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

Starting with your organic forms these are confidently drawn, which is good, and you're doing a good job of keeping your sausage forms simple as introduced here. I'm happy so see that you're varying the degree of your contour curves, and you're demonstrating an understanding that these curves should generally get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form.

You're doing great, but I have a small pointer you can keep in mind when you practise this exercise in the future. There are a couple of spots where there is a small a gap in the silhouette of your forms, such as the top right form on this page. Leaving a gap makes the form appear less solid and three dimensional, so it is better to err on the side of overlapping your lines slightly, rather than leaving a hole.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is excellent. You're doing a great job of starting with simple solid forms and gradually building complexity where you need it, step by step. You're showing a strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

There's not a lot to criticise, but I have some points to discuss and diagrams to share with you that should help you as you go through the next lesson.

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.

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.

Fortunately, you don't actually cut into your silhouettes, which is fantastic. I just needed to lay down that rule very clearly, because it also applies in lesson 5. You're doing a great job of building up your constructions with additional forms. I've noted on your work here where you've done well, as well as noting a couple of spots on the legs where you'd added a little bit of complexity with a single line instead of a complete form.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I'm pleased to see you’ve been working on applying the sausage method to construct 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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

On the whole you're sticking pretty closely to the sausage method, just occasionally you forget one of the contour curves for the intersection where two sausage forms join, as noted on your work here. These little contour curves might seem insignificant, but they provide a lot of information about how these forms connect together in 3D space, so it is worth remembering to include them.

Lastly I'll touch on texture. You're generally doing quite well at working with cast shadow shapes to imply the smaller forms that exist on an object’s surface. There are a couple of places there you're adding patches of black that don't quite make sense as cast shadow shapes. I've made some notes on your work here in green an example of a logical cast shadow, and in red where there is no other form nearby to cast the shadow that you drew. If you're not sure why I'm highlighting this as an issue, please reread the detailed explanation on texture and detail you were given by ThatOneMushroomGuy in your lesson 3 critique. If anything that has been said to you here, or previously is unclear or confusing, you are welcome to ask questions.

All right, I think that covers it. You're doing a great job, so feel free to move on to lesson 5.