Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 4 homework;

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

-These are turning out nicely, as your sausages have a consistent width throughout their length and don’t have any pinching or swelling. The contours themselves are drawn with a good deal of confidence and you are clearly aware of the degree shifts of these, the only observation I want to make is that you could improve the confidence of these contours, as some of them look a bit wobbly but only very slightly, you can focus on this on future attempts at this exercise

Insects Construction

-I can see that you are sticking to the main principles of construction and you are building your way from simple to complex, and breaking everything down into simpler shapes.

-The first thing I want to address is leg construction, you are sticking to chains of simple sausages to build the legs of your insects but you don’t push it far enough. Keep in mind that the sausage method is not about capturing the shapes of the legs exactly as they are, it is about laying down a basic structure that captures both the flow and solidity of these, once that structure is in place we start to build on top of it to add the further complexity that we see on the reference image. You can see this principle in action on this image, which shows how to apply construction to an ant’s leg, you can also see it here applied in the context of a dog’s leg

• I can also see that you tried to capture the segmentation of the legs of some insects, but in some cases you lose the opportunity to break the silhouette, for more on the importance of breaking the silhouette read this section of lesson 2.

-Your use of contour lines is good but I want to draw your attention to this scorpion and this hercules beetle , where some of your contour lines flattened the shapes they were sitting on, keep in mind that contours are a helpful tool to describe how a form sits in space but they can also work against us by flattening our drawing. The best approach is to use the ghosting method to think about each mark’s purpose and how you are going to achieve it best.

-Taking a look at this cricket I want to call out a few things, on the upper part of the thorax you have added some broken marks, to capture some of the bumps you see on the reference keep in mind that each additional form should be fully enclosed, remember that we are working with 3D objects so each form should have its own silhouette and its own volume. You can see more concrete examples of this principle on the shrimp demo and the lobster demo , take a look and if you can draw along them it’d be very helpful.

-Lastly, I want to talk about lineweight, you are using it correctly, I just want to remind you that it is better when we use it more sparingly and focus the use of line weight on clarifying how different forms overlap one another. Avoid applying line weight to marks that are especially long. You can see this principle on this image which shows how to apply lineweight to a plant.

Okay, that is all I have to say, you still have some things to keep working on but I have no doubt that you will improve with more mileage, I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.