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

Starting with your organic forms, you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of your lines are smooth and confident, nicely done.

It is good to see you're experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves. 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 that the little ellipses on the end(s) of the forms are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. There are a couple of forms where your contour curves indicate that both ends of the form face the viewer, but only one end has been given an ellipse. I've added the missing ones to one of your pages here.

Moving on to your insect constructions, these are looking very solid and three dimensional. Your line work is confident and purposeful, and your constructions appear well observed and carefully planned.

I do have some points that should help you get even 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.

Fortunately, you haven't cut back inside forms you have already drawn very much. I did see a couple of places where this happened, one example on your louse, where I've marked in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the thorax when adding the segmentation.

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're already doing a very good job of building your constructions with complete 3D forms, although occasionally you've added a partial shape instead, which doesn't quite provide enough information for the viewer to understand how these additions connect to the existing forms in 3D space. I've drawn over a couple of examples of this in blue on this mantid fly. These are quite nit-picky (and I'm aware that Uncomfortable draws a wing as a partial shape in the house fly demo) but as your work is already very strong I've had to pick at little things to give you suggestions for improvement. Here I've shown how these additions could be drawn as complete forms instead. We can then clarify which forms are in front with a little bit of extra line weight where the forms overlap.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is great to see you making effective use of the sausage method for almost all of your 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 as shown in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

I did spot one case where the leg construction wasn't quite as solid as it could be, and I've traced over what appears to be happening here on one of the front legs of the mantid fly. In green I'd drawn over your complete 3D forms, and in blue I've drawn over what appears to be a partial shape. Further down on the image I've redrawn this section, starting with a simple sausage form and building up bulk and complexity by wrapping additional forms around the sausage armature.

Notice that instead of engulfing a section in the sausage in a ball, I've used two pieces and twisted them around the sausage form. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

Conclusion

You've done a great job, and are demonstrating a strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please refer to this critique as you work through the next lesson, the various diagrams I've shared with you here should help you to tackle your animal constructions.