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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here. There are just a couple that get a little bloated in the middle instead of maintaining an even width, I've marked one of them here. Overall these look great, just keep that even width in mind when you practise these in your warmups.

Looking at your contour curves, you're doing well. I noticed a few of them are a little wobbly, which is often a sign or hesitation. Prioritise confidence over accuracy (and remember to rotate your page as needed and use the ghosting method) as with practice your accuracy will improve over time, but a confident stroke is a decision we can make. You might find it useful to read this comment from Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.

I can see that you've included a little bit of variation with the degree of your contour curves, but in future I'd like you to push this much further. I've redrawn the curves on one of your forms here to show you what I mean. As a general rule of thumb these curves should get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This concept is shown in this diagram and is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. You can see this in action in this diagram which is a good example of how to vary your contour curves to show a form in various orientations.

Moving on to your insect constructions You're doing a good job here too. You're developing an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. You've done well at utilising the principles of construction taught in this lesson, starting with simple, solid forms and methodically building up complexity step be step where you need it, lovely stuff.

I have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

First, when you follow one of the demos it is important that you follow all the steps. I noticed that on your louse you missed this step where Uncomfortable draws claws. Perhaps you were worried about this step getting into "texture and detail" territory, but as the claws are forms they would be fine to include them on a "construction only" page.

The next point I wanted to make 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.

Fortunately you don't cut inside your silhouettes all that much but I've marked on this insect in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of a form you had already drawn. Sometimes this happens due to the looseness of 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 attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist in 3D space. I can see that you were thinking about that hump as a 3D form, due to the contour lines you drew across it, but by cutting the form off where it passes behind the wing, we lose the sense of how that form is meant to exist in 3D space. I've made another edit on your work here where I guesstimated how we might give that hump its own complete silhouette and connect it to the underlying structures you'd established for the body.

So, 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'm happy to see that you made a concerted effort to use the sausage method to build your legs. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method, 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.

When you're using the sausage method it is important to include the contour curve for the intersection at the joints, which you may have missed from the sausage method diagram linked above. I've added some of them on your work here and this diagram shows where to add the contour curves when using the sausage method. These little lines might seem insignificant, but they convey a lot of information about how your sausages are orientated in space and how they fit together so please try to remember them in future.

You've made a good start with adding new forms to build bulges on your legs on this page. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

This can be taken much further as shown in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

The last point I need to talk about is texture and detail. I can see that you're working on applying the feedback you received in your lesson 3 critique with regards to texture. There are places where you're doing well at using cast shadow shapes to imply small textural forms on an objects surface.

On this insect it looks like you copied a colour pattern to colour in some markings on the insect. Remember that when using texture in this course you should be using the shapes of cast shadows to implicitly describe the smaller forms on an object's surface. You're telling the viewer how that surface feels. This has nothing to do with what colour the surface happens to be. For the sake of these exercises, imagine your insect is all one colour, like it has been painted white or grey.

On this page you're using form shading- primarily on the claw arms. Form shadows exist on the form, and cast shadows are cast from on form on to another. This diagram may help you understand the difference. I'd also recommend reviewing this section from lesson 2, and the one below it, which explain what form shading and cast shadows are, and why we focus on cast shadows only in this course.

And that's about it. You're doing a good job so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the points I've raised here in mind as you work through the next lesson, as they apply to animal constructions too. Best of luck, and keep up the good work.