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

Starting with your organic forms your linework is looking smooth, which is great, but please refresh your memory of the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, which you should be aiming to stick to for every one of these forms.

I’ve noted directly on your work here the various ways you’re deviating from these simple properties. We’re aiming for two round ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. While it can be tricky to keep your forms simple every single time and we certainly don’t expect perfect work, you have had months since lesson 2 to practice this exercise as part of your regular warmup routine so I would hope to have seen some improvement from your first attempts.

You’re also skipping step 2 of the exercise, which is a mistake that was not present in your lesson 2 work. Skipping the flow line makes it more difficult for you to keep your contour curves aligned.

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.

Moving on to your insect constructions please pay close attention to what is being assigned. The homework is 10 pages of insect constructions (4 without texture, and 6 with the option to add texture if you want to). You have submitted 9 images, and there are cases like this, this, and this where you’re obviously cropping in on specific constructions instead of submitting the whole page.

How we use the space available to us on the page makes a big difference. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. It is difficult to say for certain without seeing the whole page, but it looks like you tend to draw quite small, and leave a lot of the space on the page empty. Drawing smaller than what the space on the page allows artificially limits how much space you give a given drawing, limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

As for time, there are problems with your markmaking that suggest you’re not investing as time into each individual line as is really needed for you to complete the work to the best of your current ability. Not everywhere- your ellipses are usually looking smooth and confident, but there are enough places where your lines get hesitant or scratchy for this to have a severe impact on the solidity of your constructions. For example if we look here I’ve called out where a line is very scratchy.

I get that insect construction is difficult, and that you were probably thinking a lot about how to construct your various forms, but that does not mean your linework should suffer for it. Wobbly or scratchy lines will undermine the solidity of the construction, so it is important that your markmaking is always done to the best of your current ability. You might think that it is too tough to be thinking about your construction and linework all at the same time, and this is where the importance of using the ghosting method in full comes into play. As introduced in the ghosted lines exercise, the ghosting method allows us to break the markmaking into distinct phases, so that all of our thinking is done before the pen ever touches the page. By making effective use of the planning and preparation phases, the actual execution of each mark will not be more difficult than what we were doing in previous lessons. Now, I can certainly see evidence of you using the ghosting method some of the time, particularly for a lot of your larger forms, so there is no problem with your understanding or ability. Ultimately it comes down to exercising control, and choosing to use the ghosting method even for smaller elements, putting as much time as is required into making sure each line is the result of a conscious choice, rather than reflexively making marks that rely on the very instincts that these exercises are designed to train.

In many cases it looks like the linework problems are being exacerbated by your additional line weight, which often takes your initially smooth and confident linework and makes it wobblier or very thick and scratchy. Line weight should remain very subtle and light, rather than getting super heavy and dark. It relies on relative changes in thickness that one's subconscious will notice. It's like whispering, rather than shouting.

Everything we do in these exercises serves a specific purpose, and line weight is no exception. I’d like to you reserve line weight weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You’ll find the instructions for how to use line weight in this video from lesson 1. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight.

Make sure you start each construction with simple, solid forms for the head, thorax and abdomen. While this is something you usually do well, this construction stood out because you didn’t “draw through” and complete the thorax, and cut it off where it passes behind the head. Draw each form in its entirety, so you can fully understand how it sits in 3D space. The abdomen is also a little bit too complex to be interpreted as a simple solid form. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer to understand how it is supposed to sit in 3D space, so the more likely it is to feel flat. Once the simple forms are in place, we can build up complexity gradually, piece by piece.

The next point I need to talk about 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. 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 the three constructions in this album in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that many of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. On the same images I also marked in blue some places 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. While this approach worked for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

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 as shown in these examples here, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5 too.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. In effect, you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually 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.

All right, I think that should cover it. This feedback is, by necessity, very dense, so I expect you may need to read few it a few times to absorb it all. Once you have done so, I would like you to complete some revisions to address the points I have called out here.

In brief:

• Fill up the space on the page. I recommend you do this by drawing larger, which will make drawing smooth confident lines and fully constructing your forms easier.

• Use the ghosting method for all of your lines, to help you stick to the principles of markmaking.

• Start with simple forms, and draw through and complete them.

• Avoid cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn, and aim to build up in 3D with complete new forms instead.

• Stick to the sausage method of leg construction, as closely as you can.

• Reserve additional line weight for clarifying overlaps between forms.

• If you choose to add texture to a construction, try to follow the guidance from the texture section of lesson 2, instead of decorating your drawings.

Please complete 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves (not contour ellipses) and 4 pages of insect constructions. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.