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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a good job of sticking close to the characteristics of simple sausages. Sometimes a form will have one end slightly larger than the other, or will be a little pinched or bloated through the middle but most of these are great.

Most of your contour curves look smooth and confidently drawn, and I'm happy to see you're working on varying the degree of these curves. You're showing a solid understanding that these curves should generally get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form.

I think you will find this diagram helpful, as it shows how to vary the degree of your contour curves to show a form in various orientations.

Just a quick note for the small ellipses on the ends of the forms, remember to draw around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen. As introduced here, this is something we ask you to do for every ellipse that you freehand in this course, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is by and large very well done. You're applying the constructional methods shown in this lesson to good effect and demonstrating a strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

I do have some points that should help you continue to get the most out of these constructional exercises in the future.

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.

For example, I've marked on your work here and here in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside your forms 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.

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.

I'm happy to see that there are plentiful examples of you building on your constructions with complete 3D forms. There are a few places where you've made a quick little extension without really providing enough information for us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist in 3D space. I've marked one example of this in blue on your work here and made a little diagram to show how we could build that extension by drawing a complete form that connects to the surface of the existing ball in 3D space.

Something else that can undermine the solidity of your constructions is tracing back over large sections of the silhouette to add extra line weight. Doing this causes your initially smooth and confident lines to get wobblier, and these little wobbles cause little cuts and extensions in the silhouettes of your forms to occur. I do understand that where to add line weight can be a little confusing. During the box challenge we encourage students to add line weight to the silhouette of their boxes, as this gives them the opportunity to practice super imposed lines. For these constructional exercises however, the most effective use of line weight - at least given the bounds and limitations of this course - is to use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight. Here I've marked an example of unnecessary extra line weight in red, and a more appropriate place to use it in green.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working on using the sausage method to construct the legs on the majority of your pages. 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.

Your legs are generally well done. In future I recommend that you make sure you have a decent amount of overlap between your sausage forms. This will give you room to include the contour curve to explain how the two forms connect in 3D space. This version of the sausage method diagram has the intersections highlighted in red. These little contour curves might seem insignificant but they do tell the viewer a lot of information about how the forms are orientated in space as well as reinforcing the structure of your legs by establishing how the forms connect together. So be sure to include them in future.

Due to the way the course has developed over time, and how Uncomfortable is finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems, you may encounter older demos where the approach to texture and detail differs to what is taught in the texture section of lesson 2. When this happens, please let the information from lesson 2 supersede any conflicting information you may encounter later in the course, as the texture section contains the most effective use of texture as a learning tool for students.

In particular, when tackling these constructions imagine your subject has been painted all one colour. So we can ignore any changes in colour pattern, such as the spots and stripes on this construction. When applying texture in this course we're using cast shadow shapes to describe the smaller forms that sit on an objects surface. We're telling the viewer how that surface would feel if your run your hand over it, which has nothing to do with what colour that surface happens to be.

Okay I think that covers it. You're doing a good job and I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Please use this feedback to help you in the next lesson, as these points will apply to animal constructions too.