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

Starting with your organic forms it looks like you’re drawing your forms with confidence, and most of your line work is smooth. You're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Occasionally one of your forms will swell through the midsection and become bloated, such as the form on the bottom right of this page, so that’s something to keep an eye on when practising this exercise in your warmups.

I can see you’re working on varying the degree of your contour lines, although it is quite subtle and could be pushed much further. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions overall you’re doing a good job. You’re starting your constructions off with simple solid forms, and gradually building them up piece by piece without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given step.

I have some points that should help you get 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.

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 lobster in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already drawn for the abdomen. One thing I did notice is that a few 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 some of the 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.

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.

To help you to take actions on your constructions in 3D I urge you to “draw through” your forms and complete them, even if they may be partially obscured in your reference image. You’re doing well with the ball forms of your head, thorax, and abdomen, but often cut off the legs where they overlap one another. By drawing these forms in their entirety you will be able to gain a stronger understanding of how they exist in 3D space, and be able to connect them together with believable relationships.

If a part of the construction won’t fit on the page, instead of running it off the edge of the page as a pair of lines which leaves the form open-ended and vague, it helps to “cap off” the form, much like we did with the branches exercise in lesson 3. I’ve shown how to do this with purple ellipses on your lobster.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I’m happy to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method of leg construction for most of your insects and are off to a good start with it.

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 and detail, I can see that you’re putting thought into designing shadow shapes, rather than simply decorating your drawings, which is great. You do appear to be getting a bit mixed up between form shadows, which we do not include, and cast shadows, which we can include. I recommend that you rewatch this video which explains how to differentiate between the two. You can see these two kinds of shadows using the example of a sausage form in this diagram which also shows how this would apply to texture, implying small forms running along the surface of the sausage by drawing the shadows that they cast. In future please avoid filling in large areas with solid black, such as the abdomen of this ant. This doesn’t really provide the viewer with new information about the surface texture, it actually removes information by obscuring the underlying construction.

The last thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly, especially when blocking in the head/thorax/abdomen. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves.

Let’s finish off by taking a look at the questions you had.

if there is anything I can do shading wise to communicate depth with the legs/spindly bits

We don’t really get into “shading” in this course, as outlined in this section of lesson 2. Instead we can communicate depth with texture. By being careful to mind the curvature of these forms we can show how their surfaces turn in space, helping to reinforce the illusion that they are 3D. We can also enhance the illusion of depth by using implicit markmaking to control the detail density. One more thing we can do, with legs specifically, is to deliberately flatten the far side legs by applying straight parallel hatching lines to them, as discussed in this step of the spider demo. By flattening the far side legs, we make them appear to recede, so the near side legs come forward in comparison.

I wonder if standalone contour lines are needed considering how segmented and angular bugs tend to be, a lot of the demos don't seem to rely on them, so I wasn't sure how needed they were for my constructions.

Those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it. In truth, they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line, but in practice their usefulness is somewhat limited. You were correct in refraining from using a bunch of standalone contour lines on your constructions, as it is not uncommon for students to pile them on as a cure-all for making their constructions feel more 3D. Instead there are two main tools we have at our disposal when building up our constructions with new forms, and making those forms feel solid and 3D:

• Purposeful design of the masses' silhouettes. This is the tool to use if you're adding something that wraps around the existing structure.

• A contour line more similar to those used in Lesson 2's form intersections - which defines the joint or seam between two intersecting/interpenetrating forms. This is the tool to use if you actually have forms that are being "welded" together, like how the individual sausage segments in the sausage method have their joints defined with a contour line.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are coming along well and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please refer to this critique and tackle the points discussed here as you go through the next lesson, the points I’ve covered will continue to be relevant to animal constructions.