Hello Blankpaper, 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. There are a couple of forms that are a bit "bloated" in the middle, like this one, instead of keeping the consistent width we're aiming for, but most of these are great.

When we place an ellipse on the end of a sausage form, it's actually no different from the usual contour curves, aside from the fact that we're conveying the fact that this particular end is facing the viewer, allowing us to see the whole way around the contour line, rather than just a partial curve. On some of your forms on the first page your contour curves are arranged in a way that suggests both ends are facing the viewer, but only one end has an ellipse, like this form. Please take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.

Your contour curves are well aligned, and it's good to see that you're varying the degree of your contour curves on some of your forms. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is very well done. You're showing a strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. There are some really lovely moments, like the segmentation on the thorax of this fly which is wrapping around the curvature of your underlying thorax form with real attention to the volume of the thorax, so it emphasises the 3D illusion we seek to create in these constructional exercises, nicely done.

Something else that you do really well is drawing through your forms, including the parts you can't see. This also helps reinforce the 3D illusion, as well as helping you to develop your understanding of 3D space, good work.

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'm really happy to see that you've mostly avoided cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn. I just needed to lay the above rule down clearly, as we'd like to stick to it as you continue through the next lesson as well.

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 do make small extensions to your constructions without really providing enough information us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist in 3D space. I've highlighted some examples on this section of your weevil. In green I've highlighted the foundational form of the abdomen, and some complete 3D forms that you'd built onto that basic structure, which is all great. In blue I've highlighted some places where you'd made small extensions to your construction with single lines and partial shapes.

Sometimes I think these extensions occur accidentally when you're adding line weight. The most effective use of line weight, given the limitations of this course is specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to alter your construction with line weight, which will undermine the solidity of your forms.

In pink I highlighted a section where I'm fairly sure you intended to draw a complete 3D form, but didn't quite complete its silhouette.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're making pretty good use of the sausage method for constructing your legs. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, 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 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're doing a great job of constructing a chain of sausage forms for the base armature of your leg constructions. Right now how you're building on that basic structure is a bit of a mixed bag. There are some places where you're adding complete 3D forms, and others where it looks like you're extending your legs with single lines. I've marked a couple of examples on this section of your weevil.

Overall I can see a lot of very clear deliberate 3d thinking in your work, just make sure to work with fully enclosed forms instead of single lines as you move forward with the next lesson.

So, you're doing great, and I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please refer to this critique as you work through the next lesson, the various diagrams and demos I've shared here should help you with your animal constructions. Best of luck.