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

Starting with your organic forms, you're doing a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

You're also doing a good job of carefully aligning your contour curves and varying their degree.

In future you could try experimenting more by drawing forms with one or both ends facing towards the viewer. On these pages all your forms seem to have both ends facing away from the viewer. This isn't necessarily a mistake, but I do feel that you would benefit from taking a look at 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, your work here shows a great deal of potential. You clearly have strong observational skills, as you're able to extract a great deal of information from your references and reproduce it in your drawings. You're also developing a sense for how your forms exist in 3D space, rather than just flat shapes on the paper.

Having said that, there are a few things that are undermining your efforts here, and issues I would like you to address. Many of these points were brought up previously in your lesson 3 feedback. Keep in mind that the feedback provided in these critiques is designed to be applied by the student as they move forward, so that issues do not need to be called out repeatedly.

First and foremost, I need to talk about 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. As I see that ThatOneMushroomGuy already introduced you to this rule, and it doesn't appear to have clicked, so in addition I'd like to share this alternative diagram which shows the various types of actions we can take on a construction, using a sphere as an example.

For example, I've marked on your scorpion in red some where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. I'm not entirely certain if this was your intent, as I'm guessing that the darkest line was intended to be your final silhouette.

On the same image I marked in blue some of the many 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. It looks like you're attempting to refine the silhouette of this construction in the same way we approached edge detail in the leaves exercise for the previous lesson. Unfortunately, as explained in this section this approach only really works on forms that are already flat- paper-thin structures such as leaves or insect wings. When working with solid forms we need to use a different approach.

So 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.

I highlighted in green on your scorpion's claw where you did a great job of constructing the little spikes with complete new forms. 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.

It's worth calling out that there are a number of areas on your constructions where I actually wasn't sure where you intended your silhouette to be. It looks like you've fallen into a habit of redrawing some of your lines to either reinforce or correct them. This leaves us with a number of possible interpretations of which was the correct line, undermining the suspension of disbelief and reminding us that we're just looking at lines on a flat piece of paper. Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting lines isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to plan, prepare, and execute it to the best of your current ability. Every mark we add to these constructions should serve a clear purpose, when you ghost each mark be sure to ask yourself what the line is going to achieve.

In addition, I'd like you to take some time to review the principles of markmaking which should be followed throughout this course. I'm seeing a few places where your lines get wobbly and or scratchy. It is not unusual for students to do well with their markmaking in the first couple of lessons, then slip into old habits when they move onto drawing more interesting subject matter. Remember every construction we do in this course is an exercise, and we should strive to build onto the techniques taught earlier in the course.

Here are a few things which were brought up previously that I'll try to keep brief to prevent this critique turning into a novel.

• Avoid filling in large areas with black, as this obscures the underlying construction. I've drawn around some examples of large areas of solid black on this dragonfly. The blue one could conceivably be a cast shadow projected from one of the far side wings, but it does not describe texture or add information to your construction, it actually removes information by covering up a significant portion of your abdomen construction. The shadows I'd outlined with red are most likely form shadows, which we do not include. I'll talk more about how to tackle texture later.

• You'll get more out of these exercises if you "draw through" your forms. If a form is partially visible, draw it in it's entirety, including the parts you can't see. This will help you develop a stronger understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space.

• MushroomGuy advised you to keep your constructions contained on the page, and I can see that you're trying to do this. Sometimes part of the construction won't fit on the page. When this happens, instead of running the construction off the edge of the page as a series of lines, it helps to maintain the solidity of your forms if you "cap them off" and contain them. I've done this with ellipses on your spider as an example. By enclosing the legs with a clearly defined boundary there, we can more easily understand them as 3D forms.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I noticed that while there were many places where you were definitely striving to apply all of the aspects of the sausage method when constructing some of your legs, such as here, you weren't always quite so attentive of the approach's specific requirements. Sometimes you'd deviated substantially from simple sausage forms, or added contour curves to the surface of the individual forms, where the diagram specifies placing them only at the joints to define the intersections between these forms.

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.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. There are some areas where you're thinking a fair bit about the use of cast shadows, and working in intentionally designed shapes of solid black. That is very much headed in the right direction. There are also some areas where 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.

To my earlier comment about including form shadows, I'd like you to review this video which explains the difference between form shadows and cast shadows, and study this diagram which shows the form and cast shadow of a sausage form, and then how we can describe texture by drawing the cast shadows of small forms on the sausage's surface, implying their presence.

This feedback is, by necessity, very dense, and you may need to spend some time reading through it all a few times as well as reviewing your lesson 3 feedback and the relevant sections of lesson material. Once you've had time to absorb this feedback I'd like you to complete some additional pages to address the points I've raised here.

Please complete 4 pages of insect/arachnid constructions. The first 2 should focus on construction only, with no texture. The second 2 may include texture, if you wish, but it is optional for this lesson.