Hello Singingmute, 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.

I can see you've included some variation in the degree of your contour curves, though in most cases it's quite subtle. I'd encourage you to experiment with varying them more dramatically in future. 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. You can also 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.

When we place an ellipse on the end of a sausage form, it's actually no different from the usual contour curves, aside from the fact that we're conveying the fact that this particular end is facing the viewer, allowing us to see the whole way around the contour line, rather than just a partial curve. So with that in mind, the degree of your contour ellipse should be fairly similar to the degree of the contour curve next to it. Right now you have a tendency to draw these ellipses almost circular, especially on the first page.

Moving on to your insect constructions on the whole you're doing pretty well. You're starting with simple solid forms, and gradually building complexity piece by piece, and it looks like you've put some care into considering how all these pieces exist in 3D space and fit together. Good work.

I do have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

1 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.

2 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.

This isn't something you're doing very often, but I've take a minute to mark on your dung beetle in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

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.

So, here I've redrawn where you'd extended the underside of the construction with a single line, so that the additions have their own fully enclosed silhouettes, and wrap around the curved surfaces of the abdomen and thorax.

I also wanted to highlight the importance of drawing through all your forms, even if they are partially obscured in your reference image. A form doesn't cease to exist in 3D space where it passes behind another object, so in order to reinforce the 3D illusion we complete the form. This also helps to develop your spatial reasoning skills by figuring out how the entire form exists in 3D space and connects to the rest of the construction.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're making a good effort to apply the sausage method for constructing your legs, nice work. 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, in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

While I can see you're you're using the sausage method, I'd like you to pay attention to where you place your contour curves. You're generally doing quite well at remembering to include a contour curve for the intersection where sausage forms join together, they're not always present. There are also a couple of constructions where you'd added extra contour lines along the length of the sausage forms. So keep that in mind when using the sausage method in future.

When it comes to building on these sausage structures, you're sometimes doing a good job of adding complete forms, and sometimes altering their silhouettes with lines, here is an example of both, with a correction shown for where you'd taken an action in 2D.

There are some approaches to building up structure on top of those base sausage armatures that work better than others. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, as seen on the hind leg of this bee, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around, always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

Lastly, I wanted to have a little talk about line weight and shadows. I've made some notes on this bee for specific examples of things I wanted to call out.

• During this course line weight should be reserved specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight. You're generally using line weight correctly, but as seen on top of the far wing, it does occasionally get applied in more random places.

• When you decide to add shadows, make sure that they are cast shadows, don't copy areas that look dark in the reference. We can see an example of this with the eye here.

• It looks like you're including form shadows in some areas. Please review this section which explains the difference between form shadows and cast shadows.

• The direction of your shadows is inconsistent. Remember they should follow a consistent light source. I strongly recommend you reread your lesson 3 critique, where ThatOneMushroomGuy brought this issue up and gave a more thorough explanation about it. Of course if anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.

Okay, I think that covers it. You're showing a good understanding of the concepts taught in this lesson so I'll be marking it as complete. Keep the points discussed here in mind as you work through the next lesson, they will apply to animal constructions too. Best of luck.