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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a great job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

You're also doing really well with varying the degree of your contour curves, which is an aspect of this exercise that often gets forgotten.

My main point for you to work on in this exercise is to make sure you're prioritising a smooth confident stroke first and foremost, as there are some signs of hesitation on a few of your contour curves.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work looks great. You're demonstrating a very clear understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and you're conscientiously "drawing through" your forms which will help you to connect these pieces together in space in a way that feels convincing. You're doing a good job here, and I have just a few points to explain which should help you with these constructional exercises as you move forward.

The first of these relates to 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. This diagram shows the various kinds of actions we can take on a 3D form, using a sphere as an example. When working on organic constructions in this course we'd like students to strive to only take actions by "adding in 3D" as shown in the lower right of the diagram.

So, 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 action in these diagrams, 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.

Throughout the set you're doing most of your construction in 3D by drawing complete forms, which is fantastic. There is the occasional spot where you'd extended of an existing form with a partial flat shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how the addition actually connects to the existing structure in 3D space. I've highlighted an example on this grasshopper where the abdomen had been added to the back of the thorax as a partial shape. As a whole though I think you're doing a good job of building 3D forms on top of each other.

I should mention that although you're not necessarily relying on contour lines to make your drawings feel 3D, there are some constructions, like the one at the top of this page where you are drawing a ton of them. I'd urge you to make sure that you're asking yourself, "do I really need this, what's it meant to contribute, is it the best mark for the job" for every contour line you add (and really every line you draw), as part of the planning phase of the ghosting method. Contour lines simply run into diminishing returns very easily - and when it comes to building up additional masses (which we get into more in Lesson 5), it's very easy for students to draw them carelessly, then cover them in contour lines, instead of taking the time to design their silhouettes more purposefully from the beginning.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. For the most part I can see that you're sticking with the sausage method and applying it quite well. When it comes to how we build onto these sausage forms to arrive at a more complete leg construction there are some strategies 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, 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. 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 can take this much further, as shown in this ant leg demo which captures some of the complexities we see in these kinds of structures. I'll also share this example of the sausage method being applied to a dog leg as we'd like students to continue to use the sausage method to construct legs throughout the next lesson.

On a few of these constructions, such as this crab it looks like you're going back over large portions of your constructions to add line weight. During this course we find it works best to reserve additional line weight for clarifying overlaps between forms, and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. You can see Uncomfortable explaining and demonstrating this concept in this recently added video on line weight.

Just a quick reminder before I wrap this up. During this course we do not use light under-drawings followed by a clean up pass, as discussed in this section of the form intersections exercise. They're so faint that I may well be mistaken, but there are places like these sections where it looks like sections of the drawing were sketched lightly in pencil before doing the "real" drawing in pen on top and erasing the pencil lines afterwards. If the marks I'm seeing are lines showing through from drawings on the back of the page, or random bits of lint, you can ignore this, but if you have been using pencil and erasing it I'd like you to read this article which explains why we use ink in this course, and make it clear that sticking with the recommended tools is mandatory for students submitting for official critique.

And with that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You've done very well, so keep up the great work.