Hello RLX8, 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 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.

You also appear to be running a contour line length-ways along your forms instead of using a central flow line as discussed in this section. Again, not a huge problem, but not what was asked of you. Altering the exercise does have the potential to reduce its effectiveness, and if that happens it may result in revisions being assigned. So always try to follow the instructions as closely as you can in future.

Using a central flow line is designed to help students keep contour curves/ellipses aligned. As shown here on one of your forms there is scope for improvement in this regard. We're aiming to have the contour curves/ellipses cut into two symmetrical halves by the central flow line. Getting contour curves alligned is not easy, and we expect to see mistakes (my little draw over is far from perfect) but having every curve on a form misaligned suggests you may not have been aware of this aspect of the exercise.

Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines/ellipses 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.

It is great to see you keeping your linework smooth and confident for this exercise, and most of your forms are reasonably close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There are some forms on your pages that swell slightly through their midsection, or have one end a bit larger than the other, so that's something to keep an eye on when practising this exercise in your warmups.

Moving on to your insect constructions, these are coming along well. You're doing a good job of following the constructional process by starting with simple solid forms and gradually building complexity piece by piece. I get the impression that you have a pretty good understanding of the forms you draw existing in 3D space, but I do have some advice that should help you to make that 3D illusion stronger and get even more out of these exercises as you move forward.

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 beetle 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 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.

On the same image I marked in blue an example of where you'd extended off the existing form of the abdomen using partial, flat shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how this addition actually connects 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.

Now, I can see a lot of places on your constructions where you're already doing a jolly good job of building up your constructions with complete 3D forms, for example with this ant the spikes on the thorax, antennae, and intermediary forms between the thorax and abdomen are all solid and 3D, so please keep that up.

I'll share some examples you can refer to with this beetle horn demo, and 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 were striving to use the sausage method as introduced here, and you're off to a decent start.

As shown in these notes on your ant we want to draw a complete sausage form for each leg section. Once the sausages are in place it is important to include a contour line at each joint, to show how these forms intersect. You're definitely applying the contour curve to a lot of the joints, but sometimes they are missing. It's worth mentioning that using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively.

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 this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

I can see that you've jumped in and started to apply additional forms to some of your leg constructions. There are some approaches to building up structure on top of those base sausage armatures that work better than others. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, (as we see on this bee) it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

We find that the most effective use of line weight - at least given the bounds and limitations of this course - is to use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here. We shouldn't be thinking of later steps as an opportunity to completely redraw forms that are already on the page, as those are problems we have already solved. Instead, at each step we need only add the parts that change. I noticed on some of your constructions you'd ended up tracing back over the parts of a form you wanted to keep visible, for example the abdomen of this ant. Tracing back over your lines in this manner tends to take your initially smooth and confident line and make it wobblier, undermining the solidity of the form somewhat. You may find that it helps if you draw your ellipses with a slightly thicker line, as we see here in this page of form intersections from your lesson 2 submission. Then you won't need to come back and reinforce them later.

Okay, I think that covers it. You've done a good job and I'll mark this as complete. Please refer to this critique as you tackle the next lesson, the points discussed here will apply to animal constructions too. Best of luck.