Hello Rhyldur, welcome back!

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

Starting with your organic forms it is clear that you're working towards sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Your first page is generally stronger than the second in this regard, on the second page a couple of forms have one end larger than the other, or some bulging through their midsection.

It is good to see that you're starting to experiment with varying the degree of your contour curves on some of your forms. 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 appears well observed and carefully crafted. For the most part these are looking solid and well constructed, as you're demonstrating a good understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space.

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

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 caterpillar 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'd extended 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.

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.

I noticed that on a few of your constructions, such as this acanalonia conica you appear to have gone back over quite large sections of your construction's silhouette to add extra line weight. Going back over your lines in this manner can cause your initially smooth and confident lines to get a little wobblier. In addition, when a student traces back over the silhouette it can switch their attention from thinking about drawing 3D forms, back to thinking about drawing lines on a flat piece of paper. The most effective use of additional line weight, given the bounds and limitations of this course is to reserve it for clarifying overlaps as explained here, and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. What this keeps us from doing is adding line weight to more random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes with additional line weight.

There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. This issue only crops up on a couple of pages, like this ladybug which would have benefited from being drawn larger. Drawing small makes it more difficult to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved in these constructions, while also making it more difficult to engage your whole arm, which can result in line work that's a little stiffer than what you're truly capable of.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is good to see you using the sausage method of leg construction on the majority of your pages, though there are a some places where you experimented with other forms, such as the hind leg of this cephalotes varians. 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.

All right, your work is coming along well and I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you tackle the next lesson, they will apply to animal constructions too.