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

Starting with your organic forms your line work is smooth and confident and it is clear that you're working towards the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. About half of these are slightly wider at one end than the other, try to keep a consistent width along your form's length.

On the first page the contour curves appear to mostly be sticking to the same degree although I can see a little bit more variation on the second page. 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 there are a few things that stand out, some of them great, and some of them where I can offer guidance that should help you to get more out of these constructional exercises in future.

You've done a good job of starting each construction simple, and building complexity piece by piece. It is great to see that you've drawn through your forms in these constructions, by drawing each form in its entirety, even when partially obscured in the reference, you've pushed your brain into thinking about how the whole form exists in 3D space, and this will help you to develop your spatial reasoning skills and create convincingly 3D constructions. Good work.

Something that stands out about your work is that several of your constructions seem to consist of two phases, which are drawn in distinctly different ways. If we take a look at this page we can see that the construction features a light underdrawing, which is either drawn with much less pressure, or a completely different pen. Then you've come back in with a darker set of lines, discarding large sections of the ellipses you had established for your major masses, and tracing back over the parts you want to keep visible. This is something Uncomfortable calls a clean up pass and while it is a perfectly valid method of drawing in general, it is something we firmly discourage throughout this course. Deliberately drawing the early stages of a construction faintly tends to make students treat them as less solid, less real, like a vague guideline or suggestion. Instead, keep a consistent line thickness through the various stages of your construction, and instead of completely redrawing your subject at a later stage, only add the parts that change. Additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps between pieces of your construction, and should be restricted to localised areas where those overlaps occur, as discussed in this section.

The next topic I need to talk about 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 - 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.

We can see this happening on many of these pages. For example, I've marked on this page in red where 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. It is perfectly normal for there to be some looseness to your ellipses, after all, we insist on students prioritising a smooth confident stroke over accuracy. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid 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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is good to see that you've made a real effort to use the sausage method for most of your leg constructions. 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.

Conclusion I would normally let students apply the point about not cutting back inside forms they have already drawn as they work through the next lesson, as it hasn't been fully incorporated into the lesson material yet. However as this is occurring in conjunction with a clean up pass and ThatOneMushroomGuy already explained to you that altering the silhouette of forms you have already drawn will flatten your constructions, I will ask you to address these points before moving forward.

Please complete 2 pages of insect constructions. If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.