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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both pages to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

It is lovely to see that you're keeping your linework smooth and confident, and the majority of your forms are reasonably close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

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, yes, you're allowed to include your attempts at following the demos as part of your homework as long as they constitute less than half of your insect drawings, so including 3 pages of demos is fine.

Overall you're doing a great job with your constructions, it looks like you're thinking through how your forms exist in 3D space, rather than simply drawing flat shapes on a piece of paper, and there are places where your constructions are developing a strong sense of volume, such as the abdomen of this ant where your addition of segmentation wraps around the curving surface of the underlying ball form in 3D space. That really is key, thinking about how each addition we draw connects to those existing structures in 3D with specific relationships.

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.

By and large, you don't actually alter the silhouette of forms you have already drawn very often, although I have marked a few examples here 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 many 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 the silhouette of forms we have already drawn, it is also possible to accidentally flatten the construction by extending off existing forms using partial flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I've marked one such example in blue here as well as redrawing the extension in green, using a complete new form instead.

So, 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 can see plenty of places where you're already building up your constructions in 3D, but I will go ahead and share some examples you can refer to. 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. I'm happy to see that you've used the sausage method for the majority of your leg constructions, and you're generally doing pretty well at keeping those sausage forms simple. You're somewhat inconsistent about applying a contour curve at each joint, to show how the sausage forms intersect and connect together in 3D space. These little curves might seem insignificant, but they are a very useful tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction so please work on remembering them more consistently.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method, 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.

The last point to touch on concerns texture and detail. Your application of fur on your bee is coming along quite well. I like that you're focusing your attention on places where the fur breaks the silhouette, as this is where it will have the most impact, and that you're working with tufts instead of trying to draw every hair as single lines. I can also see that you put some thought into how to draw the veins on the wings implicitly, well done. On the same page, I noticed that you'd filled the eyes in with black. Keep in mind that when using texture in this course, we want to reserve areas of black for cast shadows only. I think it is quite likely that you filled the eyes in because they look dark in the reference, rather than because those forms are in cast shadow. Imagine whatever you're drawing in these constructional exercises has been painted all one colour, ignoring a zebra's stripes or a cheetah's spots, and focus your attention on conveying to the viewer how the surface feels if you run your hand along it. These notes from the texture page of lesson 2 are a good section to review as a reminder for how to approach texture in this course.

All right, I think that should cover it. You're doing a great job and I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Please refer to the points discussed in this critique as you handle your animal constructions in the next lesson. Its not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting the same points being called out in the next critique.