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

Starting with your organic forms, you're skipping step 2 where we draw a flow line through the centre of the forms. Remember to include a central flow line for this exercise, as it helps with the alignment of the contour curves.

I'm happy to see you've drawn your forms with fairly smooth, confident lines. It is a little tricky for me to gauge how consistently you're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, as there are only 6 forms in total. Drawing large is something I generally encourage, as it helps students to engage their whole arm while drawing, however for this particular exercise I encourage you to draw each form a little smaller, so you can fit more forms on each page. The sample homework shows a sensible number of forms on each page. If we take this page as an example, the form at the bottom sticks pretty closely to the characteristics of a simple sausage form. The two at the top both have ends of uneven sizes (we want them to be even, so the form maintains a consistent width along its length) and the one at the top right has a sharp corner.

Remember to draw a small contour ellipse on the tip(s) of the forms that face towards the viewer, as discussed in this section.

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 want to call out that your Imgur album contains 9 pages of insect constructions, when the homework assignment was for 10 (4 pages with no texture, and 6 with the option to add texture). I can see that you did complete 10 pages, as your louse demo drawing is visible on the back of your wasp page, but please be more careful to ensure that you upload all the required pages in future.

It looks like you're making a good effort to stick to the principles of markmaking, as your lines are usually smooth and continuous. I'm also happy to see that you're approaching these constructions by starting with simple solid forms, and building them methodically, without attempting to add too much complexity in a single step. I do have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

It is important to maintain tight, specific relationships between the various pieces of these constructions, so the viewer can understand how they fit together in 3D space. I noticed on your mosquito that you'd left a gap between the head and the body, so the viewer has no way of knowing how the head is supposed to be attached. Underneath your work I've provided two possible solutions to this issue. We can either allow the head and the thorax to overlap and then define the intersection where they connect together with a contour line, or we can draw an additional form as a sort of "neck" that connects the head to the body.

Most of your constructions are off to a good start, however some of them are oversimplified, so they feel unfinished. If we take a look at your dragonfly construction and compare it to a similar reference, there is quite a lot more going on that you could attempt to construct. The legs seem to be missing the last section, the thorax could be taken beyond a basic ball to capture the blocky armour sections, and the abdomen has segmentation that you could attempt to construct. Make sure you're observing your reference carefully and frequently, to extract as much structural information as you can, and transfer that information to your construction. Taking your constructions an extra step beyond your basic balls and sausage forms will help you to get a bit more out of these exercises.

When it comes to how to build onto your foundational forms, I have some advice that should help you to do so in a way that reinforces the 3D illusion we seek to create with these constructions. Let's start by 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 cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn very much. I've marked two small examples in red on this beetle where it looks like you accidentally cut back inside the silhouette of the ball form you had already constructed. This came down to the fact that your ellipse came out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd picked the inner edge to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately left a stray line 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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working with the sausage method in mind, though you did not always adhere to all of its specifics. On a couple of your constructions the leg forms swell through their midsection, so they become bloated and stiff, and on most of these pages you're missing the contour curves that should be applied to each joint, to show how the forms intersect.

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.

Okay, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are off to a good start, though there are a few factors which indicate that the more demanding and complex constructions we tackle in the next lesson might be a tad overwhelming for you right now. I'm going to assign some extra pages for you to put the advice in this feedback into practice.

Please complete the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves.

• 3 pages of insect constructions. Please upload the references you use for these pages.