Hello SlayerDelano, 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 pages 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.

The majority of your forms are reasonably close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, although you’ll want to avoid pinching the middle of the sausage form inwards, as seen on the right of this page, when you practice this exercise in future.

You’re doing a good job of fitting your contour curves and ellipses snugly against the sides of the forms, but there are places where it looks like you could be paying closer attention to their alignment. We want each curve/ellipse to be cut into two symmetrical halves by the central flow line.

When deciding whether to place a small contour ellipse on a given end of a form, 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 where 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 these are starting to come together nicely. You’re doing a good job of sticking to the principles of markmaking introduced back in lesson 1 (drawing smooth confident lines with clear purpose and consistent trajectory) and I’m happy to see that you’ve started all your constructions by establishing simple solid forms for the head, thorax and abdomen.

Something that caught my attention is that a few of your constructions are rotated to a different position than the corresponding reference. It’s most obvious in this spider which almost looks mirrored, but it is also present in other constructions such as the stag beetle and the bee. If this is deliberate I’d advise you to stick to the orientation shown in your reference when doing your homework in future. While these constructional exercises will help you to extrapolate from multiple references and rebuild your subject matter from different angles I recommend you leave that for practising drawing in your own time, rather than these assignments, simply because it makes your task unnecessarily difficult, when these constructions are challenging enough already.

If this wasn’t done deliberately then this is an indicator that some of your constructions would benefit from more careful and frequent observation of your reference. Now, this course doesn't focus that much on observation, in the sense that we understand it's important, but it comes down primarily to identifying the nature of the specific forms we're transferring. We can end up with constructions that are, as a result of little accumulated mistakes, not accurately reproducing our reference images and that's fine - but if we don't end up investing the time necessary to have observed our reference carefully and frequently throughout the process, then it's very easy to end up building up our forms only based on a vague, incomplete, oversimplified recollection of what's present in the reference, rather than pulling directly from the reference itself.

Mostly this is going to come down to simply investing more time into observing your subject, but I’ve also made a few comparisons on your bee of the sort of things we can look for in a reference to help process the wealth of visible information in a photo. I actually started by rotating your drawing to the position that most closely resembled the reference, to be as fair as possible. With A, we’re looking at how far the hind leg protrudes beyond the body. With B we’re looking at the gesture or flow of the leg sausages. We don’t actually draw in the central flow line of the legs, but it helps a lot to look at the legs carefully for which direction they’re flowing and make sure that gets replicated in your drawing. C is a comparison between the tops of the wings, and D is a vertical where the front foot lined up rather handily with the mouthparts in the reference. Making these kinds of observations can help to keep the construction organised and believable. Speaking of- I thought this dragonfly was pretty well observed and led to a believable representation of the insect in question. I can see you wound up having the wings quite short so they would fit on the page, but things like the voluminous abdomen segmentation and the controlled positioning of the legs make this one of your strongest constructions.

The next point I want to talk about relates to 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 beetle in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already established for the thorax. I’ve done a similar mark up on this bee where the instances of cutting into forms 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.

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 great to see that you’ve made an effort to use the sausage method for constructing your legs. You’re doing pretty well at constructing chains of sausage forms, although in places they could be positioned more accurately through more careful observation of the reference. You also appear to be missing the intersections at the joints which we add to show how the forms connect together.

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.

The last point I need to mention briefly, is that when adding texture to constructions in this course, we want to be reserving using solid black for cast shadows only. It is very common to copy things that look dark, such as the eyes of this construction but this doesn’t really tell the viewer about the texture of that surface. We want to communicate how that surface might feel to run your fingers over it, which has nothing to do with what colour the surface happens to be. If you’re in doubt about how to handle textures, these reminders are a good section to review.

All right, I think that should cover it. You’re constructions are off to a good start. I’ve called out a few points where there is room for growth, but these are all things that can be addressed in the next lesson, so I’ll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Please be sure to actively tackle these points here as you draw your animals, so that we can build on them in the next lesson. Best of luck.