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

Starting with your organic forms these aren't sticking as closely to the characteristics of simple sausages that as this page from your lesson 2 homework. Remember we're aiming for two equally sized balls connected by a bendy tube of consistent width, here is a reminder of what a simple sausage form should be. These aren't bad but there are some places where the ends are getting deformed or unevenly sized, and some slight pinching or bulging in the middle of one or two forms.

Your contour curves are well aligned, but a few of them look a little bit hesitant, remember to prioritise making a smooth confident stroke.

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.

Remember to draw around the small ellipses on the ends of the forms two full times before lifting your pen off the page. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, as introduced in this section of lesson 1.

Moving on to your insect constructions I can see that you're holding to the principles of construction quite well, you're starting with simple forms and building things piece by piece. Your attempts to follow the demos are mostly successful. Each mark in these constructions looks deliberate, I can see that you're thinking through each line you draw and planning things carefully.

I do have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these relates to 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.

We can see this happening on a fair few of your pages, for example, I've marked on your mantis and your earwig in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside forms you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes on your ellipses. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your 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 images I marked in blue some of the areas 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.

I'm noticing a tendency for you to add quite heavy additional line weight to areas that seem somewhat arbitrary. Here are some examples. I find that the most effective use of line weight - at least given the bounds and limitations of this course - is to use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight. Weight is relative, you're not going in to make one line extremely bold on its own. You're going in to make it subtly thicker than another. This doesn't require the addition of much extra thickness, just enough to set it apart. Our subconscious will pick up on this difference even if our eyes don't immediately, and will understand the kind of hierarchy this is creating. Usually one superimposed stroke will be enough to create the desired effect.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs. 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.

You've made a decent effort with the sausage method on your wasp demo drawing, but I've noticed on several of your original constructions that you'd drawn shapes next to each other, rather than complete overlapping forms. Here is an example. I've included a step by step breakdown of how to apply the sausage method so that you can construct your legs in 3D.

• Start with simple sausage forms (with the same characteristics as for the organic forms exercise) and be sure to overlap them.

• Add a contour curve at each joint, to show how these sausage forms connect together in 3D space, just like the form intersections exercise from lesson 2.

• Any additional bulk or complexity that cannot be captured with simple sausage forms can now be added by building more forms onto the sausage armature, each one with its own complete silhouette.

There are some places where I see you've drawn partial shapes on the far side of your constructions, instead of "drawing through" and completing your forms. It will help you develop your spatial reasoning skills if you draw each form in its entirety, instead of allowing them to get cut off where they are obscured by something else. If we take a look at this grasshopper as an example, the legs on the far side are incomplete. In future I'd like you to draw the parts you can't see, imagine you have X-ray vision, and try to figure out how these legs exist in 3D space and connect to the far side of the body.

Conclusion

So, I've outlined some things to work on, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete, just be sure to actively tackle these points as you handle your animals. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid). If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.