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

Starting with your organic forms it is clear that you're working towards the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Sometimes these forms have ends that are different sizes, or get a bit bloated through their midsection, so keep that in mind when practising these in your warmups.

It is good to see you've experimented with varying the degree of your contour curves. 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 out here, as well as adding some that were missing, in red. 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.

On this page I've circled in blue several places where you had drawn your contour curves twice. We insist on students drawing around their ellipses two full times before lifting the pen off the page, because this leans into the arm's natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps students draw ellipses smoothly. Going back over contour curves isn't actually helpful, it will just make your work messier.

I see you had a query about the form at the bottom of this page. Having two contour curves going opposite directions crossing over like this tells the viewer that the surface of the form faces two different directions at the same time. This contradiction is confusing and will undermine the 3D illusion.

Moving on to your insect constructions I can see you've put a great deal of care and attention into thinking about how to build your constructions in 3D, and have made good use of the methods shown in the demos. Despite taking a long break in the middle of the lesson I don't see a negative impact on your work. Either you have an excellent memory, or were very conscientious about reviewing the lesson material and doing warm ups before resuming.

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

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

So, here I have redrawn some of the extensions I had previously marked in blue, using complete forms with fully enclosed silhouettes. I also took the opportunity to point out some places where you're already doing an excellent job of building on your constructions with complete 3D forms, showing good spatial reasoning skills with a rather complex insect. Nicely done!

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I'm happy to see that you've been quite diligent in using the sausage method for constructing most of your legs. 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.

Before I wrap this up, I did notice that you seem to be filling in most of the insects' eyes with black. Remember when adding texture and detail that areas of filled black should be reserved for cast shadows. As insect eyes tend to protrude, I have a hard time believing that they are all in cast shadow, and suspect that you may have filled them in because they appear dark in the reference image. I'd suggest you give these reminders for how to tackle texture in this course another read. I did see that you had some difficulty drawing fur, but am not too concerned as this is entirely normal, and Uncomfortable will discuss and demonstrate drawing fur in the next lesson.

Conclusion

All right, I think that covers it. You're going a good job and I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you work through the next lesson, they will apply to animal constructions too.