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

Starting with your organic forms, most of these are sticking fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Sometimes one end of a form gets a little bit stretched out, remember we want them to be rounded like spheres.

Your lines appear smooth and confident, and it is great that this confidence carries over to your contour curves.

It is good to see that you've experimented with varying the degree of your contour curves. 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, on the whole your work is coming along very well, you're using the construction methods shown in the lesson to good effect, and you haven't gone easy on yourself in terms of subject matter. The Millipede in particular demonstrates a great deal of patience, you've constructed each segment carefully and the body demonstrates a strong understanding of how the forms you've drawn exist in 3D space. There are a few spots where the legs aren't as well constructed as is seen on some of your other pages. It can be tempting to either neglect the ghosting method or draw from the wrist when drawing a lot of little forms. Try to stay conscious of the actions you're taking, and if you find this happening, refocus. Be sure to use the ghosting method and engage your whole arm, no matter how small or insignificant a line may seem. I think from the context of your Discord posts that you'd split this one up over multiple sittings, which is a great strategy to make sure you're able to do your best work throughout a demanding construction, nice one!

Something that jumps out as I look through these constructions, is quite a few of them appear to have been started with very faint lines in the early stages. Drawing faintly tends to make students think of their initial forms as less real, less solid, or less important than the final stages of the construction. Part of the reason we insist on students using fineliners for these lessons is because they produce a rich, dark line. This means that at each stage of the construction, we need only add the parts that change, rather than redrawing structures in their entirety.

Throughout your submission I can see that you're trying to restrict your additional line weight for clarifying overlaps as discussed in this section but I can see places where your first line was so faint you were basically forced to go back over it to make it visible. If you're not drawing faintly by choice, then it may be that the pen you're using is running out of ink, as I don't see this issue in your older work, for example this page from your lesson 2 submission has clear line work throughout. When poor ink flow affects the manner in which you draw, then it is time to use a fresh pen.

The next point I need to talk about was introduced by ThatOneMushroomGuy in your lesson 3 critique, but I need to repeat it here as it is just as relevant in this lesson, and should be applied throughout lesson 5 too.

Something that will help you to build solid constructions is learning to differentiate 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.

For example, I've marked on a section of your butterfly in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes it looks like you accidentally cut back inside your construction by using the inner line of your (2D) ellipse to represent the silhouette of your (3D) ball form, leaving a stray line outside the construction to remind the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat piece of paper. To avoid this problem be sure to use the outer line of your ellipses as the silhouette of your forms in future. This diagram provides a visual example.

On your sun spider I've marked in red a couple more examples of cutting back inside the silhouette of forms that had already been established, and used blue to highlight where you'd extended off an existing form using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. It looks like you may have been trying to build up the abdomen in the same way we tackled leaves in the last lesson. Unfortunately, as explained in this section, this only really works for forms that are already flat. You've used this technique to good effect for some of your insect wings. For something as voluminous as a sun spider's abdomen we'd need to use another strategy. Here I think following the process shown in the louse demo would probably work well.

So, 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 a few different strategies for constructing legs. You've demonstrated pretty good use of the sausage method on this moth though quite a few of your other constructions appear to be using ellipses or cylinders instead. 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.

Before I wrap this up let's address your concerns about drawing fluff. If we take this bee as an example, you've done a good job of jumping over a lot of the common pitfalls that Uncomfortable discussed in the context of a tarantula in the lesson intro video. You've focused your attention on where the fluff breaks the silhouette, as this is where it will have the greatest impact. It looks like you're being fairly intentional with each tuft of hair that you've drawn, it doesn't look like you're making marks at random, which is a very common mistake when students are faced with large amounts of detail in a construction.

A couple of things that you could consider for your future attempts, first, you don't have to add the furry texture everywhere you see it on your reference. You've got it packed quite densely along large sections of the silhouette here, be aware that you can choose where you think it will be most effective and control the detail density.

Second, while it is great that you're focusing on adding the detail to the silhouette, you can also consider working implicitly within the silhouette, to capture some of the cast shadows between the fluff, this diagram shows an example. Be careful not to overdo it though, it can be quite easy to liberally cover the whole construction with detail, which gets visually noisy. Just a few little suggestions here and there will go a long way to giving the impression of a surface being fluffy. Uncomfortable demonstrates how to draw fur on a few occasions throughout the next lesson, so hopefully that will clear up any concerns or confusion you may have on this topic.

Okay I think that covers it. You've done a good job here and your spatial reasoning skills are coming along well. Please make sure to address the points discussed in this critique as you tackle your animals in the next lesson, the advice provided here should help you to get the most out of these constructional exercises as you move forward.