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

Starting with your organic forms you're keeping to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here some of the time. This one is pretty good. This one is pinched in the middle. This one has one end much wider than the other, and I can see that you redrew one of the contour curves. Resist the temptation to redraw your lines, as it can make your work messy and confusing. This is an example of one of your forms that swells throughout its midsection. Try to keep the width even throughout its length. This is also an example of where you drew the flow line completely straight, and while in essence there's nothing against the rules of the exercise to do that, I really don't see this as being nearly as beneficial as having them bend.

You're doing a really good job of varying the degree of your contour curves, well done. Some of these curves show some signs of hesitation, so be sure to use the ghosting method and draw from your shoulder to help you execute these smoothly, with confidence. A wobbly line is a mistake, no matter how accurate, and a confident line will be correct, as with practice the accuracy will get better. This applies to the rest of your constructions too.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're making good progress, developing an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. You're doing a good job of starting with simple forms and adding complexity where you need to. I do have some points to discuss that should help you to continue to make the most of these exercises.

The first of these relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

1 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.

2 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.

I've highlighted in red on your ant some places where you appear to have cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you had already drawn. One way this can happen is if there is some looseness to an ellipse and you choose the line you like best for the base of your construction, or hop around between different passes instead of sticking to just one of them. Where there is a gap between passes of your ellipse, you should base your construction on the outer line, to prevent any stray lines going outside of your silhouette.

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 for example, I marked on this section of your Hercules beetle in green where you did a great job of adding a 3D form to the head. In blue I highlighted some places where you extended your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space, and shown how you could add a whole form instead.

Sometimes you redraw sections of your silhouette to add line weight. Going back over your lines in this manner causes small sections of silhouettes to be cut out, and small sections to be extended.

Instead, line weight should always follow the silhouette of one form at a time, and should be reserved to the specific localised areas where overlaps occur between forms, in order to help clarify those overlaps, as explained here. It does look like you're aware of using line weight to clarify overlaps, but aren't strictly sticking to it.

I noticed a tendency to start your construction off lighter, and then increase the weight of your marks as you progress. This can encourage us to redraw more of the structure than we strictly need to. I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight as discussed above only towards the end.

I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. 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.

Overall you're doing a good job. While the points I've raised here do need to be addressed, they can be applied to animal constructions. So I'm going to mark this lesson as complete with the understanding that you will do your best to apply this feedback to your homework as you move forward.