Hello Decaf_Bubblegum, 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 linework smooth, and are sticking more closely to the characteristics of simple sausages than in your lesson 2 work, which is good progress. There are just a couple of spots where one end of a form got a little stretched and pointy, so keep working on having the ends rounded like half spheres.

You’re doing well at fitting your curves snugly against the edges of the forms, and experimenting with shifting their degree.

I noticed sometimes you’d place an ellipse on an end of the sausage that the contour curves tell us is facing away from the viewer. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.

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. Some of them are points from previous lessons you may have forgotten, or aspects of techniques you may have neglected to apply, although the biggest 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.

Starting with this main point, 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 cut back inside the silhouettes of existing forms very much at all, and you generally work by adding to the existing structure instead, I hope you’ll continue to work additively in the next lesson too, as this will help you constructions continue to feel solid and believable. I did see one (possible) example where it looks like you may have intended to cut back inside the silhouette of the thorax on this fly but this could also be interpreted as part of that simple round form peeking out from behind the additional piece you'd built on top of it.

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 your Hercules beetle I 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.

I’m pleased to see that you’re already using this strategy quite a bit in your various pages, and I’d traced over some good examples with green on your fly to call them out. In this drawover I’ve shown how we can use complete new forms to build upon the Hercules beetle, instead of the partial shapes I’d marked with blue previously.

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 working with the sausage method quite a bit (such as with this spider) as well as experimenting with a couple of other strategies. 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.

The last point I wanted to mention is a couple of reminders about linework. It looks like you’re making use of the ghosting method for most of your lines (which is great) but keep in mind that the ghosting method emphasises the importance of drawing your lines one time only. On the left of your fly I’ve called out a few places where it looks like you’d drawn a line 2 or 3 times without a clear purpose in mind. This will just make the construction messy and confusing, so going forward remember to ghost the line as many times as you need, but only draw it once.

Over towards the right of the same image, I wanted to call out that sometimes your lines are so faint you’re basically forced to come back and draw them again to make them more visible. Aim to keep a more consistent line thickness through the various stages of construction, so that at each step you only need to add the parts that change instead of redrawing forms that are already on the page. If you’re not intentionally sketching lightly or timidly, it may simply be that your pen is running low on ink, and it may help to retire that pen to warmups and use a fresher pen for your homework.

Alright, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are feeling pretty solid and your spatial reasoning skills appear to be developing nicely. I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please refer to the information in this critique as you tackle the next lesson, these points will continue to apply to animal constructions. Keep up the good work.