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

Starting with your organic forms, you're doing a good job executing your lines smoothly, with confidence. You're also doing a good job of varying the degree of your contour curves. It looks like you're working towards having the contour curves fit snugly within the silhouette of your forms, and the accuracy should continue to improve over time with practice.

For this exercise we'd like students to stick as closely as possible to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. We're aiming for two rounded ends (like balls) connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. There are some forms where you're pretty close, for example the one at the bottom of this page is good. There are other forms, such as at the top of the same page, that swell through their midsection to such an extent that they're closer to ellipses than sausage forms. Most of them aren't far enough off to be a huge concern, but there are enough forms with ends of different sizes or swelling/pinching in the middle to suggest that you may not be consciously aware of this particular aspect of the exercise. Focusing on those simple properties for each form helps us to capture the illusion of solidity for each one, which in turn is very valuable in using these sausages as one of the core building blocks of our constructions.

Moving on to your insect constructions, something that stood out on your first two pages was that you were clearly still preplanning how many constructions you'd like to fit on the page, and artificially restricting how much space you allocated to each one, despite this being the main issue that was called out on your plant constructions. Keep in mind that the advice provided in critiques is designed to be applied by the student as they move forward, so that issues do not need to be called out repeatedly.

In your later pages you're sticking to one construction per page, but often leaving a lot of empty space on the page that could have been used for your construction. In general I'd recommend drawing bigger when working on these kinds of constructional exercises in future, this would allow you not only more room to work through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm. I understand that some students naturally feel more comfortable drawing small, but the size of your drawings is a choice that you can make, and the more you practice drawing bigger the easier it will get.

Moving on, in many ways your work is largely heading in the right direction. You're doing a good job of following the general constructional process shown in the demos, you're starting each construction with simple solid forms and gradually building up complexity piece by piece. I'm also seeing some areas where you're clearly putting a lot of thought into how the various pieces of your constructions exist in 3D space, such as this spider which has a strong impression of the cephalothorax being in front, and the abdomen receding in space. You've also done a good job of building the spikes on the abdomen with solid 3D forms with specific connections to the existing structure, instead of adding flat shapes, which is great.

Now, I do have some advice to give you that should help you to build up your constructions with a strong 3D illusion more consistently. This 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 mantidfly 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.

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 of altering our silhouettes in this manner, 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.

Another thing I should mention that will help you to build solid constructions, is to always keep tight specific relationships between the various elements of your construction. For example I've circled in blue an area where your lines got a bit sketchy on your mantidfly resulting in a gap in the silhouette of the head. This makes it unclear where the edge of the form is supposed to be, and forces the viewer to guess. This undermines the viewer's suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at lines on a flat piece of paper.

On the same image I'd added a reminder to draw around your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page, as this helps to execute them smoothly.

I also wanted to clarify that you should not be going back over your contour curves to reinforce or correct them. We want to execute them once, with a smooth stroke, as you did in your organic forms exercise.

Contour lines themselves fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want. Unfortunately the first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns, where adding one may help the form feel 3D, but piling on a whole bunch of them won't have any extra effect. The first type also only makes a structure feel more three dimensional in isolation. They don't actually help define the relationships between forms in space, which can be better achieved with the form intersection type, and by careful design of the silhouettes of the forms themselves. Try to think through the purpose of each contour line you wish to add when going through the planning phase of the ghosting method.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were making a real effort to stick to the sausage method of leg construction for most of these. For the most part you're off to a good start with your leg constructions. You could be sticking more closely to simple sausage forms, though I think the deviations are accidental, and come down to these forms being quite challenging to execute when they are small and skinny.

Something I did notice is that quite often you make a good start with your leg construction, but stop too soon without really building out the whole leg visible in your reference. 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.

Now, the last thing I wanted to bring up is just to encourage you to observe your references carefully and frequently. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. I think you're making a an effort to observe what's going on in your reference, but perhaps find the dense amount of information we see in a photo difficult to parse through. I've made a couple of notes here of things we can look out for to help with analysing the reference material. Keeping track of where the extremities are positioned relative to one another, and looking for the location of overlaps can help to keep the positioning of your forms organised.

At the end of the day, it can definitely be difficult to judge how large we need to draw any given form, and we expect to see errors here and there that result in the construction coming out a little different to the reference image. Ultimately we'd prefer that students respect the solidity of their forms once they are on the paper, rather than redrawing them to correct them as we see on the head of this tree hopper.

Now, as a whole the points I've called out can continue to be worked on as you move onto the next lesson, so I will be marking this one as complete. That said, this feedback is rather dense - so be sure to do whatever it is you need to address these points, so we can build upon them in the next lesson.