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

Starting with your organic forms you appear to be having some difficulty with sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, or perhaps didn't have these properties fresh in your mind at the time.

On the left of this page there is an example of a form that continually swells through its midsection, so it is more like an ellipse than a sausage form.

On the left of this page is an example of a form with one end significantly larger than the other. Try to keep them the same size.

The other forms are doing better in terms of keeping a consistent width, but pay attention to the ends too, we're aiming to have them rounded, like balls. There are a number of ends that are flattened, lopsided or pointy.

These forms can be a bit tricky, but there are a few things we can do to increase the chance of executing them as intended. Make sure you're using the ghosting method to full effect for every form. Planning and practising the motion before you execute it will help with confidence and control. Don't forget you can rotate your page to find the easiest angle to draw these from, and double check that you're engaging your whole arm to help your marks to flow smoothly.

Some of these contour curves look a touch stiff and hesitant, remember to prioritise making a smooth flowing curve.

It is good to see that you've started to experiment 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 you've done a good job of starting with simple solid forms and gradually building complexity piece by piece, and I can see you developing a sense of how all these pieces exist in 3D space.

I do have some advice that should help you to take this 3D thinking much further. Lets start by taking a moment to talk about differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

1 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.

2 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 this page in red where you it looks like cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already established for the thorax. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside forms you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes on your ellipses. It is perfectly normal for there to be some looseness to your ellipses, after all, we insist on students prioritising a smooth confident stroke over accuracy. We can still use a loose ellipse to build a solid construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image I marked in blue some places 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.

So, here I've redrawn some of the extensions I'd marked with blue earlier as complete forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes. In most cases this just required "drawing through" and completing forms which had been cut off where they passed behind something else. Drawing through your forms will not only help to build a solid construction, but by figuring out how the whole form exists in 3D space even if it is partially obscured in your reference this also helps you to develop your spatial reasoning skills.

I noticed that on some of your pages the constructions didn't quite fit on the paper. It is okay if part f the construction doesn't fit on the page, but instead of running lines off the edge of page, which leaves your forms open-ended, it helps to cap off the forms with an ellipse before they reach the edge of the paper, as I've shown in the draw-over above. This will help your constructions to retain their solidity.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I'm happy to see that you were working with the sausage method for constructing most of your legs. Sometimes it looks like you did experiment with using forms that don't really adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages, and you're a little bit inconsistent about applying the contour curve for the intersection at each joint.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method 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 can see a few places where you've applied rather heavy additional line weight in places that seem somewhat arbitrary, such as all the way around the abdomen of the spider on this page. The most effective use of additional line weight, given the bounds and limitations of this course is to reserve it for clarifying overlaps as explained here, and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. What this keeps us from doing is adding line weight to more random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes with additional line weight.

Your application of texture has improved significantly from your lesson 3 submission, I can see quite a few places where you're starting to use cast shadows to implicitly describe small textural forms on an object's surface. It is still quite a mixed bag though, and there are a few issues to call out.

• Remember that when using texture in this course, we're focusing on cast shadows only. On the insect on the lower right of this page I get the distinct impression that you'd copied a color pattern. Imagine your subject has been painted all one color when working on these exercises.

• On the larger construction on this page you'd filled a large part of the thorax in solid black. This area may well have looked dark in the reference, as the form of the thorax turns away from the light it will go into form shadow, but as there are no other forms present to cast a shadow onto the thorax here, what we have here cannot be a cast shadow. I strongly recommend you re-watch this video which explains the difference between form shadows and cast shadows. In future please refrain from filling such large areas in with solid black, as in addition to not quite following the guidance for texture it also obscures the underlying construction, making it more difficult to accurately assess your work.

• There are some examples like this of fairly sloppy zig-zagged hatching which looks like an attempt at form shading which we don't include when working on texture in this course. Furthermore, remember that every mark you make should be designed and intentional, never rely on randomness to create texture.

In short, your approach to texture and detail is improving, but I think you would still benefit from rereading the explanation on how to approach texture in this course which was provided in your lesson 3 critique, as well as these reminders.

Now, as a whole I still think that your underlying spatial reasoning skills are developing well, and each of the technical/procedural issues I've outlined here can continue to be addressed into the next lesson, where they are just as relevant. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - just be sure to take notes on what I've said here and revisit this feedback to ensure that you are continually focusing on addressing these points as you move forwards.