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

Starting with your organic forms we just ask for 2 pages with contour curves for this lesson, so the pages with contour ellipses are superfluous. Not a big deal, but checking the assignment instructions more carefully in future might save you from doing unnecessary extra work.

You’re doing an excellent job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and making good progress with the confidence of your contour curves, which are generally looking much smoother than your lesson 2 attempts.

There are two contour curves on the form at the bottom of this page which stand out because they are thicker than the others and somewhat wobbly. It looks like you may have drawn these lines twice, presumably to try to correct them. In this course it is best to leave mistakes alone rather than attempting to correct them. Correcting a mistake will create the impression in our brain that the mistake was addressed, whereas really addressing the mistake would involve reflecting upon why it may have occurred and adjusting our approach to try and avoid the mistake in the future - something we usually do by giving ourselves more time to think through the actions we take while doing the work. Leaving the mistakes alone allows us to come back after the page is complete to assess where the mistakes occurred, and how we might do better in the future. On the other hand, redoing a line generally just makes the work messier.

It is good to see that you’ve been experimenting with shifting the degree of your contour curves and ellipses, which is an aspect of the exercise that people often overlook. Keep in mind that barring any actual bending of the form, a sausage is essentially a cylinder which follows the same logic explained here in the ellipses section of lesson 1. This means that the degree of the contour curves 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. You can see a good example of how to vary your contour curves in this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

Moving on to your insect constructions once again, please pay attention to the assignment instructions. We ask for 4 pages of constructions with no texture/detail and 6 pages that can go into texture if you wish, so 10 in total. I counted 9 pages total, 8 with texture. There is a body of work here that will allow me to provide your feedback, but it is important that you submit what is actually assigned so that we can accurately asses your work and provide you with feedback that is as useful to you as possible.

Overall you've done well, but there are a few points I want to draw to your attention.

Something that stands out on quite a few of these pages is a lot of liberal use of heavier line weight/cast shadows in ways that suggested you weren't necessarily distinguishing between the two. While they're similar in some ways, line weight and cast shadows have to adhere to different rules. Line weight can cling to the silhouette of a form, but has to remain very subtle and light, rather than getting super heavy and dark. It relies on relative changes in thickness that one's subconscious will notice. It's like whispering, rather than shouting. Cast shadows on the other hand do not cling to the silhouette of a form, and instead are cast onto a different surface. They can be much broader and heavier, but we can't have them floating arbitrarily in space without an actual surface to receive them. We also need to be mindful of where our light source is. For example, if you look here, you'll see that you've got the shadow being cast both above and below the leg. This suggests an inconsistent light source. It should be casting above, or below, but not both simultaneously.

Please watch this video from lesson 1 which explains how to use line weight. The most effective use of line weight (at leas within the bounds and limitations of this course) is specifically for clarifying overlaps between forms, and limiting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. What this keeps us from doing is adding line weight to random places, or attempting to correct or hide mistakes beneath line weight. In addition to this, one thing I do want to stress is to try to avoid making your later phases of construction darker or thicker than the earlier ones. This can tempt us to redraw more of our existing structure than we need to, rather than simply adding the parts that change.

The next point I want to talk about is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had. It's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the later forms respect and even reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

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 grasshopper in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Along the abdomen it looks like this 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.

While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. On this image I’ve used blue to trace over two examples of extending the silhouette of an existing form with partial shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. While this approach worked for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

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.

Another thing that can help maintain the 3D illusion, if a part of the construction won’t fit on the page (like tips of some of the legs of this spider) we can “cap off” the form with an ellipse instead of running it off the edge of the page as a pair of lines and leaving it open ended.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were using the sausage method quite a bit, as well trying out a couple of different strategies for constructing 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, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5.

Finishing things off with a look at texture and detail, once the construction phase is completed, you’re starting to move in the right direction but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

• Remember that in Drawabox we do not use hatching to create form shading which occurs on a couple of your constructions, for example this spider.

• When we have a black pen in out hand it is very tempting to use it to fill in anything that we see in the reference that looks black, but this is not really what the texture section of lesson 2 describes. Instead of copying, we want do design the shape of shadows cast by small textural forms based on our understanding of the forms that are physically present and the relationships between them. It is entirely normal to find this very challenging, just make sure you’re following the specific process described in these reminders when adding texture to constructions in future.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your spatial reasoning skills appear to be developing very well and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. There is a lot of information in this critique, so please make sure you refer to it (or make a shorter summary of the key points in your own words to refer to) as you tackle the next lesson, so that you can apply these points to your animal constructions.