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

Starting with your organic forms these are confidently drawn, and you're doing a great job of keeping most of your sausage forms simple as explained here. There's just a couple on your second page with one end slightly larger than the other, so try to keep them evenly sized when you practice these in your warmups.

I'm happy to see that you're varying the degree of your contour curves. The idea we're trying to get across here is that these curves should generally get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form as is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. So for the three forms at the top of this page you have the shift in degree reversed.

I think it will also be helpful if you include a small contour ellipse on the end(s) of the form that are facing the viewer. In addition to the exercise instructions, you can also see this demonstrated in this diagram which is a good example of how to vary your contour curves to show a form in various orientations.

Moving on to your insect constructions you've done well at utilising the principles of construction taught in this lesson, starting with simple, solid forms and methodically building up complexity step be step where you need it, lovely stuff.

I have some points that should help you get more 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 tropical harvestman in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. 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 that new addition was meant to exist in 3D space. In green I added a contour curve at the base of an additional form, to explain specifically how this new form connects to the underlying structure. There's another example of extending your silhouette in blue on this moth.

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 wanted to note that when you're drawing along with one of the demos it is important to follow each step as closely as you can. I've made a note on your wasp where you weren't quite careful enough in the way you copied one the forms on the back of the thorax, so it reads as an extension in 2D space instead of a 3D form.

Another point I need to make is that there are a couple of constructions, such as this louse where it looks like you've traced around all (or most) of your silhouette to reinforce it with extra line weight. I do understand where this comes from, as in the 250 box challenge we recommend adding line weight to the silhouette of your boxes to give students extra practice with their super imposed lines. However for these constructions going back over the silhouette in this manner causes small extensions and cuts to occur in the silhouette, undermining the solidity of your constructions, this is especially prevalent when you allow your extra line weight to jump from one form to another and make a little "bridge." So, instead, for these constructions you should be applying line weight with a ghosted, confident, super imposed stroke to one form at a time and reserving it for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're making an effort to use the sausage method 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.

You're generally doing a good job with using the sausage method to construct your legs, you may find it useful to draw a more generous overlap between your sausages, so that you have room to apply the contour curve for the intersection at the joints more consistently. On this inchworm your leg forms got quite elliptical instead of sticking to sausage forms, but it looks like this was a one-off experiment.

Finally I wanted to take a moment to talk about the shading on the far side wing of this moth. If you're using hatching to "push" the far side back (as seen in the black widow demo) then these lines should be neat, parallel and evenly spaced. If you're employing texture here I'd recommend that you reread the lecture about texture that ThatOneMushroomGuy gave you during your lesson 3 critique, where he explained how we approach texture in this course. Instead of quickly scratching in a few lines to create a midtone, you should be identifying and outlining cast shadow shapes, then carefully filling them in.

And that's about it. You're doing a good job so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the points I've raised here in mind as you work through the next lesson, as they apply to animal constructions too. Best of luck, and keep up the good work.