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

The lessons in this course do build on one another, so it is to be expected that as you move forward the lessons will become more challenging. It is also normal to make mistakes, or to feel like it isn’t quite coming together just yet. Scrolling through your work, there’s nothing to be concerned about here, you’re doing quite well. As a student your responsibility is just to take as much time as you need to follow the instructions as closely as you can, to the best of your current understanding and ability. If you’re doing that, then you’re doing your job, and the rest is up to whoever is providing feedback to identify any areas you might not fully understand, and clarify them. So let’s get to it.

Starting with your organic forms you're doing an excellent job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. The only places I can see where you deviate from these simple characteristics appear to have occurred accidentally, in a couple of spots where there is a slight wobble to the line. Make sure you prioritise a smooth confident execution of your lines first and foremost, as hesitating or prioritizing accuracy can lead to stiff lines which undermine the solidity of your forms.

You’ve made a good start with experimenting with varying the degree of your contour lines. 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.

Remember to draw around the small ellipses on the tips of the forms two full times before lifting your pen off the page, as this helps to execute them smoothly. This is something we ask students to do for all ellipses freehanded in this course, as introduced here.

Moving on to your insect constructions on the whole you’re doing a pretty good job. You’re making use of the methods shown in the demos, starting with simple solid forms and gradually building up complexity piece by piece. I can see you’re thinking about how some of your forms exist in 3D space, as demonstrated by how you’re wrapping the various pieces of abdomen segmentation around the curving 3D surface of the underlying ball-like forms, good work.

I do have a few points to talk about that I think will help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these 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.

This is something ThatOneMushroomGuy touched upon, with the following excerpt:

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.

I can see that you’ve made a real effort to avoid cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn, and the places where I saw this happen, such as the areas I’ve marked with red on your spider, came down to the fact that there was a gap between the lines of your ellipses (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.

It is also possible to take actions “in 2D” by extending off existing forms using using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I’ve marked a couple of examples of this in blue on your mosquito.

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.

I’ve gone ahead and redrawn some of the partial shapes on your mosquito as complete forms with a 3D connection to the underlying structures, here although the green forms on the legs are just tracing over your sausage forms, which you had already drawn correctly.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is good to see that you were working with the sausage method for the majority of your leg constructions.

Keep in mind that while we ask students to draw around their ellipses two full times, as this leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute them smoothly, this doesn’t help us to draw sausage forms, which require a different series of motions to draw. So going around sausages twice isn’t helpful, it just makes the construction confusing, as noted here on your spider. In all fairness, I only saw you doing this on a couple of pages, but it is an important distinction to make.

Another point 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.

You’ll get more out of these exercises if you make sure you're drawing each form in its entirety. There may be places those forms get hidden behind other structures - like the legs - but draw them anyway, so you can understand fully how they sit in space. Here is an example of what this means, on your mantis.

Now, you might be thinking that having all these lines where various forms overlap gets confusing, and we have a tool to help mitigate that. As a finishing touch near the end of your construction you can use additional line weight to help clarify the various overlaps between forms, restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can find an explanation on how to use line weight in this video.

The last point I need to touch on is texture and detail. I had a quick look over your lesson 3 work and I can say that your application of texture is improving. As you move forward, remember that we’re focused on using cast shadows to tell the viewer how the surface feels to run your fingers over it. This has nothing to do with what colour the surface happens to be, it may help if you imagine that whatever subject you are drawing has been painted solid white or grey. Just thought I’d better mention that because with this ant you appear to be copying colour patterns, which we don’t need to worry about here.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are developing nicely and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please refer to this feedback as you tackle the next lesson. The points discussed here will continue to apply, and I think the diagrams and demos I’ve shared here will help you with your animal constructions. Best of luck.