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

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, with just a couple of them swelling through their midsections and becoming bloated (such as the one at the top of this page) which you should aim to avoid because it makes the form stiff.

Keep in mind that barring any actual bending of the form, a sausage is essentially a cylinder which follows the same logic explained here in the ellipses section of lesson 1. This means that the degree of the contour curves 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. You can 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 overall you've done very well, but there are a few points I want to draw to your attention.

The first of these is something ThatOneMushroomGuy brought up in your previous critique, you should be drawing through and completing your forms wherever possible, as this will help you to develop a stronger understanding of how all the pieces of your constructions connect together in 3D space. If we look at this rhino beetle for example, I’ve traced over your abdomen in blue, to highlight how it just stops existing where it meets the thorax, which is not correct. Take another look at this section of the lesson intro page where Uncomfortable talks about using solid forms. See how in the example image that he has drawn each of the 3 major forms in their entirety including the parts where they overlap. If you only draw the visible sections of your forms it is very easy to slip back into thinking in 2D, transferring the shapes you observe in the flat reference image over onto your flat piece of paper.

Just to be clear, you usually do draw through your forms, and I don’t think you’re copying 2D shapes, but I wanted to take a moment to explain why it is so important, and I hope you’ll push yourself to complete your forms more consistently as you move forward.

The next point is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had. It's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the later forms respect and even reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

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 appear to cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn very much, and that is helping your constructions to feel solid and convincing. Sometimes this can happen accidentally, such as with the sections marked with red here on your ant. This came down to there being a gap between lines passing around an ellipse (which is totally normal), and then picking 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.

While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. On the ant I also marked in blue some places 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. While this approach worked for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

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.

This additive construction is something you’re already applying really well in some areas, such as the boxy form I’d traced over with green on your ant above. Here I’ve shown how to complete a few of the partial shapes I’d marked with blue earlier, so we can show more clearly how all these pieces are supposed to fit together in 3D space.

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 I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were aiming to stick with the sausage method for most of your legs, which is a great start. 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, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are coming along very well and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please apply the advice in this critique to your animal constructions in the next lesson, where these points will continue to be relevant. Keep up the good work.