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

Starting with your organic forms you're getting a mixture of some smooth confident lines, as well as some places where there is subtle wobbling, which is usually a sign of hesitating. Make sure you're prioritising a smooth confident stroke first and foremost.

The majority of these forms are sticking reasonably close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, though there are a few places where a form is pinched or bulging through its midsection, or has ends of different sizes. Keep focused on sticking to the characteristics of two round ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width, as by sticking to those simple properties these forms become very useful building blocks for our organic construction exercises.

It is good to see that you're experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves. Keep in mind that the degree 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 you're doing a good job of starting most of your constructions with simple solid forms, and gradually building up complexity piece by piece, without attempting to add more complexity in a single step than can be supported by the existing structures.

I did spot one construction that didn't appear to have been started with solid forms. If we take a look at this damselfly notice how the thorax just stops existing where it passes behind the head. It is important to "draw through" your forms in these exercises, and complete the forms where they overlap instead of cutting them off. By drawing each form in its entirety, we can develop a stronger understanding of how they exist in space and connect together with specific relationships.

As for how we build onto those first simple forms while maintaining the illusion that the construction is 3D, I have some advice that we don't talk that much about in the lesson demonstrations, relating 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 your ant in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that some 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.

On the same image I marked in blue a couple of examples 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.

The last note I wanted to make on the ant was to call out a couple of places where you'd left gaps in the silhouette of the construction (as I'd circled in purple) which makes it unclear where the edge of the form is supposed to be, which forces the viewer to guess, undermining their suspension of disbelief and reminding them (and *you) that the construction is just a series of lines on a flat piece of paper.

Something I noticed on some of your pages is a tendency to trace back over large sections of the construction to add extra line weight. This causes your initially smooth and confident lines to become wobblier, and makes little extensions and cuts to your forms' silhouettes, flattening them out somewhat. I strongly encourage you to keep a more consistent line thickness through the various stages of construction, drawing your initial ellipses as boldly as your later forms, so you're not tempted to trace over them to reinforce them later. Then, as a finishing touch, we can apply line weight selectively, using it to clarify overlaps between forms, and restricting its application to localised areas where those overlaps occur. Please watch this video which explains how to use line weight in this course. It was added after you completed lesson 1, so you may have missed it.

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.

When it comes to texture, it looks like you're working on applying the advice ThatOneMushroomGuy provided in your previous critique, though there are places like the abdomen of this spider where you seem to be getting confused between form shadows, which we do not include, and cast shadows which we can include. A form shadow occurs where a form faces away from the light source, but for a cast shadow to occur, one form blocks the light, stopping it from hitting another surface. You may find it helpful to re-watch this video where Uncomfortable talks about the difference between form shadows and cast shadows. You can also see a comparison between a form shadow and a cast shadow in this diagram which includes an example of how this might apply to texture, implying small bumps on an object's surface.

Now, as a whole the points I've called out can continue to be worked on as you move onto the next lesson, so I will be marking this one as complete. That said, this feedback is rather dense - so be sure to do whatever it is you need to do in order to address these points, so we can build upon them in the next lesson.