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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

Your contour curves are well aligned, and it looks like you're executing them smoothly, nicely done.

On your first page most of your contour curves are sticking to the same degree. 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.

On the second page I can see you've made an effort to try to shift the degree of your contour curves. On this page the contour curves are telling us that both ends of these forms are facing away from the viewer, and yet you've placed an ellipse one one end of each of these forms. 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, you clearly have strong observational skills, along with a flair for producing a polished end result. These all look pretty impressive, and my main concern is that you seem to be (to some extent) prioritising this end result over the specific steps you take to arrive at a completed drawing.

In general, when doing the homework for these lessons, it is likely going to be beneficial to set aside the way in which you want to draw (which clearly has a focus on end results and presentation), as this can distract you from what will get you most out of the exercise itself. To that point, keeping in mind that these are exercises - where the specific process is what matters, where we're basically solving a 3d spatial puzzle that forces us to consider how the different forms relate to one another in 3d space. Each construction is another puzzle, and with each one we solve, we rewire how our brains understand the relationship between the things we're drawing and the 3d structures they represent.

As we shift focus to ensuring that the end result is visually pleasing, we also dilute the effectiveness of the exercise. Of course that doesn't mean the end result shouldn't look pleasing - just that this should be a byproduct of doing the exercise, not the result of the exercise being altered for that purpose.

Right now, the majority of your constructions appear to consist of two distinct phases. On pages like this beetle it looks like you're starting off with a faint sketch or underdrawing, then coming back in with a clean up pass and reinforcing the lines you'd like to keep visible. Notice how we could remove the underdrawing from your beetle without really affecting the final result. You're effectively making a lighter drawing that is designed to be replaced at a later stage.

Drawing the first forms faintly often leads students into thinking of them as less solid, or less real, than the later stages of construction. Instead, consider your first steps of construction as introducing structure to the world. Think of your simple solid forms like pieces of marble, and once they are on the page we want to respect their solidity, attaching all our additional pieces to these existing structures, and trying to figure out how all these pieces connect together in 3D space. Try to keep a more even thickness of line through your various stages of construction, and at each step, rather than redrawing the whole insect, only add the parts that change.

You appear to be using additional line weight as a tool to refine and manipulate the silhouette of your forms. Given the bounds and limitations of this course, the most effective use of additional line weight is to reserve it for clarifying overlaps between your forms and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can also see an example of where to apply line weight shown in black in the last step if this simple mantidfly construction. Keep your line weight subtle, think of it as a whisper rather than a shout. Usually a single super imposed stroke will be enough to get the desired effect.

As ThatOneMushroomGuy discussed in your previous critique, we want to "draw through" our forms wherever possible. If a form is partially visible in your reference, try to draw the whole form, even where it may pass behind something else in the reference image and become obscured. If you only draw the visible sections of forms in your constructions, some of these will be partial shapes, and the viewer (and you) will be missing the information they need to really understand how these shapes connect together in 3D space. If we take this dragonfly as an example, all the overlapping legs have been chopped into pieces where they pass behind one another, which reduces the effectiveness of the exercise, by diverting your attention away from drawing 3D forms, back to drawing individual lines on a flat piece of paper.

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 scorpion in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that some of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (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. 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 this image I marked in blue one example (of many places) where you'd extended off existing forms using a partial, flat shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure 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.

The last point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs. 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.

Now, I have called out a number of points to address, and while some of these are new information that you're not expected to know at this stage, (such as not altering the silhouette of forms you have already drawn) others have been brought to your attention before (such as the importance of drawing through forms and appropriate use of line weight) and so I will be assigning some revisions for you to apply this information before moving forward.

While there is no lack of ability here, I do need to check that you have understood the lesson instructions and the feedback that has been provided. The concepts in these lessons build upon one another so moving you forward with unaddressed issues may result in undermining your efforts to learn from these exercises. If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.

Please complete 2 pages of insect constructions.