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

Starting with your organic forms it looks like you’re aiming to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and although sometimes your forms get a bit pinched in the middle or have one end a bit larger than the other, you’re not far enough off for this to be a big concern. Just keep actively aiming for those simple properties when doing this exercise in your warmups and your accuracy should improve with practice.

It is good to see that you’re keeping most of your linework smooth and confident, but try to resist the temptation to redraw lines to make corrections. The ghosting method emphasizes 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 execute each mark. This also applies to your insect constructions, and to the course as a whole.

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.

Moving on to your insect constructions you’ve done a pretty good job, I’m happy to see that you’re starting all your constructions off with simple solid forms and building up complexity gradually, piece, by piece. I can see that you’re starting to get the hang of thinking about how your forms sit in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships, and I like how you tend to wrap abdomen segmentation around the curvature of those underlying simple forms so they feel satisfyingly voluminous.

I do have a few things to talk about to help you to continue to get as much as possible out of your constructions, and the first of these relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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.

Fortunately, you don’t seem to cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn very much, although I have marked a couple of small examples with red on your ant. It looks like you may have accidentally cut back inside the front end of the abdomen form on your wasp due to their being a gap between lines passing around your ellipse (which is totally normal), and then you'd picked one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately does leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which creates 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.

It is also possible to alter the silhouette of an existing form by extending it. On your ant head and this beetle leg I also marked in blue some 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 fine 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.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. On this image I’ve swapped the two partial shapes I marked with blue earlier with complete 3D forms. 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 looks like you were aiming to use the sausage method for most of your legs, and you’re doing pretty well at drawing chains of overlapping sausage forms. It does look like you have a bit of a misunderstanding about how to tackle the joints. It looks like you’re drawing circles on top of the joints, or possibly laying out circles where you want to put the joints and then constructing the sausages around them.

Take a look at this copy of the sausage method diagram. To use the sausage method correctly we start by drawing a chain of overlapping sausage forms, then (as highlighted in red) we draw a contour curve at each joint, in the region where the forms overlap. What we are doing here is drawing the intersection where the two forms penetrate one another in space, creating a specific 3D relationship between the two forms. If you need something on the page to help you ghost where you want your sausage forms to go, placing a dot where you want to put a joint will give you a visual aid, without making the construction messy or confusing.

Another point 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.

I’m happy to see that you’ve taken a swing at building onto your sausage armatures on some of your pages, adding the sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that you observe in these structures, arriving at a more characteristic representation of the leg in question than what can be achieved with the sausages alone. I have some diagrams to share with you that I hope will help you to build onto your leg structures “in 3D” as you move forwards.

• These diagrams show how we can add to the construction with complete 3D forms instead of flat shapes and one-off lines.

• This diagram shows how instead of fully engulfing an existing form within a new one, we can establish a clearer relationship between the existing form and the new addition by breaking it into two pieces.

• This ant leg demo shows how we can take the sausage method and push it further, adding all kinds of lumps bumps and spikes to the sausage armature.

• I’d also like to share this dog leg demo with you, which shows how the sausage method can be applied to animal legs. This is important, as we’d like you to continue to stick with the sausage method of leg construction when tackling your animals in the next lesson.

It doesn’t look like you’ve fully understood what ThatOneMushroomGuy said about your use of lineweight in your previous critique. I’ve made some notes directly on your work here which I hope will help you to understand. In red I’ve called out places where your additional lineweight is actually undermining the solidity of your construction, rather than helping in any way. In green, I’ve drawn some spots where lineweight can be used to help clarify overlaps between your forms, restricting its application to localised areas where those overlaps occur. Lineweight should be kept subtle, it doesn’t take much extra thickness for the viewer’s subconscious to pick up on it. And remember additional lineweight should adhere to the principles of markmaking, using the ghosting method. Please revisit this video from lesson 1 which explains how to use lineweight in this course.

Lastly, generally it is best to avoid filling in large areas with solid black, such as the heads of this beetle and this spider. While it is possible that these areas might be cast shadows, they do not add any textural information, in fact they remove information by obscuring the underlying construction. Focus your application of cast shadows on implying the presence of small textural forms running along the surface of your larger constructed forms.

All right, I think that should cover it. Overall you’ve done a good job so I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please refer to this critique as you tackle the next lesson, the information I have provided here should be applied to your animal constructions as you move forwards. Keep up the good work.