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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did two pages of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both pages to be contour curves. You've also skipped over step 2 from the exercise instructions, where we draw a central flow line. Not huge problems, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

You're doing a good job of keeping most of your lines smooth and confident in this exercise, and you're sticking reasonably close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

You're doing well with fitting your ellipses snugly against the sides of the forms, and I'm happy to see that you're experimenting with varying their degree.

I will need to ask you to submit a page of this exercise with the contour curves so we can check how you're doing with those. Sometimes students will do well with their ellipses but struggle with the contour curves.

Moving on to your insect constructions you've clearly put a lot of time and effort into these, but once again I need to stress the importance of reading and following the assignment instructions carefully. 4 of these pages should have been purely constructional with no texture or detail. I get it - detail is a lot more fun to get into, and it also leans into things like drawing more from the wrist. It may be a more comfortable area to focus your time, whereas drawing tight, even ellipses where you need them to be may be a lot more daunting. But the thing is, these drawings are just exercises.

We aren't to focus on reproducing the reference image at all costs, or to have our drawings come out looking impressive - rather, each drawing is just a puzzle. We start with a reference image that helps us determine the direction of our goal, and we start out with simple pieces, gradually building them up piece by piece until we're able to achieve something more complex, somewhat closer to our reference than when we started. That process involves considering how different forms sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it - it's by forcing our brain to think about these things as though they exist in three dimensions that helps develop that mental model of space, and our underlying spatial reasoning skills.

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 ant in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that some 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.

On the same image I marked in blue 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.

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.

I like that you're drawing your constructions quite large, making full use of the space available on the page. This makes it easier to engage your whole arm while drawing. If a part of a construction won't fit on the page, rather than running it off the page as a pair of lines, it will help to maintain the illusion of solidity if you "cap off" the form, much like we capped the ends of branches with an ellipse in the previous lesson. If you look back at the markup of your ant, you'll see I've shown how to do this with the antennae.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're working towards applying the sausage method of leg construction, although you're quite frequently undermining the solidity of these sausage forms by redrawing them or editing them with one-off lines. 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.

I'm noticing a tendency for you to apply additional line weight to places that seem somewhat arbitrary. Given the bounds and limitations of this course, the most effective use of line weight is for clarifying overlaps between forms and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. I'd like you to watch this video which explains how to use line weight in this course.

Lastly let's touch on texture and detail. It looks like you're working on applying the advice provided by ThatOneMushroomGuy in your previous critique, and I can see places where you're starting to make good use of cast shadows to imply the presence of textural forms running along the object's surface. As I've noted on one of your pages here there are also some places where your details lean more on the decorative side of things, making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it, which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular I think it may help you to review this video which explains the difference between form shadows (which we do not include) and cast shadows (which we can include), as well as this diagram showing how to work with shadow shapes, and these reminders for how to approach texture in this course.

Please complete:

1 page of organic forms with contour curves.

3 pages of insect/arachnid constructions focusing on construction only with no texture whatsoever.