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

For your question about branches it can help to space the ellipses further apart where the branch has a shallow, gentle curve, and a little closer together where a branch bends more strongly. For further advice on your branches I'd recommend joining our Discord chat server (there's a "chat with us" button on each page of this website, above your username) and posting your branches and/or questions about them into the lesson 3 channel, where many of our helpful community members may be able to offer assistance.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both pages to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

For this exercise we should be aiming to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Your work suggests that you're quite capable of doing this (some of your forms are quite close to being simple sausages) but may not have had these properties in mind as a goal when you were doing these pages, as some of your forms are quite pinched through their midsection, or have one end significantly larger than the other, and these are things we should aim to avoid.

Remember to hook your contour curves around the form, so that their curvature accelerates correctly as the line approaches the edge of the form.

It is good to see that you're making an effort to vary the degree of your contour lines. 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 I'm happy to see evidence of using the ghosting method for some of your lines, and it looks like you're aiming to stick to the principles of markmaking introduced in lesson 1. Sometimes when you have a lot of little lines to draw (such as the legs of your centipede) some of them seem to get wobblier. Remember to take your time and ghost each line, no matter how many lines are required to complete the construction.

Something from lesson 1 that does seem to have slipped a little here is drawing around your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page. This helps to execute the ellipse smoothly and is something that we ask students to do for all ellipses freehanded in this course, as introduced in this section.

For these constructional exercises it is crucial that you start each drawing with simple solid forms as explained on the lesson intro page. When you're laying down the forms of the head/thorax/abdomen I'm seeing two significant issues occurring intermittently across the set, and will talk about it using your stag beetle, as it contains examples of both.

The first of these is that you're making some of your first forms far too complex, as I've pointed out on the head of your beetle in these notes. In red I've traced over what I think was the form you drew for the head. As you can see there's a lot going on there, with various inward and outward curves and corners, and it is quite difficult to understand how this form is supposed to exist in 3D space, so it feels flat. Instead of trying to capture all these lumps, bumps and complexities in one go, we create a 3D illusion by starting dead simple and then gradually adding complexity piece by piece as shown here and here. If this process seems unfamiliar or confusing I'd suggest revisiting this page from lesson 2 where constructional drawing is introduced. For this lesson we'll usually be using ellipses or sausage forms to capture the simple forms of the head, thorax and abdomen before moving forward, although the branch you constructed for the centipede works fine too.

The other point I wanted to make about how you're building your first forms is what I've noted in blue on the same stag beetle. sometimes you'll cut your forms off where they pass behind something else. If a form is partially visible I want you to "draw through" and complete the form, by including the parts that may be obscured in the reference. This will help you to develop an understanding of how these forms exist in 3D space and then you can work on connecting them together with specific relationships (such as contour lines where the forms intersect) and build more solid constructions. You'll see in the top left of the notes on your beetle that I’ve shown how to keep the forms simple, draw through and complete them, and use contour lines to establish how they fit together.

Continuing on, the next thing I wanted to talk about is how to approach building onto those simple solid forms once they are in place. This requires 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 actually cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn very much, but this rule also applies to how we go about adding to the construction as well. I'd like you to look carefully through this diagram showing the various types of actions we can take on a construction, using the example of a sphere.

At the moment, you're quite often building parts of your constructions through addition in 2D, by extending 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. I've marked out a few examples in blue on your beetle.

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 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, 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 think on some of your pages you may have been intending to use the sausage method, but did not hold to all of its specifics. As shown here we want to stick to simple sausage forms as closely as we can, make sure they are complete forms (not partial shapes) and allow them to overlap at the joints. Then we show how the sausages connect together in 3D by applying contour curves at the joints and can begin to add complexity using additional forms.

All right, I think that should cover it. This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and I expect you will need to read through it all several times, and possibly take notes in your own words to help absorb it all. Once you have had some time to go through all the information here, and in the sections of lesson material I've linked to, I'd like you to complete some revisions to work on tackling the points discussed here. Please complete the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves.

• 1 drawing done following the shrimp demo and one drawing following the lobster demo. Follow each step as closely as you can so you can learn the constructional methods Uncomfortable uses.

• 4 additional pages of insect constructions, using the additive construction methods discussed in this critique and shown in the shrimp and lobster demos.