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

Starting with your organic forms, on the second page you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, with a few more irregularities (such as ends of different sizes, or bloated middles) being present on the first page.

You’re keeping your linework smooth and confident here, which is great. Keep striving to have your contour curves fit snugly against the sides of the forms, there are a few that are floating inside the form, or drifting outside their bounds.

I can see that you’re experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves, and you’re off to a good start. 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, these are looking very strong. You’ve clearly put a lot of though into how the forms you draw exist not just as shapes on the page, but as solid forms in 3D space. You’re often fitting the various pieces of your constructions together specific relationships, such as contour lines where they intersect, helping to actively reinforce the 3D illusion as you build complexity, which is excellent.

Normally as part of lesson 4 critiques I introduce students to the following rule to help to only take actions “in 3D.”

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.

Now, you’re already sticking to this rule remarkably well, and checking your previous submission I see that ThatOneMushroomGuy already brought it up in your lesson 3 feedback.

The only places I spotted where you had cut back into the silhouette forms you had already drawn are probably accidental, and came down to the fact that there would be gaps between the lines of your 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. I’ve marked with red a couple of instances of this which I noticed on your beetle. 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. Often these happen where you had overlapping forms and cut them off, only drawing the visible sections. I encourage you to “draw through” and complete your forms where possible, so you can establish how they fit together in 3D space.

So, 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.

I noted on your beetle in green an example where you’re already applying this tactic really well to build the horn onto the existing construction, but I’ll go ahead and share a couple of examples of this in practice which you might find useful.

- Beetle horn demo

- 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 were striving to use the sausage method for the majority of your leg constructions, as well as experimenting with some other strategies, particularly for the limb segments furthest from the bodies. 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.

The last thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves.

Okay I think that covers it. You’ve done a fantastic job and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, keep up the good work.