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

Starting with your organic forms most of the forms on this page are swelling through their midsections slightly and becoming bloated. Aim to keep a more consistent width along the length of your forms, such as with the second form down on the left of this page, which is spot on.

It is good to see you're working on varying the degree of the contour curves on some of your forms. 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 some good examples 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.

Your lines appear smooth and confident, which is great. Something that is quite noticeable is the number of extra lines on your work. I think, for the most part, you're not deliberately going back over lines to make corrections, but are accidentally touching the page while ghosting. Try to be a little bit more deliberate about your spacing, and movement. The pen doesn’t have to be especially close to the page when you’re ghosting, and, when you decide to lower it, do so confidently, so the act of it coming into contact with the page doesn’t surprise you.

Moving on to your insect constructions it is good to see you've been quite conscientious about drawing through your forms, instead of cutting them off where they are obscured in the reference. Drawing through, as though you have X-Ray vision and figuring out how the entire form exists in space and connects to the other parts of the construction will help you to develop your understanding of 3D space and build solid constructions, so please keep that up. You're already demonstrating a decent understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space, but I do have a few points to bring to your attention that should help you to get more out of these constructional exercises in future.

Jumping right in with how you're arranging your constructions on the page, you are unfortunately doing yourself something of a disservice in this regard, and making things harder than they need to be. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are (to some extent) thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

Next I need to reiterate something that was brought to your attention in your lesson 3 critique, additional line weight. Everything we add to our constructions in this course serves a specific purpose, and none of it has to do with making our drawings look pretty. Additional line weight is no exception. 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. Line weight should be kept subtle and added with a single, confident, ghosted, super imposed stroke, as shown here.

Right now, you appear to be starting many of your constructions with much fainter lines, and tracing back over large sections of your constructions, reinforcing the lines you want to keep visible to the viewer. This is something Uncomfortable refers to as a clean up pass and while is is a perfectly valid manner of drawing in general, it is something we firmly discourage in this course. Starting with faint lines tends to make students think of these initial forms as less solid, less, real, than they would if they were drawn clearly. Think of the forms your draw as solid blocks of marble, once they are on the page they cannot be ignored or discarded. I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight as discussed above only towards the end.

The next point I need to talk about 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.

For example, I've marked on this construction in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. On the same image I marked in blue where you'd extended off existing forms using one-off lines and partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. To be honest, some of the areas I've marked as cuts might be extensions and vice versa, as it's not always clear what order the lines were drawn in, or where the final silhouette is meant to be.

In having multiple lines representing the edge of a single form the viewer is presented with a number of possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another line present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing. Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to executing each mark to the best of your current ability.

So 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 next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction.It is good to see that you've made an effort to use the sausage method for constructing the majority of you 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.

When it comes to texture, your work here generally looks stronger than your lesson 3 submission, as there is less reliance on randomness and you're mostly working with shadow shapes.

On the wings of this fly the veins look a bit explicit. You can see an example of how to tackle veins implicitly in the context of a leaf here.

Remember that when adding texture to constructions you should be implying smaller forms on the surface of an object by drawing the shadows they cast. We're telling the viewer how the surface feels to run your hand along it, which has nothing to do with any changes in colouration. So in future avoid filling in the eyes with black, (as we see on the same fly I linked to previously) they're unlikely to be entirely within cast shadow, unless there is another form present to cast that shadow. If any of this sounds unfamiliar, you may want to review the texture section from lesson 2, these reminders offer a brief recap of how to approach texture within this course.

Conclusion

Your work here shows a great deal of potential. I am somewhat concerned about your tendency to go back over your lines to make corrections or arbitrarily reinforce them, but your underlying spatial reasoning skills appear strong. So what I'm going to do is mark this lesson as complete with the understanding that you'll make every effort to actively tackle the points raised in this critique as you handle your animals. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid). If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.