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

Starting with your organic forms you’re drawing your forms with smooth confident lines and most of them stick closely to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, nicely done!

Keep in mind that the contour curves are no different from the contour ellipses, they’ll have the same curvature, we just don’t draw the full circuit around them. I noticed with the form at the top left of this page that most of your curves were more of a stretched out “3” shape suggesting that the form was more complex than two round ends connected by a bendy tube of consistent width.

I’d also encourage you to hook your contour curves around the far side of the forms a bit more, until you become more accustomed to making their curvature accelerate at they approach the edge of the forms. It is no where near as extreme as this example from the exercise instructions, but there are a few cases where your curves end too abruptly.

Keep in mind that barring any actual bending of the form, a sausage is essentially a cylinder which follows the same logic explained here in the ellipses section of lesson 1. This means that the degree of the contour curves 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. You can see a good example of how to vary your contour curves in this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

Moving on to your insect constructions before I talk more critically about your work, I want to mention that looking at your submission outside of the specific goals and requirements of the lesson (and of the course as whole) these are really cool drawings. I can tell that you put quite a bit of effort into them, and you appear to have a fair bit of drawing experience with strong observational skills.

This thing is, we do have to be pretty strict about the methods used in these constructions, both in following any new techniques shown in the current lesson, and in continuing to abide by the methods and principles introduced in previous lessons. Doing so will help you to get a more believable three dimensional result with the construction at hand, but more importantly it is going to help you to learn more from the exercise, so it will benefit you in the long run too.

So, as introduced in lesson 1, we want students to stick to the principles of markmaking throughout the course. While this isn’t an issue everywhere, for example your ellipses tend to be really smooth and confident, there are a significant number of areas where your lines are either scratchy, breaking the first principle of markmaking, and/or wobbly, breaking the second principle.

Looking at your organic forms it is abundantly clear that you are entirely capable of maintaining smooth confident linework, so there is no lack of ability. It comes down to being more intentional about each line you choose to add to a drawing, and making sure that you’re making proper use of the ghosting method for every line should help with that. By planning each mark you can ensure that it serves a clear purpose, then using the preparation phase will help you to execute the line smoothly, with confidence.

Another contributing factor to the linework issues is that on some pages (such as this fly) it looks like you’d traced back over a lot of pre-existing lines to add line weight to random areas. Everything we do in these exercises serves a specific purpose, and additional line weight is no exception. As introduced in this video from lesson 1 the most effective way to use line weight in this course is for clarifying overlaps between forms, restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur.

Moving along to information from lesson 2, as explained in this section using hatching to create form shading serves no purpose in terms of what we hope to achieve when adding texture to a construction, and should not be part of your work. You’ve used this technique on half of your pages, despite ThatOneMushroomGuy bringing it up as an issue in both rounds of your lesson 3 feedback. Please make every effort to apply the advice provided in previous critiques, it it intended to help you.

I do also see areas there you were using more intentional shapes of solid black, although because we happen to have a black pen in our hand it can be tempting to fill in anything we see in the reference that looks black, which isn’t really what the texture section of lesson 2 describes. Areas of solid black should be reserved for cast shadows only. Right now you’re getting a bit muddled up with colour patterns and form shadows, which is very common. Remember that a form shadow occurs where the surface of a form faces away from the light source, but a cast shadow occurs where one form blocks the light from hitting another surface. These diagrams show an example of a form shadow and a cast shadow, using the context of a sausage form. Below s a quick example of how we can leverage the shadows cast by small textural forms running along the surface of the sausage, implying the bumpy texture without having to outline all the little bumps themselves. Doing this will allow you to control the density of detail and create intentional focal points. If you're feeling unsure whther something constirutes texture, or how to approach adding it, this summary describes the sprecific proces you should be following, and is a great section to refer to. In general I recommend that you avoid filling in large areas with solid black, because this doesn’t give much information about the surface texture, and can actually remove information by obscuring the underlying construction.

Moving along to the constructional methods, it is very important that you draw through and complete your forms wherever possible, as this will lead you to figuring out how the whole form sits in space, and then allow you to create specific 3D relationships between those forms. I’d like you to take a look at this section of the lesson intro page, particularly the example on the left. Notice that each of those forms has been drawn in its entirety, including the parts where they overlap. Compare this to your spider where the cephalothorax just stops existing where it meets the abdomen. When we only draw the visible sections, it is very easy to slip back into thinking in 2D, just copying over 2D shapes from the flat reference image over onto out flat piece of paper.

Granted, you usually do draw through the head/thorax/abdomen forms, but more broadly you often cut off sections of the legs, especially where they attach to the body. Compare the legs of your louse with the corresponding structures in the louse demo.

While we’re on the topic of legs, it looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing them. 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 too.

Continuing on, I have some advice that should help you to build upon your constructions more effectively, once the simple solid forms are in place. 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.

For example, I've marked on your beetle in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. 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 spider I also marked in blue some of the 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.

This drawover demonstrates a few examples of how to use complete new forms to construct the spider, instead of the flat partial shapes I’d marked with blue earlier. 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 don’t doubt that you have the ability to do an excellent job with this lesson, but right now you’re not quite sticking to the principles laid out in earlier lessons, or the construction methods introduced in this one. I’m going to ask you to complete some revisions to address the various points I’ve explained here.

Please complete:

• 2 pages of insect constructions that include construction only, with no texture.

• 2 pages of insect constructions that may include texture of you wish, but these can also be construction only.