Hello Axeohhh, congratulations on completing the assignments for lesson 4.

Starting with your sausages with contour lines, great job sticking to simple sausages, and keeping your linework smooth and confident. You’re also doing well at subtly but intentionally shifting the degree of your contour curves as we slide along the length of the forms. Nicely done!

Moving on to your insect constructions There are a few little things I'll draw your attention to, but as a whole I can see very clearly that you're thinking hard about building up your constructions one step at a time, from simple to complex, and more importantly where many students are prone to jumping back and forth between working in both 3D space (engaging with the construction as a collection of forms) and in 2D space (cutting into the silhouettes of forms, or making additions as partial shapes or individual lines), you by and large focus quite heavily on the former, which gives your constructions far more solidity.

That said, I will stress this regardless: as you move forwards, hold to that tightly, and avoid altering the silhouettes of forms you've already constructed. 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 it looks like you’ve stuck to adding new pieces whenever you want to build onto your constructions, usually introducing new additions as complete, self-enclosed silhouettes. As we build things up, there are basically two ways in which a new form can become part of an existing structure - either by interpenetrating that structure, and having its relationship/connection defined by a contour line (like the form intersections from Lesson 2), or by having a form wrap around that existing structure, and conveying this through the use of its silhouette, as shown here.

Scrolling through the set, I did see a few places where you fall into certain shortcuts, like extending the silhouette of a form you've already drawn to quickly get away with incorporating a little more complexity, but accidentally flattening out your construction instead. I’ve traced over some examples with blue here on your moth and on this weevil’s leg with blue, then redrawn them as complete new forms in green. As a whole though, I think you're doing a good job of building up 3D forms on top of each other. That's really the key, and 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 with 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.

Although I should note that while you're not strictly relying on all the additional contour lines you've been drawing to make your constructions feel 3D, sometimes you’ll use a ton of them. For example you’d added about 5 of them to the wing of the mantis. 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. The type of contour line introduced in the sausage forms exercise 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. By their very nature the type of contour line introduced in the Form Intersections exercise only allows us to draw one contour per intersection, and they’re generally more useful because they actually define relationships between the forms, helping t reinforce the solidity of the construction as a whole.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working with the sausage method in mind throughout the set, which is a great start.. 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 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 the base structure or armature that captures that captures both the solidity and gestural flow of the 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, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to build up the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this ant leg demo. I'll also share this dog leg demo as an example of how to apply the sausage method to animal legs because the sausage method should be used throughout lesson 5.

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