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

Starting with your organic forms, you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

You're keeping your line work smooth and confident for your flow lines and forms, though I do see the occasional sign of hesitation on a few of your contour curves, so remember to always prioritise making a smooth confident stroke first and foremost.

I can see that you're experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves, good work. 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 your work here is very well done. You're building up your constructions one step at a time, from simple to complex, and more importantly where many students are prone to jumping back and forth between working in both 3D space (engaging with the construction as a collection of forms) and in 2D space (cutting into the silhouettes of forms, or making additions as partial shapes or individual lines), you by and large focus quite heavily on the former, which gives your constructions far more solidity.

I usually spend a large portion of lesson 4 critiques explaining how we can take actions on our constructions that respect the solidity of our forms by avoiding altering the silhouettes of forms we have already drawn. I see that ThatOneMushroomGuy already introduced you to this rule back in your lesson 3 feedback, and that you're sticking to it pretty well. This is marvellous, and something I hope you'll continue to hold to throughout the next lesson as well.

This also means that this critique will probably be a fair bit shorter than is normal for this lesson.

So, fortunately what you've generally stuck to is introducing new additions as complete, self-enclosed silhouettes. As we build things up, there are basically two ways in which a new form can become part of an existing structure - either by interpenetrating that structure, and having its relationship/connection defined by a contour line (like the form intersections from Lesson 2), or by having a form wrap around that existing structure, and conveying this through the use of its silhouette, as shown here.

To that last point, I do see you developing a sense for how to specifically design the silhouette of your additional forms as you progress through the set, but I've made a couple of notes on your grasshopper to show how we can better convey how they wrap around the existing structure. This is something you'll get a lot more practice with as you tackle the next lesson, so think of this as a bonus to give you a little leg-up as you move forward.

So again, this is something you're doing very well, but I'll go ahead and share an example of additive construction in practice 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. I'm honestly pretty happy with how you're applying the sausage method throughout the set, and I'd like to encourage you to keep using this method throughout the next lesson to construct your animal's legs too.

I do have some diagrams and demos that can help with further understanding how to approach additive construction in the context of legs:

• Here see how we can break a larger engulfing form into separate pieces so that each one's silhouette will make ample contact with the existing structure.

• These diagrams show examples of building onto existing structures with 3D forms instead of flat shapes or one-off lines.

• This ant leg demo shows how this approach can be pushed further to capture all sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that we might see in these kinds of structures.

• Finally this dog leg demo shows an example of how this approach can be applied to animal constructions.

Your use of texture is heading in the right direction, and I can see you're making an effort to tackle this aspect using the guidance for textures introduced in lesson 2. While you're focusing on cast shadows, which is great, you could stand to be a bit more careful when you fill them in. If we look at the thorax of this fly there appear to be unintentional white gaps in some of your shadows, as well as places where you're going outside the boundary of the shadow shape you had designed with your fineliner. Just be sure to take your time with this, and if a shadow is too small or fiddly to fill in with a brush pen you can fill it in with your fineliner, which should give you more control.

When adding fur to a construction it is very easy to switch to autopilot and become monotonous. Try to focus on designing each individual tuft one at a time, being intentional and purposeful with each one. It's also easy to go way overboard and accidentally create a lot of contrast when attempting to draw fur. We can actually give the impression that something is furry by adding just a few tufts where they will have the most impact- usually along the silhouette. The viewer's mind is very good at taking that information and inferring that the whole surface is furry, so you'll usually find that "less is more" in this area.

And with that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You've done very well, so keep up the great work.