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

Starting with your organic forms the page labelled 1 is the stronger of the two, with smoother, more confident linework and more success at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

Your contour curves are coming along well, you do a good job of fitting them snugly against the edges of the forms with a nice overshoot that helps them to wrap around the surface of the forms. It is good to see that you’re consciously experimenting with shifting the degree of your contour curves, as this is an aspect of the exercise that is often overlooked, keep it up.

Moving on to your insect constructions overall you've done very well, but there are a few points I want to draw to your attention. Some of them are points from previous lessons you may have forgotten, or aspects of techniques you may have neglected to apply, although the biggest point is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had.

Starting with this main point, 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 work here in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that many 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.

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 the same I also marked in blue along one leg a couple of spots 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 additive 3D construction is something I can see you exploring quite a bit in your pages, for example on the page I’d marked up the antennae and mandibles are nice solid 3D additions to your base construction, good work. 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 second point I wanted to bring up is a bit of a reminder to stick to the principles of markmaking as closely as you can for all of your linework. There are plenty of areas where you do this well, a lot of your larger forms are drawn with smooth confident lines, and I can see the dots you’ve used to help with the planning stage of the ghosting method in some areas. Sometimes there are areas where your lines get a little stiff and hesitant, for example this leg has some noticeable wobbling, and these wobbles add unwanted complexity to your forms, making them appear less solid.

It is not all that unusual to slip back into drawing for the wrist or elbow when drawing smaller pieces, in an effort to keep control over the lines and draw with more precision, but changing the pivot restricts the range of motion, often resulting in the sort of stiff lines we see in that leg. Keep pushing to engage your whole arm and draw from the shoulder throughout the construction process. The stiff precise marks we can make by drawing from the wrist are more useful for describing texture, once the construction phase of the drawing is complete.

Another problem which can impact the smoothness of lines is incorrect or incomplete use of the ghosting method. Make sure you’re going through the preparation (ghosting) phase to build up some temporary muscle memory, so that once your pen touches the page you can trust your arm to do its job and make the mark with confidence.

Make sure you draw around every ellipse two full times before lifting your pen off the page, as this helps to keep them smooth and even. As introduced in this section this is something we insist on for all ellipses freehanded in this course. Again, this is something you do correctly much of the time, this is just a little reminder to do so consistently.

The next thing 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, 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.

To use the sausage method:

• The only ellipse is the one where the leg connects to the body.

• Stick to the characteristics of simple sausages (as introduced with the organic forms exercise) for each limb section, as closely as you can.

• Make sure the sausage forms overlap, so you can apply one contour line to each joint, within the overlap, to define how the sections fit together in 3D. These contour lines are just like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise, and they make adding any extra contour lines to the middle of the sausages obsolete.

• Once the sausage chains are in place we can attach more forms to them, to develop a more characteristic construction of the particular leg in question.

The last topic I should mention is texture, where you’re making great headway towards working implicitly to create texture. I thought the wing of your bee was very well done. Here you’ve implied the presence of veins on the wing, by drawing the shadows that the veins cast onto the wing, without outlining the veins themselves. This is excellent, as working implicitly will allow you to control the density of detail within your textures and create focal points, rather than overwhelming the viewer with detail everywhere. Be sure to put this much care into any texture or detail you wish to add, on the same bee construction, some of the fur looks like the marks were made a bit hastily without using the ghosting method, rather than being individually intentionally designed.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your spatial reasoning skills appear to be developing well and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please make sure you refer to this feedback as you tackle the next lesson, the points discussed here should be applied to your animal constructions as you move forwards.