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

Starting with your organic forms, you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There are a couple of slight inconsistencies but it is very clear that you're aiming for simple sausages, good work.

Most of your contour curves look smooth, with only the occasional wobble, and I'm happy to see that you're experimenting with varying their 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. You can also 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, on the whole these are coming along well. I can see you're following the constructional process of starting with simple solid forms and gradually building things up piece by piece, without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given stage. It looks like you're paying attention to figuring out how all these pieces fit together in 3D space, and I'm happy to see that you've been quite conscientious about "drawing through" your forms and including the parts we can't see. This will help you develop a stronger understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space, so please keep up the good work.

So, you're on the right track, but I do have a few pieces of advice that I think will help you to get more out of these exercises in future.

There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. I noticed a few pages such as this beetle and this cricket where your construction was rather small, and a great deal of empty space was left on the page. In artificially limiting how much space you gave these two constructions, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Once that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

As to time, just be sure to give each drawing as much time as it requires - not just for drawing, but for observing your reference as well. There are some cases here and there where you oversimplify a little too much in ways that it suggests you could probably benefit from pushing yourself to spend more time looking at your reference (specifically doing so continuously throughout the drawing process, rather than only up-front). The specifics of where those things occur isn't really that important - just something to keep in mind. Sometimes students may feel rushed to complete some drawings faster, simply because they only have a certain amount of time in a given sitting. If you ever feel yourself pressured to work faster than you need, remember that you can always set a drawing down and pick it up another day. No need to call it done the moment you get up.

I notice the reference image you shared for your shrimp is very small. If this is the full size image you were using I urge you to find larger reference images to work from in future. Working from low resolution images is going to make it unnecessarily difficult to observe your subject and pick out the more subtle, nuanced elements that will lead to more believable drawings.

The next point I wanted 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.

Fortunately you haven't cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn very often, and when you did, as marked in red here, it usually 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.

Another way we can alter the silhouette of forms we have already drawn is by extending them with partial shapes, as marked in blue on this cricket. This doesn't provide the viewer (or you) with enough information to understand how these additions actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space, so it reminds us that we're just looking at lines on a flat piece of paper.

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 last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I'm happy to see you've mostly been working with the sausage method, though there are a couple of pages such as this shrimp where it looks like you experimented with other strategies. 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.

All right, I think that should cover it. On the whole you're moving in the right direction and I think you should be good to continue working to adhere as strongly as you can to the idea of working in 3D space as you tackle the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Just be sure to keep these points in mind, and refer back to this feedback periodically to ensure that you can apply it all as you move forwards.