigger than the other, it is important that you do your best to draw sausages with both ends equally sized, alway remember the recipe of two spheres united by a tube of consistent width. THe contour curves are moving in the right direction it seems that you are aware of how they change degree as they move through space, I think there are a few cases where you are using too many contours, remember that contour lines are a useful tool but they can easily work against us by flattening our drawing, the more of them you add and the easier it becomes to make a mistake. Instead, think about what each individual mark is meant to accomplish and what it is going to contribute to the drawing. If you find yourself drawing too many of them then you probably want to step back and rethink what you are doing.

Insects

-Moving on to the insects I can see that you are definitely making good use of the construction method, in order to break your subjects into their main components I do see some areas where I can suggest you make some changes to your approach.

-First I can see that whenever you want to change something sometimes you will add full forms which is correct and some other times you will end up just adding simple lines, I think one of the best examples would be the grasshopper where you drew many lines to capture the segmentation in its body, this is an issue as throughout these lessons we want to make use of full forms rather than simple lines, instead whenever we want to change something or add anything new to the scene we should do so by introducing full forms with a fully self enclosed silhouette. We can do this by defining the intersections, just like in lesson 2 form intersections exercise, or we can wrap the silhouette of the new form by around the existing structure as shown here https://imgur.com/IINKdQA , this is the most important approach that you will be using for lesson 5. One thing that can help you to get familiar with it is to try to think about how our mass would exist in 3D space then as it starts to press against the existing structure its silhouette starts to change in response, and it begins to wrap around it, here is another example that illustrates this point, https://imgur.com/8O2RTcT .

This approach has not been fully integrated into the lesson material, but for the moment you can see some really good examples on the informal demo page, the lobster and the shrimp demo illustrate this point pretty clearly, I highly encourage you to draw along them so you can actually get some practice before moving on to lesson 5.

-THe other important point to address is leg construction , I can see that you are using the sausage method, but in some instances your sausages end up pinching or swelling, I know it can be very difficult to draw the legs especially the legs of insects as they are usually quite thin and small, you want to give yourself ample room to work with and make those construction as big as you can, so you can focus more on the construction side of things rather than the mark making.

Speaking of construction when it comes to the legs you are not pushing them as far as you could, the important thing to remember is that the sausage method is not about capturing the shape of the legs precisely as they are instead it is about laying down a basic structure that captures both the flow and solidity of these limbs in equal measure. Make sure to overlap the sausages a good bit so you can define the intersection between them, once that structure is laid down we can start to add more masses to better capture the shape of the legs, this process is exemplified in this diagram which shows how to construct the leg (https://imgur.com/7b9rc9e ) of an insect and you can see it here too in the context of a dog’s leg, https://imgur.com/97hS0XF .

This approach really helps with the legs of insects like the grasshopper, which has some big rear legs, and more intricate details.

-And lastly let’s talk a bit about texture and detail, on the moth and the beetle I can see that you have tried to drown some details like their fur or hairs, now when it comes to fur it is better to draw clumps of hair rather than straight lines, and design the shape of each one of them, this is something that will be explained in more detail in the next lessons, so I’ll just quickly redirect you to this diagram https://drawabox.com/lesson/5/1/fur .

Okayy you can keep working on these issues in the next lesson, so I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Edit: I forgot that I did want to assign some revisions, 1 page of organic forms with contour lines so you can focus on the shape of your sausages. So please send it if you want.

You have very smooth and confident marks