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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a reasonably good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Your second page came out stronger in this regard. The form on the lower left of your first page is swelling through the middle, instead of keeping an even width along its length. The two forms nearest the top of the first page have one end larger than the other. On the whole it is clear that you understand what we're aiming for with the shape of these sausage forms.

Looking at your contour curves, they're quite sparse, which could be seen as a missed opportunity to get more practise in, and really get the most out of this exercise.

It is great that you're experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves. 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 see a good example of how to vary your curves, and which ends of the forms to place ellipses on, in this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms and gradually building complexity piece by piece. Your work appears well planned and well observed, and you're showing a developing understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space, good work.

I do have some points that should help you get even more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these 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.

Fortunately you don't do this all that often, but I've marked on your ladybird in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside forms you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes on 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. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space. Extending your constructions with partial shapes is something that happens on a fair few of your pages.

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 tried out a few 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.

You made a solid attempt at using the sausage method with your wasp and your louse constructions, but on others you drew some of your legs with partial shapes (2D) instead of complete forms (3D). Here is an example. Be sure to draw complete forms, including the parts you can't see, like you have X-ray vision. This will give you a more solid three dimensional construction, as well as helping to reinforce your own understanding of 3D space.

Your use of additional line weight is usually quite well done. There are a few places where the line weight is a little strange, such as the front legs of this spider.

The most effective use of line weight, given the limitations of this course is 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. Line weight should be added with a single, confident, ghosted, super imposed stroke, as shown here.

Finally lets touch on texture and detail. It looks like on the whole you're thinking about using cast shadows to imply the smaller forms running along an object's surface, which is good. Remember that when using texture in this course you're telling the viewer how the surface would feel if you run your hand along it. This has nothing to do with what colour that surface happens to be, so I would warn you against copying things that appear dark in the reference, due to having a darker local colour. We can see an example of this with the eyes on these pages which are highly unlikely to be in cast shadow, if we consider the forms that are present in these constructions.

Remember that when adding texture you want to follow this process of outlining a shape and filling it in carefully. I can see some places where you're using hatching lines to describe texture, which can easily become mindless and repetitive and doesn't add much information to your construction. You may want to give these reminders on texture another read, to refresh your memory.

Alright, you clearly understood this lesson so I'll go ahead and mark it as complete. Please keep the points I've raised here in mind as you work through the next lesson, as they will apply to animal constructions too. Best of luck.