Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 4 homework.

Organic Forms

-Starting with the organic forms I think that you got confused and did one page of contour ellipses when the homework asked for two pages of contour curves. When it comes to the shape of your sausages they are moving in the right direction, as most of them are equally sized on both ends and you have done your best to avoid any pinching or scratching through their length. Of course there is still room for improvement so keep practicing, when it comes to the contour ellipses I can see that you are aware of how they change degree as they move through space, but I can see that you have a much harder time with the contour curves, there are some sausages where they look consistent as they move through space, but I can see that they are moving in the right direction in many ways.

Just keep in mind that contour curves are a useful tool to describe how a form sits in 3D space but they can easily work against us by fattening our drawing, the best strategy is to use the ghosting method to think about each individual mark’s purpose purpose and how you are going to achieve it best, this way you will avoid drawing any mark that do not add any useful information to the drawing

Insects

-Moving to the insects you are moving in the right direction too, you are using the constructional approach well to break everything into smaller and simpler steps rather than trying to capture many things at a time.

-One of the things that you are doing well is the leg construction, you are laying a chain of sausages that captures well the fluidity of these limbs, but you are not pushing it as far as you could, in many cases you are not defining the intersection between the sausages which may seem like a small detail but it is super important to sell the illusion that they are actually 3D forms.

But the most important thing to keep in mind is that the sausage method is not about capturing the shape of the sausages precisely as they are, instead it is about laying down a basic structure that captures both the flow and solidity of the limbs in equal measure. Once that structure is in place we can start to build on top of it by adding more masses to better capture the actual shape of the leg. You can see an example of this process in this demo which shows how to construct the leg of an ant, https://imgur.com/7b9rc9e .

-This process of adding masses is worth an explanation of its own, basically whenever we want to add anything or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure - forms with their own fully self-enclosed 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 https://imgur.com/IINKdQA .

This will help us to always work with full forms rather than flat shapes or simple marks. So for example, when you tried to capture the segmentation of the abdomen on your earwig you employed some simple contours, which don’t really help to convey the solidity of these forms.

There are some really good examples of this approach on the informal demos page, like the shrimp demo and the lobster demo, so I highly encourage you to draw along them, as you will use this same exact technique on the next lesson.

-And lastly I want to call out your use of lineweight, there are some cases when you apply it on the silhouette of entire forms and there are other when it is pretty thick, remember to keep it reserved to clarify how forms overlap, avoid applying it on particularly long marks and keep it subtle, if you end up making it too thick you will take the solidity of your forms away and turn them into mere graphic shapes. Here’s an example with some overlapping leaves https://imgur.com/WILCymm .

Okayy that should be about everything I wanted to address, you can keep working on these issues on lesson 5, I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.