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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms that are introduced here. While it's not really a mistake per se, this exercise is more beneficial if you curve the flow line (and the form) slightly instead of having some of them completely straight. A straight flow line makes for a stiff form, and it is useful to be able to incorporate gesture into these forms.

It is great to see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves. 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. This concept is shown in this diagram and is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

There are a couple of forms like this with an ellipse on an end of the form that is facing away from the viewer. 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, which is a good example of how to vary your contour curves to show a form in various orientations.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is largely quite well done. You're starting your constructions with simple solid forms, and gradually building up complexity step by step. You're demonstrating a developing understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

I do have some points that should help you to continue to get the most 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.

For example, I've marked on your work here in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of the ellipse you had established for the head. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside your forms 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 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.

You're generally doing well at adding forms to your constructions, however on this page there were quite a few little spikes that were drawn as partial shapes. I've drawn over one of them to show how we could draw a complete form instead.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out some 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.

You did quite well with using the sausage method for the leg construction on this lobster. This spider uses sausage forms, but the contour curves for the intersections at the joints are missing. These little contour curves might seem insignificant but they do tell the viewer a lot of information about how the forms are orientated in space as well as reinforcing the structure of your legs by establishing how the forms connect together. So be sure to remember to include them in future. I've done a quick step-by-step over one of your legs here.

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, 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.

There are some approaches to building up structure on top of those base sausage armatures 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, as seen in this bee 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.

One last point, I noticed you filled in the eyes with black on some of your pages. Remember that for Drawabox exercises we only fill in cast shadows with black. So be sure to consider what forms are present in your construction, and decide whether it makes sense for there to be a cast shadow in a particular area before filling it with black. For these exercises it may help if you visualise the insect as all one color, like someone has painted it solid grey.

Okay, I think that covers it. You're doing a good job here so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the above points in mind as you move forward, they should help you in the next lesson.