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

Starting with your organic forms you're keeping your lines smooth and confident here, which is great. Some of your forms are sticking very closely to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as introduced here. Sometimes the ends of your forms are different sizes like these so keep working on having them more even in future.

It's good that your line confidence carries over to your contour curves but I get the impression that you're not paying much attention to their alignment. If we take this form as an example, the bottom two contour curves are both significantly misaligned in the exact same manner. Sometimes despite our best efforts, a line won't come out quite how we planned, but what we can do is take note of this and attempt to correct for this mistake when we draw the next one. So- make sure you rotate your page to the best angle to help you align each curve, take a moment to asses each curve before moving on to the next one, and be sure to use the ghosting method.

I can see some evidence of you working on varying the degree of your contour curves which is good. The idea we're trying to get across here is that these curves should generally get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form as is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. On some of your forms you have this "degree shift" reversed. It's not impossible for this to happen, if the form is bending a great deal, like this banana, but what we would normally expect to see is shown in this diagram which is a good example of how to vary your contour curves to show a form in various orientations.

When it comes to the little ellipses on the ends of your forms, (and all your ellipses, this issue is present in your insect constructions too,) remember to draw all the way around the ellipse two full times before lifting your pen. As explained here, this is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This is something ThatOneMushroomGuy already asked you to do twice in your lesson 3 critique and feedback for your lesson 3 revisions. If anything that has been said to you here or previously is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions. If there's no misunderstanding or confusion here then you're going to need to take much more care to actually apply the feedback you have received.

Moving on to your insect constructions I can see you have the ability to do a really good job here, but there are a couple of aspects to how you're approaching these exercises that are undermining your efforts. They're both things that were raised in your lesson 3 critique, which does suggest you may want to refer back to the feedback you have received more frequently as you work though these exercises instead of relying on your memory from reading it once.

Firstly draw through your forms. By this I mean draw each form in its entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off when they pass behind another form. It will help you to gain a better understanding of 3D space if you draw like you have X-ray vision.

Moreover, it is incredibly important that you start each construction with simple, solid forms as explained on the lesson introduction page. This is something you're doing for the majority of your constructions but this grasshopper and this fly both started with incomplete shapes for the thorax and abdomen. Here on your fly I've highlighted exactly what I'm talking about, and shown you how to draw through, so that you have a solid foundation upon which to build the rest of your construction.

The second point that was already raised in lesson 3 is that you're starting your constructions with significantly fainter lines, then coming back later with a heavier line to trace over large sections of the silhouette, reinforcing the lines you wish to "keep." It is notable throughout your work, but this scorpion is a particularly prominent example, I can barely see your construction lines at all. This is something Uncomfortable refers to as a clean-up pass and while this is a perfectly valid method for drawing in general, it is one we firmly discourage in this course. Instead of treating your first steps as an underdrawing to help you put your "real drawing" in the right place, think about these first steps as introducing real, solid structures into the world. To help put you in this frame of mind, keep an even thickness of line throughout all stages of your construction, and only add the parts that change instead of redrawing the whole silhouette. Any additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

Moving on to new information for lesson 4.

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.

With your first steps being so faint it's difficult to see but I've marked on your scorpion in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

On this page 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. Some of this is the result of cutting your forms off where they are overlapped by something else, instead of drawing through your forms.

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 lots of 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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. The concepts taught in each lesson build upon one another so if I move you on with unaddressed issues they may become exacerbated in the next lesson, and undermine your efforts to learn from these exercises.

Please complete 3 pages of insect constructions.