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

Before I get to critiquing your work I'll address the concerns you shared when submitting your homework.

I'm guessing you're referring to your lesson 2 critique, where Tofu talked about tending to focus on negative shapes, rather than your lesson 3 feedback, where ThatOneMushroomGuy talked about mixing up form shadows and cast shadows. I've put together a diagram here that illustrates examples of both.

I've used a simple example of a branch and a leaf. In red, I've identified form shadows, where a form turns away from the light. We don't include form shadows in these exercises. In blue I've filled in a negative space (meaning a gap) between the forms, we don't fill these in with black either. In green I've drawn a cast shadow, where the leaf blocks the light from hitting the branch. I've used a large scale example to make this concept easy to understand, but when tackling texture we're thinking about the little lumps and bumps on an object's surface, and using the shadows they cast to imply their presence.

This is covered in this section on form shading, and the section below it about cast shadows. These reminders are also a good section to review for how to tackle texture in this course.

When it comes to additional line weight, as shown in the diagrams of the leaf and the branch, it should be reserved for clarifying overlaps, and restricted to localised areas where those overlaps occur. It should be added to one form at a time, using a confident, ghosted, super imposed stroke. You can read more about this here. In order to keep line weight subtle I usually find one additional stroke is enough to get the desired effect.

Okay, now let's take a look at your work.

Starting with your organic forms most of these are sticking reasonably close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There are a couple with one end larger than the other, or ends that get a bit flattened rather than being rounded like half spheres, but it is clear that you understand what to aim for.

Your contour curves are well aligned, although a few of them look just a little bit stiff and hesitant, remember to prioritise making a smooth, confident stroke over accuracy. It is good to see that you're varying the degree of your contour curves, though it looks like you're reluctant to make them wider than a certain degree. 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.

I noticed that sometimes you've placed an ellipse on an end of your forms where the contour curves tell us it is facing away from the viewer, I've crossed one of them out here, and added one that was missing. 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, in this case if 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 heading in the right direction. You've done a good job of starting with simple forms and gradually building complexity piece by piece, and I can see evidence that you're developing a decent understanding of how all these pieces exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

I do have some points that should help you get 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 - 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 I didn't actually see many places where you'd cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already established, although I've marked in red on your wasp where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. It is also possible that you may have started with the smaller form, then extended it with a single line, but either way this undermines the 3D illusion of the construction.

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.

So, for example I marked in blue on this mantis 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. I've also noted in green some examples where you'd done a good job of building on your construction using complete 3D forms.

Here I've made some alterations to your mantis, drawing some of the flat extensions as complete 3D forms. I also wanted to point out that you can adapt the leaves method of construction to insect wings. Starting simple, and adding complexity bit by bit.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out a few different strategies for constructing legs. This page shows that you can apply the sausage method of leg construction quite well, whereas most of the legs on this page consist of flat partial shapes. 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

Your work here is progressing well. I've outlined some things to work on, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete, just be sure to actively tackle these points as you handle your animals. 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.