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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a good job of keeping your lines smooth and confident, and most of your forms are reasonably close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

You’re skipping step 2 of the exercise, adding a central flow line. This step can help students align their contour curves/ellipses correctly, by having them cut into two symmetrical halves by the flow line. This isn’t a big problem in your work here, but do make sure you follow all the instructions as closely as possible in future, so you don’t miss a crucial instruction that results in being assigned revisions in future.

I can see that you’re flipping the direction of your contour curves to assert your forms in a couple of different orientations (both ends facing the viewer, or neither) but it is difficult to tell if you’re actually shifting the degree of your contour curves, as you apply them so sparsely. There’s room to apply more than 3 curves to these forms, and that would allow you to explore this aspect of the exercise more thoroughly.

Last point for this exercise, we ask students to draw around ellipses 2 full times before lifting the pen off the page, and this applies to the small ellipses on the tips of these forms.

Moving on to your insect constructions I’m happy to see that your smooth linework carries over to your insects. There are a few spots where your lines get a little sketchy and that impacts the clarity of the construction. I’ve marked some examples on this section of your louse using red where there were gaps between lines that should connect together, and blue where you’d redrawn some lines, presumably to make corrections. Both of these result in it being unclear where the edge of the forms are supposed to be, which reminds the viewer (and you) that the drawing is lines on a flat piece of paper. Your linework is generally good, just make sure you take your time with each mark, and avoid automatically redrawing things to correct them, it can quickly lead to the construction becoming messy and confusing.

You’re doing a good job with starting your constructions off with simple solid forms, and I’m happy to see that you’re building your constructions up in stages, never attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given stage, which is great.

When it comes to how we build up complexity onto those first simple forms, it helps to differentiate 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 mantis in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of a form you had already drawn. I do understand that you did this to correct a form that came out larger than intended, but the effect of undermining the 3D illusion of the construction still occurs, whatever the reason for cutting back inside the silhouette of the form may be. Make sure you give yourself ample time to observe, plan, and ghost each form, to give yourself every chance of keeping your lines under control.

It is also possible to alter the silhouette of forms we’ve already drawn by extending off them using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I’ve marked a couple of examples of extending in 2D in blue on the same mantis construction.

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.

Here I’ve redrawn the pieces I marked in blue earlier, using complete 3D forms. 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 next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were aiming to use the sausage method for the majority of your leg constructions, and on this page I thought you did well at keeping the sausage forms simple and applying a contour curve at each joint, to show how the forms connect together. The legs on this page do appear to be a bit larger/thicker than I would anticipate for this kind of insect. It can definitely be tricky to draw these skinny sausage forms accurately, and you do get points for keeping your lines smooth and confident, but do make sure you observe the reference and plan your forms to try to keep the proportions within the realms of believability.

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.

All right, your constructions are coming along well and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please refer to the diagrams and demos I’ve shared with you here as you work through the next lesson, they should help you tackle your animal constructions.