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

Starting with your organic forms these are confidently drawn, and you're doing a great job of keeping most of your sausage forms simple as explained here. There's just a couple with one end a bit bigger than the other like this so try to keep them more evenly sized in future.

I can see you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves, and you appear to understand that as a general rule of thumb these curves should get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form as is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

There were a few places where the contour ellipses on the ends were misplaced. Here is a form with a contour ellipse placed on the end not visible to the viewer, and here is an area where some of them were missing.

When you draw an ellipse on the end remember that we can see the entirety of this ellipse because it's facing towards us - this also happens to serve as a very effective visual cue. You would want the contour curve next to it to curve as shown in this diagram.

Moving on to your insect constructions these are quite pleasant to look at, and I get the impression that you have a fair bit of drawing experience under your belt already. I do have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

First, make sure to start each construction with simple solid forms. Remember to draw a complete form for the head, thorax and abdomen, even if the form is partially obscured in your reference, complete the form and then you can clarify which structure is in front where they overlap by using additional line weight. here is an example where you drew an incomplete form for your Ladybug's abdomen. What we're doing in these constructional exercises is similar to the form intersections exercise from lesson 2- drawing through our forms and then establishing how they connect together in 3D space, except now we're applying it to build a construction that resembles an insect.

My next point 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.

For example, I've marked on your ant in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this happens due to the looseness of 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 if there is a gap between passes on an ellipse.

On the same image I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist 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 tried out a few 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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. Sometimes you're getting a little caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - sometimes pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

So, for example, I would avoid filling the eyes in black just because they are dark in colour, or appear dark in your reference, consider if there is a form there casting a shadow on to them. At no point should you be hatching in half tones or angling your pen to make scratchy marks that use the randomness of the paper texture to do the work for you, an example of this would be the wings of your firefly, page number 9. On number 8, your jumping spider, you seem to have outlined highlights on the water drop on the creature's back, as well as filling in some form shadows. This looks pretty, but doesn't follow the guidance laid out in the texture section of lesson 2. Following the instructions for how we handle textures in this course is difficult, but it is a valuable exercise for understanding your reference, instead of copying it.

So, that about covers it. I think you're fully capable of applying this feedback to your work as you go through the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this as complete.