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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

This form is spot on! it is sticking very closely to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

However there are other forms such as this one with ends of drastically different sizes and this one which bulges through its midsection, where it appears you may not have had the characteristics of simple sausage forms in mind. Try to keep the ends evenly sized and the width consistent in future.

You're doing a good job of varying the degree of your contour curves. Keep in mind that your first priority is executing these lines smoothly, with confidence, as introduced here in the principles of markmaking section. Just a few of these contour curves look a little stiff and hesitant, like you may have been prioritising accuracy above smoothness.

Resist the temptation to redraw lines to make corrections. The ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to executing each mark to the best of your current ability.

Moving on to your insect constructions these are looking solid and three dimensional, as you're making effective use of the methods shown in the lesson. Your wasp demo construction is particularly well done.

I do have some points that should help you 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:

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 - (and I notice ThatOneMushroomGuy already introduced this rule in your lesson 3 critique) 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.

So, I've marked on your work here in red where it looks you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside forms you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes on your ellipses. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

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.

Here I have redrawn some of the spots I marked with blue earlier as complete forms with fully enclosed silhouettes. In the legs this highlights the importance of "drawing through" and completing your forms, even if they are partially obscured in the reference image.

There are places where you've added quite aggressively thick line weight to places that seem to be a bit arbitrary. 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. Only apply additional line weight as a finishing touch, to avoid accidentally placing on structures that won't be visible when your construction is complete. What this keeps us from doing is adding line weight to more random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes with additional line weight. Keep your line weight subtle, usually a single confident, ghosted, super imposed stroke will be enough to create the desired effect.

I've noted a couple of examples of unnecessary line weight here as well as pointing out some places where your line weight is jumping across multiple forms, extending their silhouette with a little bridge, which flattens out your construction somewhat.

Remember solid black should be reserved for describing the cast shadows of small textural forms running along an object's surface. As there is nothing present to cast shadows on the antennae in the image I linked above, this looks like you either filled them in because they have a dark local colour in the reference, or because you felt you had made a mistake and tried to hide it.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working towards using the sausage method for constructing most of 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.

I noticed that although you're usually constructing your legs from sausage forms, you seem to have missed the contour curve for the intersection at the joints. You can see it highlighted in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram These contour curves might seem insignificant, but using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively.

All right, I think that covers it. Your work is progressing well and I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please make sure to refer back to this critique and apply the advice provided here to your animal constructions as you work through the next lesson. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid). If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.