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

Starting with your organic forms, it is worth noting that you submitted 4 pages, when only 2 were assigned. I want to stress what Uncomfortable mentions in this video from Lesson 0. When assigned a certain number of pages of work, you should only be doing what's asked. It's not uncommon that when I have students feeling the need to complete more pages, that they tend to focus less on executing each individual instance of the exercise to the best of their current ability - taking the time to execute each mark, draw each shape, and construct each form as well as they reasonably can (regardless of how much time that takes them), and more on simply getting the exercise done in quantity - but not necessarily to the best of their ability.

Drawing more itself isn't a bad thing on its face, but it's about how it impacts the manner in which we engage with the work. You will always have more opportunities to practice these exercises in your warmups - the quantity we assign is not with the expectation of seeing growth and improvement over the set, but just to judge whether your understanding of what you're meant to be doing with the exercise is correct, or whether it requires clarification. Can't really judge that too well if you're spreading the time, energy, and effort you could have dedicated to a single page of a given exercise over multiple pages.

Looking at your pages, things are a bit mixed. You're doing a great job of drawing the forms themselves with a great deal of confidence, giving you smooth lines. However you're not always sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Some of these forms are spot on, but some of them stray far enough from these simple properties to be cause for concern. Here are some specific examples on one of your pages. There are enough cases where a sausage has ends of different sizes, or where there's pinching or bulging through the midsection, that suggests that you may not be consciously aware of this particular aspect of the exercise. Focusing on those simple properties for each form helps us to capture the illusion of solidity for each one, which in turn is very valuable in using these sausages as one of the core building blocks of our constructions.

As for your contour curves, focus on executing these with the same confidence as the forms themselves, as there are signs of hesitation on a few of these. There are also a few places where it looks like you could be paying a bit more attention to the alignment. Most of your curves and ellipses are pretty well aligned, but there are a few where it looks like you would have benefited from investing more time to align them more carefully.

Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines/ellipses 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.

Lastly, when doing the organic forms with contour curves, it helps to place a full contour ellipse right on the tips of the sausages that face towards the viewer. Technically the contour curves and contour ellipses are the same - it's just that in this version of the exercise, we're drawing only the portion of the curve that would be visible (plus a bit of overshoot to get the curvature right). When we have a tip of the sausage facing the viewer , we're able to see enough of that surface that we'd see the whole contour ellipse all the way around. You can see this in this example from the exercise, as well as in this diagram.

Moving on to your insect constructions, by and large you're doing fairly well. You're starting your constructions with simple solid forms, and you generally don't attempt to skip steps or add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given stage. I like that you're being quite conscientious about drawing through your forms and including the parts you can't see, which will help you to develop a stronger understanding of how they exist in 3D space, so please keep that up.

I'll be breaking this feedback into the following 4 key topics to hopefully make it easier to digest:

How you're arranging your constructions on the page.

How to build constructions in 3D.

Leg construction.

Line weight.

Now, jumping right in with how you're arranging your constructions on the page, you are unfortunately doing yourself something of a disservice in this regard, and making things harder than they need to be. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. We can see this in action with the two constructions at the top of this page where some of your lines are unusually stiff and wobbly and the constructions are a bit oversimplified because you ran out of space to fully explore finer elements such as legs and heads.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

I did check your lesson 3 submission, and I see that this issue is the first point that ThatOneMushroomGuy called out regarding your plant constructions. It is important that students make every effort to apply the feedback provided in their critiques as they move forward, so that issues do not have to be called out repeatedly. If something said to you in a critique is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask for clarification.

Continuing on to how to build constructions in 3D, let's talk about differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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 spider in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

One thing I did notice is that many of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

I also circled in red an area where I wasn't too sure where you intended the silhouette of your construction to be. I only really saw this on this one construction, so just consider this a little reminder to keep tight specific relationships between each stage of construction and don't get "loose" or sketchy with your lines. This also applies to the spot I circled in purple where you'd left a gap in the leg construction. Gaps will make it vague or unclear where the edge of your form is meant to be, undermining the viewer's suspension of disbelief and reminding them that they're looking at lines of a flat piece of paper.

On the same image I marked in blue where you'd extended off the existing form of the abdomen using a partial, flat shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how it actually connects to the existing structure in 3D space.

So! 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. I think you were working towards using the sausage method on many of your constructions, though I have some advice that I think will help you apply the method more effectively.

• We want to be sticking to simple sausage forms, that is two rounded ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. I strongly recommend drawing your constructions larger, to make it easier to execute these forms utilising your whole arm.

• We want a healthy amount of overlap between these forms, to allow them to interpenetrate at the joints. This will make it a bit easier to apply the contour curves at the joints, which I'm very happy to see that you usually remember to add.

• 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.

Line weight. The last thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly, especially when blocking in the head/thorax/abdomen. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves. We want to avoid tracing back over these ellipses to reinforce the parts we'd like to keep visible, as this will take your initially smooth confident lines and make them wobblier, undermining their solidity. Instead, we reserve additional line weight for clarifying overlaps, and restrict it to localised areas where those overlaps occur, as discussed in this video.

Conclusion

You're mostly on the right track but right now the small size of many of your constructions is inhibiting your ability to get the most out of these exercises, and I would like to see you address this before moving forward (especially as this issue was also raised in your previous critique). Fortunately this is a matter of approach, rather than ability, so should be relatively straightforward to address.

Please complete the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves, sticking to simple sausages as closely as you can.

• 3 pages of insect or arachnid constructions. Stick to one construction per page, and try to use as much of the space available as you can.