Hello lost_david, I’ll be the TA handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, I can see you’re working towards keeping your sausage forms simple as shown here, though there are a few cases where you have one end larger than the other like this one, and a couple of places where you’ve placed a contour ellipse on an end of a form in a way that contradicts the information your contour curves are telling us, such as here. When you draw an ellipse on the end remember that we can see the entirety of this ellipse because it's facing towards us - this also happens to serve as a very effective visual cue. You would want the contour curve next to it to curve as shown in this diagram.

Remember that the degree of your contour curves need to get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

It’s notable that some of your marks are coming out pretty faint. This could be due to your pen running low on ink, but may also be down to the angle you hold it at, you can see Uncomfortable demonstrate how to hold your pen in this video

Moving on to your insect constructions, I can see you started with simple forms and added complexity and detail step by step, good job. You’re demonstrating a developing understanding of how the forms you’re drawing exist in 3d space and connecting them together with specific relationships. I did notice that you have a tendency to draw your initial forms in more lightly than the final steps of your construction. In some cases you're starting your constructions out with lines that are effectively designed to be replaced, and then going back in to apply a clean-up pass of thicker lines to replace them. While this is a valid approach in general, it is one we firmly avoid in this course, as discussed here in Lesson 2. These initial forms are not a loose underdrawing, but solid forms that make up the backbone of your constructions, so draw them clearly.

This brings us to my next point. 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. I’ve marked on your ant here in red where you appear to have cut back inside your initial forms and in blue where you’ve extended them. Perhaps the cut on the abdomen was just the gap between passes on your ellipse, but on the thorax you’re definitely cutting back inside your initial form.

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.

On this critter it appears you may have accidentally made alterations to your silhouette by tracing back over your existing forms with a heavier line. Line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here which I can see you are aware of by the way you’ve used line weight on some of your other constructions, but I also want to remind you to keep your line weight subtle. Usually one ghosted, super imposed line is enough to do the job.

Moving on, I can see that you’ve mostly been using the sausage method to construct your insects legs, great work. These sausage forms do a good job of showing both the gestural flow and solid structure of the legs simultaneously and is the construction method Uncomfortable wants students to use for both this lesson and lesson 5 too. On the whole you’re doing a good job with this, but I see some places where you aren’t always adding the contour line at the joints, to show how the two sausage forms intersect. These little contour lines convey a lot of information about how your sausages are orientated in space and how they fit together so please try to remember them in future.

There are a couple of places where your leg sausages start a bit too complex, such as the top section of the hind leg on this guy. Instead of jumping ahead to complex forms right away, I’d like to push you towards starting simple and building complexity on top by adding more forms as shown in these examples here, here, and here and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is important for tackling animal constructions too.

You mentioned some doubts about texture and detail on your submission. I want to reassure you that texture is completely optional for this lesson (and the next one) and I would be perfectly happy with your homework if you chose to focus only on construction for the entirety of the submission. If you do want to add texture and detail to some of your constructions I would point you in the direction of the texture section of lesson 2 which contains the most detailed and up to date information on Drawabox on the subject and which will supersede any conflicting information you may encounter during some of the older demos featured later in the course. For example the current instruction is to ignore changes in local color (such as a leopard’s spots) and to focus instead on cast shadows.

Okay, I think you’ve got plenty to work on there. I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you may end up just creating further issues on top of them. I’d like you to complete 2 additional pages of insect constructions please. Whenever you add to your existing structure try to think in terms of adding a complete 3d form instead of single lines or a 2d shape. I look forward to seeing your work.