Hello Yume, thank you for uploading the missing pages.

You're doing a good job of starting most of your constructions off with solid forms for the head, thorax and abdomen, and I'm happy to see that you're executing these ellipses smoothly, with confidence. I do have a few points to cover that should help you to get more out of these constructional exercises in future.

Firstly, how we make use of the space available on the page makes a big difference. It is a little hard to tell as most of your pages are cropped, but going off the relative size of your handwriting and the thickness of the lines I'm guessing a few of these pages may contain one small construction and a lot of blank empty space. If this is the case I encourage you to draw your constructions larger. If you're artificially limiting the amount of space you use for a given construction (making it smaller than what the space on the page allows) then you're making things more difficult than they really need to be, by limiting your brain's capacity to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these constructions, and by making it more difficult to engage your whole arm while drawing, which may result in linework that is clumsier than what you're really capable of. Drawing small also makes it more difficult to fully construct finer elements like legs, leading to some of your constructions coming out a bit over-simplified.

Another factor we must give these exercises in order to get as much as possible from them is time. There are some places where your linework gets a bit loose and sketchy, suggesting you may not be allowing yourself time to go through all the stages of the ghosting method for each mark you make. We can see looseness in the feet of this construction where you'd left gaps in the silhouettes of the feet, making it unclear where the edge of these forms are supposed to be, which will undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief and remind them that they're looking at lines on a flat piece of paper. Here are a couple of examples of places where you appear to be scratching your lines, breaking the first principle of markmaking from lesson 1. We want to avoid arbitrarily redrawing our lines to reinforce or correct them (which makes the construction messy and confusing) and instead focus on ghosting each line as much as needed, then executing it one time only.

When you follow along with one of the demos it is important to follow each step as closely as you can, do not cut them short, and do not alter their steps. This is so you can learn the methods and techniques Uncomfortable uses, so that you can then apply them to your own constructions using your own choice of reference. If we look at this wasp there are a lot of extra stray marks that are not shown in the demo, yet the eye seems to be missing and the legs are incomplete. This causes you to miss out on getting as much as possible from drawing along with the demo.

The next point I wanted to talk about relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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.

For example, I've marked on your ant 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 there would be gaps between your passes around the ellipses (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.

On the same image I marked in blue some examples 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.

The last thing to call out is that 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 as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo. Please make every effort to stick to the sausage method when constructing insect or animal legs in this course, as closely as you can.

Now, I have called out quite a few things to work on, and I will be assigning some revisions for you to address the points we've covered here. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark using the ghosting method), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete the following:

• 1 drawing done following the shrimp demo and 1 drawing done following the lobster demo. Take care to follow each step as closely as you can.

• 3 pages of insect or arachnid constructions using reference of your choice.