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

Starting with your organic forms you appear to be having some issues with sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. You're doing a good job keeping most of the ends rounded like half spheres, but there's a tendency for some of your forms to swell through their midsection and become bloated. For example this one continually swells through its midsection, so it is closer to an ellipse than a sausage form.

Remember you should be drawing around all your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page. This applies to the small ellipses on the tips of your forms, which you're not drawing through at all, as well as throughout your insect constructions, where you do so intermittently. This leans into the arm's natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute the ellipses smoothly. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse freehanded in this course as introduced here.

On the other hand, sausage forms require a different series of motions to draw, so drawing around them multiple times is not helpful. All this does is make the drawing messier and exacerbate the tendency to make your sausage forms elliptical instead of keeping their width consistent, so avoid drawing around sausage forms multiple times in future.

Continuing on to the contour curves, you're a bit inconsistent about hooking your contour curves around the form, so some of them don't accelerate as they approach the edge of the form, which flattens out the 3D illusion we're trying to create.

You're usually doing reasonably well at aligning your contour curves so that they are cut into two symmetrical halves by the central flow line, though there are a couple of forms, such as this one which I think would have benefited from taking a little more time and care with the alignment of some of the 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions, I'm happy to see that you've started each construction off with simple solid forms, and you appear to be putting quite a bit of thought into how these basic forms exist in 3D space and connect together. I do 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:

• 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.

• 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 beetle in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. On the same image I marked in blue some examples where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space.

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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies 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 as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

A note on line weight, when we use additional line weight it should be a whisper, not a shout. It doesn't take much additional thickness for the viewer's subconscious to pick up on it and discern that the thicker line is closer. On this construction (which appears to be one of your "no texture" pages) the line weight is waaaay too thick and distracting. 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 find an explanation and demonstration for how and where to apply line weight in this video. 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.

Moving on to how you're handling the textural aspect of your drawings, once the construction is complete, I get the impression that you're drastically underestimating how much time is required for you to follow the guidelines for texture introduced in lesson 2, to the best of your current ability. Adding texture is optional in this lesson, so if you choose to do so, do not rush.

If we take a look at this bee for example, the addition of fur involves a lot of zig-zagging marks, which breaks the 3rd principle of markmaking introduced in this section of lesson 1. Furthermore, all the little hooks on the ends of these lines are a telltale sign that your hand was moving really fast as you applied the fur, not giving your brain time to think through each stroke before you drew it. Every mark we add to these constructions should be intentionally designed, and serve a clear purpose, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.

Another aspect to your textural work that makes it appear to be somewhat haphazard is that you're diving in with the brush pen to apply shadows in a painterly fashion. This is difficult to control, and will give a sloppier result than what you're really capable of. Instead, make sure you're outlining each shadow shape with your fineliner first, so you can be really intentional with the design of that shape. Then you can use the brush to carefully fill in the shadow shape as shown in this diagram.

It looks like you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and you may need to spend some time reading through it all a few times as well as reviewing the relevant sections of lesson material. Once you've had time to absorb this feedback I'd like you to complete some additional pages to address the points I've raised here.

Please complete the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves.

• 3 pages of insect constructions.