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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

You're generally doing a good job of keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here. Occasionally you have a form with one end larger than the other, for example here so try to keep them more even in future.

The forms themselves are smooth and confidently drawn, and so are your ellipses. Some of your contour curves looks slightly hesitant, so keep working on that confident execution when your practise these in your warmups. Something that may help (if you're not already doing it) is to ghost the entire ellipse and only place your pen down for the section you wish to draw.

I can see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves. The idea we're trying to get across here is that these curves should generally get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form as is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. On some of your forms you have this "degree shift" reversed. It's not impossible for this to happen, if the form is bending a great deal, like this banana, but what we would normally expect to see is shown in this diagram which is a good example of how to vary your contour curves to show a form in various orientations.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is coming along well. You're demonstrating a good understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

I'm going to paste in the feedback I gave you over Discord for this beetle. I'm really pleased that you took this feedback on board and corrected this in the rest of your set, but I wanted to make sure your feedback is all in one spot instead of having some of it buried over on Discord.

The first point that jumped out at me is this drawing features two distinct structures, which appear to occupy the same space, but seem to be fundamentally separate in the way they've been drawn. This distinction exists between those initial masses you start with (the head, thorax, abdominal masses) which are drawn either with a completely different pen, or simply with far less pressure, and all of the subsequent linework which is considerably thicker and bolder.

When students create this distinction between phases of their construction (treating the early masses as something separate or different from the rest of the construction), it can encourage one to view those initial masses as being less solid, and less present in the world. Constructional drawing itself is all about building up to a result, step by step - it's an exercise, a spatial puzzle that we solve, and in so doing we gradually rewire the way in which our brains perceive the 3D space that exists within the flat surface of the page. For the most part you clearly work well in that direction, but in this drawing those first masses are treated as being separate, as not being a part of the final drawing.

Note in particular how with each of those early masses, if they were removed from the drawing, it would not have any impact on the end result's completeness. That is because you end up replacing them with darker, bolder lines, phasing them out of the construction altogether.

I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight to clarify overlaps only towards the end.

If you're using a brush pen, it should only be used to fill in shapes that you've already outlined with your fineliner as shown in this diagram, you don't want to be painting with it directly, or using it for line weight.

Moving on, I have some advice that should help you to continue to make the most out of these constructional exercises in the future.

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 ant in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside your forms where there is a gap between passes on your ellipses. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space.

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.

I've made some notes on your weevil here where you're doing a good job of adding a bumps onto your legs with additional forms, but then you go in with lines to add a little more refinement and detail to your silhouette. Sometimes this may be accidental, when you're adding lineweight and allow if to bridge between two forms, smoothing out your silhouette in the process. I've shown how we might build that spiky bump using just forms, without the need to extend with lines. I hope it helps.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I'm happy to see you're making use of the sausage method throughout your work. You're a bit inconsistent with adding a contour curve to define the intersection between sausage forms at the joints as shown here. These little contour curves might seem insignificant but they do tell the viewer a lot of information about how the forms are orientated in space as well as reinforcing the structure of your legs by establishing how the forms connect together. So be sure to remember to include them in future.

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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

I think that covers it. You're doing a great job so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.