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

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

Your lines are faint to the point where some of them are getting broken, and I can see a couple of spots where you had to go back over a line to make it visible. When lack of proper ink flow affects the manner in which you draw, it is time to use a fresh pen.

Your contour curves are well aligned, though they are mostly sticking to the same degree. 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.

I noticed that sometimes you've placed an ellipse on an end of your forms where the contour curves tell us it is facing away from the viewer, I've crossed one of them out here. and added some that were missing. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But, in this case if the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions, your work here is well observed and carefully crafted. I can see that you've been quite mindful to build your constructions up in stages, starting simple and building complexity bit by bit, without skipping steps. You're starting to treat some of your forms as three dimensional, and I have some advice that should hopefully point you in the right direction in this regard.

The first point that jumped out at me is the tendency for your drawings to feature two distinct phases, which appear to occupy the same space, but seem to be fundamentally separate in the way they've been drawn. This distinction exists between the early stages of the head, thorax and abdomen masses, and some of your leg forms, which are drawn either with a completely different pen, or simply with far less pressure, and the subsequent linework which is considerably thicker and bolder. The most effective use of additional line weight, given the bounds and limitations of this course is to reserve it for clarifying overlaps as explained here, and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. Starting with faint lines and tracing back over the parts you want to keep visible is something Uncomfortable calls a clean up pass, and while it is a perfectly valid manner of drawing in general, is is something we firmly discourage in this course, as discussed here. Do not start with faint lines. Something else that may help a bit with this is to change your scanner settings. It looks like you have these images set to "black and white" which removes a lot of nuance and fine, tapering strokes from the image as it is processed. If you use "color" or "photo" settings you may get an image that is closer to what is actually present in your drawing.

When students create this distinction between phases of their construction (treating the early masses as something separate or different from the rest of the construction), it can encourage one to view those initial masses as being less solid, and less present in the world. Constructional drawing itself is all about building up to a result, step by step - it's an exercise, a spatial puzzle that we solve, and in so doing we gradually rewire the way in which our brains perceive the 3D space that exists within the flat surface of the page.

Note in particular how with most of those initial ellipses, if they were removed from the drawings, it would not have any impact on the end result's completeness. That is because you end up replacing them with darker, bolder lines, phasing them out of the construction altogether.

Long story short - always treat those initial masses as though they are establishing real, tangible, solid forms in the world, and as you move forwards, do not change your approach. Don't press harder, don't switch to a different pen, just introduce every next element as another solid, complete form, focusing on establishing how one connects to the other in 3D space.

Speaking of establishing connections in 3D space, I'd like to take a minute to talk about differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

1 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.

2 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 grasshopper in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. On the same image I marked in blue 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.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing 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.

All right, I've outlined 3 key areas to work on, and I'd like you to address these points by tackling some additional pages. Make sure you take as much time as you need to go through the information in this critique (which is, by necessity, quite dense) and to study the various diagrams and demos I've shared with you here, so that you can apply this information to your work. If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.

Please complete 4 pages of insect constructions.