Hello Parker7302, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

There is no need to apologise for taking a break and doing other things, there are no deadlines here. Saying that, if you do have a period away from Drawabox in the middle of a lesson it is advisable to reread/re-watch the lesson content before continuing your homework.

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a good job of keeping your lines confident and you're working well towards keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here. Sometimes one end of your form will be very slightly flattened or pointy, aim to keep them rounded, like two half spheres. Aim to have both ends a similar size, this one is a bit uneven.

Something important to note- do not redraw lines to correct them. We can see this happening on a flow line and two contour curves in this section of your work. Make sure you're investing ample time into planning and ghosting each line to increase your chances of producing the line you want. Because we're not robots, sometimes a line will miss where we wanted it to go. When this happens don't automatically draw it again to try to fix it, as this can make your work messy and confusing.

Your contour curves are looking smooth too, which is great, but you have a habit of drawing them floating inside your forms instead of touching the sides as seen on 5 out of 6 contact points on this form and on most of the contact points on this section of your work. This is a mistake, as explained in the exercise instructions here.

It is great to see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves. Just remember that 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 is demonstrated in this diagram, and is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. On some of your forms, such as this one you have your degree shift reversed, so bear that in mind when you practise this exercise in your warmups.

Moving on to your insect constructions I can see you have the potential to do an excellent job in this lesson, but there are a few ways that the manner in which you have approached some of your work here has undermined your efforts and reduced the learning benefits you're getting from these exercises.

I want to stress what Uncomfortable mentions in this video from Lesson 0. When assigned a certain number of pages of work, you should only be doing what's asked. It's not uncommon that when I have students feeling the need to complete more pages, that they tend to focus less on executing each individual instance of the exercise to the best of their current ability - taking the time to execute each mark, draw each shape, and construct each form as well as they reasonably can (regardless of how much time that takes them), and more on simply getting the exercise done in quantity - but not necessarily to the best of their ability.

Drawing more itself isn't a bad thing on its face, but it's about how it impacts the manner in which we engage with the work. You will always have more opportunities to practice these exercises in your warmups - the quantity we assign is not with the expectation of seeing growth and improvement over the set, but just to judge whether your understanding of what you're meant to be doing with the exercise is correct, or whether it requires clarification. Can't really judge that too well if you're spreading the time, energy, and effort you could have dedicated to a single page of a given exercise over multiple pages.

This idea of dedicating your time and energy most effectively also comes into play when I look as your tendency to repeat the same construction multiple times to different levels of completion. Don't do "practice" constructions, or show me your process. One of the many reasons we ask you to draw in fineliner in this course is so that whoever critiques your work can see every mark you make. I can see your process in your "final" constructions, so you don't need to repeat yourself. Make sure you're doing your thinking in your head and not on the page. If you make a mistake, instead of starting the construction again, push it to completion to the best of your current ability, you'll learn more from completing a flawed construction than by grinding the first couple of steps.

On some of your later pages , like this one it looks like you were thinking ahead to how many constructions you could fit on the page. I understand where this comes from, having done Dynamic Sketching I'm aware that that course encourages students to include multiple drawings on a single page and explore interesting and attractive layouts of their pages, it's just not the approach we use here.

It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, 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. Only when 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.

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 work here in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this happens if there is a gap between passes 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.

On this image I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist 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.

You were working towards building your constructions in 3D in the first half of your homework, but when you returned after Dynamic Sketching your pages show a shift in focus from 3D forms to 2D shapes, and in places just loose individual marks. I've highlighted some specific issues with your approach in this wasp.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out a variety 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 shown in these examples here, here, and 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 first half of your homework shows a fair attempt at using the sausage method, though on this spider you were using ellipses instead of sausage forms and as noted on your work here drawing through ellipses twice is correct, but drawing around your sausage forms twice is not helpful, as they require a different series of motions from your arm. The second half of your homework seems to abandon the sausage method entirely.

Conclusion I know you can do a great job here but the second half of your homework has deviated substantially from the lesson instructions and the core fundamentals that we're aiming to teach here. Please read this feedback thoroughly, you may need to review it multiple times to absorb it, and/or take notes.

Then, as a minimum review the following sections of lesson material:

Principles of markmaking

Thinking in 3D

Constructional drawing

Lesson 4 overview

Then please complete 3 pages of insect constructions, following the lesson instructions (and applying the above feedback) as closely as you can.