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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a great job of keeping your sausage forms simple, and you're also doing very well at varying the degree of your contour curves, nice work. I did notice just a few places where your lines show some signs of hesitation, keep working on using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder to help with that smooth, confident execution of your marks.

Also if I'm being nit picky, you should be drawing through the little ellipses on the ends that face the viewer 2 full times.

Continuing to your insect constructions you're doing a good job here, starting with simple forms and building up complexity where you need to. As a result most of your constructions feel quite solid and I think this one in particular was pretty successful. There are a few pointers I have to give you that should help you continue to get the most out of these exercises.

The first of these is 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.

To illustrate this point I've marked on one of your weevils in red a couple of places where you appear to have cut back inside forms that were already on the page to alter their silhouettes.On the same image, in blue I've noted some places where you attempted to extend your silhouettes 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.

Sometimes you make small alterations to your silhouette when you redraw a line to correct it. Put as much time and care as you need into planning each line and drawing it to the best of your current ability. Sometimes despite our best efforts and using the ghosting method, we won't quite make the mark we intended. When this happens, resist the temptation to draw the line again to try to fix it, as this will only bring more attention to the place you felt you made a mistake, and can make your work messy and confusing.

Another way you make small alterations to parts of your silhouette in some of your constructions is by tracing back over your lines to reinforce them. Students going back over their work with a slow, belabored stroke trying to be careful generally causes their drawings to become stiff and undermines the solidity of their forms. Be aware that additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here and should be applied with a single ghosted, confident super imposed stroke as explained in this diagram

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. I'm not 100% sure in terms of space because many of your photos have the edges of the page cropped out, but I do get the impression that you may not always be making full use of the space available on your page. if this is the case I would encourage you to draw bigger, giving your constructions as much room as possible on your page will make it easier to think through the spacial reasoning problems presented by these exercises and will also make it easier to engage your whole arm while drawing.

As for time, I feel that a couple of your constructions would have benefited from having a little more time invested in them. For example this weevil has his head, thorax and abdomen simplified into a single form. Looking at what I'm fairly sure is the reference I can see this insect does have the same basic anatomy described on the lesson page.

This oversimplification is also apparent on this insect which appears to be some kind of grasshopper or cricket. These insects usually have segmented abdomens and/or wings. It's not necessarily that your construction was incorrect, but I do think there was a lot more going on in your reference that you could have attempted to draw if you had put a little more time into it.

Another little note- reserve your solid black for describing cast shadows. When you fill in the eyes of your insects it tends to make them look flat.

The last point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're making considerable efforts to stick to the sausage method for constructing your legs. That's great, it's what we'd like students to do for this lesson, and we'd like you to continue to use this method for leg construction in lesson 5 too. I did notice that for this insect many of the leg sections came out elliptical. Try to stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method, 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 important for tackling animal constructions too.

Conclusion There's a lot of solid 3D thinking being demonstrated in your work and I do think you're generally heading in the right direction. However due to the large number of points I needed to raise in this critique I think it would be in your best interests to give you the chance to address some of them before moving on. This is not a punishment, and it does not mean you did a bad job. Each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you may end up compounding or exacerbating them.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- 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.

2- 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.

Of course if anything that has been called out previously, or here, is unclear or confusing, you are allowed to ask questions.