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

Starting with your organic forms the three forms at the top of your first page are reasonably close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

This isn't necessarily a mistake per se, but I noticed you're drawing a large proportion of your forms completely straight and rigid. Part of what makes these sausage forms so useful as building blocks in this lesson (and again in lesson 5) is because by using a subtle curve along the length of the form we can introduce gesture into our constructions. Keeping them completely straight will tend to stiffen things. I've marked some examples of this with a letter A on your work here.

I've marked with a letter B where some forms are getting bloated, continuously swelling through their midsection, so they're closer to being ellipses than sausage forms.

I've marked with a letter C an example of flattening the end of one of your forms. Remember we're trying to keep the ends rounded, like balls.

The form marked D has a lovely rounded end, but also some unexpected bulging. I've redawn the budlges to keep this form simpler.

I can see that you understand how to arrange your contour curves to show a form with either one end facing the viewer, or neither ends facing the viewer, which is good. You do tend to keep the degree of your contour curves quite narrow. 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.

Remember to draw around the small ellipses on the ends 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page. This is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. You can read more about this here.

Moving on to your insect constructions overall these are heading in the right direction. You're doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms, and building your constructions methodically, piece by piece, good work. You're demonstrating a developing understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space. I have a few things to talk about that should help you to get more out of these constructional exercises in futre.

This isn't a problem thoughout all your pages, but there are cases like this where I urge you to make better use of the space available to you on the page, as you've left a great deal of the space on the page blank. You can either choose to draw your objects bigger (drawing smaller than what the objects themselves require of you can impede your brain's spatial reasoning skills and also make it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing, leading to more stiffness and clumsiness), or if the drawing was already given as much room as it requires, you should consider whether another drawing will fit in the remaining space. Having a single drawing occupying a small section of the page and leaving the rest blank is unwise - it's either robbing you of the opportunity to get further mileage under your belt, or it's hindering you from getting the most out of each individual drawing.

Please remember to "draw through" your forms for these constructional drawings. By that I mean that you should complete each form, even if it is partially obscured in your reference. Imagine you're drawing with X-ray vision, and include the parts of forms that you can't see. This will help you to reinforce both your understanding of 3D space, and the 3D illusion we seek to create with these constructions. You did a good job of drawing through your forms on this louse whereas some of your other pages, like this lady bug the legs cease to exist where they are overlapped by the body.

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.

You don't appear to cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn all that often, but I've marked on your beetle in red some examples I saw. Sometimes I think you accidentaly cut inside forms you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes on 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. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same 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.

In purple I circled a few places where you appear to have redrawn your lines. In ending up with multiple different lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing. Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to executing each mark to the best of your current ability.

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 next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots 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.

You may have been wondering why I'd highlighted so much of the legs of your beetle in blue, stating that there isn't enough information for these sections to understand how they exist in 3D space. This is because these areas consist of shapes drawn adjacent to each other on the page, which connects them together in 2D space. To draw forms that connect together in 3D space, we want to draw complete forms that overlap on the page, then draw intersections where these forms connect together in 3D space, just like from the Form Intersections exercise from lesson 2. Here I've made a diagram for you to show the difference.

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.

The last point I want to touch on is texture and detail. There are some places where your approach to texture is spot on, and some others where you're not quite following the instructions for texture that are introduced in lesson 2. I've marked some specific examples on this beetle.

In green I've circled an area where you did a great job of using cast shadows to imply small bumps on the leg.

On the thorax you appear to be using randomness to create an area of midtone. Each shadow you wish to add should be individually designed, by outlining it first, then carefully filling it in as shown here.

On the wing casings it looks like you've copied a colour pattern, as I cannot see any forms present in your construction that would cast shadows here. As noted in these reminders we should focus only on cast shadows, and avoid copying areas that look dark in the reference.

So - 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.