Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 4 homework.

Organic forms with contour lines

-Starting with the organic forms, you have done a pretty good job drawing the shape of your sausages without any unexpected pinching or swelling throughout their length, when it comes to the contour lines these are beginning to wrap around in a believable way and they are drawn with a good deal of confidence, the main issue here is that the contours barely shift degrees in some cases and in others there is no degree shift at all. We know this is a mistake as explained in lesson 1 ellipses section, before adding a contour line try to think about each one’s purpose and how you are going to achieve it best, go through each step of the ghosting method in order to avoid adding marks that don’t add a lot of useful information to our drawing, also keep in mind that contour lines are a useful tool to describe how a form exists in 3D space but they can easily work against us by flattening our drawing, that’s why you have to be very careful when using them

Insect construction

-Your initial construction lines are looking quite faint here, and you tend to add a lot of lineweight only to those that you want to commit to, this may not seem like a big deal but it reinforces the mindset that we are just working with a set of lines rather than actual forms that have volume and exist in 3D space. The first thing you want to make sure of when doing your exercises is to be confident in your own belief that you are drawing objects that exist in a 3D world ,so add a contour line to your initial masses and don’t forget to draw through your ellipses twice.

-The second issue I want to call out is that you are cutting into the silhouette of your forms quite often, and you seem to be ignoring the initial masses that you had blocked in, this is more easily seen in your ant, where you ignore the initial ellipses you had drawn, leaving you with a completely flat drawing. Instead what we should do when we want to add additional masses or change something, is to add fully enclosed forms that have their own volume, and by establishing how these forms relate to the already present construction, we can do this by defining the intersection between them or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

In general you want to avoid constructing subtractively, if you want to change something it is better to add forms, in any case this diagram explains my point much better

Also, this is a concept that has not been fully integrated into the lesson yet, but you can see more concrete examples of it on the informal demos page, the shrimp demos and the lobster demo specifically, you can also see it in practice in this beetle horn demo and this ant head demo.

-Now let's move on to leg construction, I can see that you are incorporating elements of the sausage method, and overall you are moving in the right direction. However there are some cases where your sausages swell and bulge. It is important to keep in mind that the sausage method is not about capturing the shape of the sausages precisely as they are, instead it is about laying down a very basic structure that captures both the flow and solidity of these limbs, once that structure is in place we can start to add additional masses to better capture the actual shape of the legs.

This whole process is exemplified in this diagram showing how to apply construction to an ant's leg you can also see it here on the context of a dog's leg

-Lastly, another minor issue I caught is that you let your forms cut off each other like on your cricket you let the wings cut off the segmentation of the abdomen, remember to draw forms with a fully enclosed silhouette and don't let them cut off each other.

Anyways, I have given you plenty of things to keep working and I'd like to see them addressed so I'll give you some additional homework