Hello Meli55, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms, you're getting a mixture of forms like this one which are pretty close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, as well as some forms which stray away from these characteristics such as this one with ends of different sizes, and this one which is pinched in the middle.

The second page is quite a bit better in this regard, so assuming that the pages are in order this suggests that you may benefit from including this exercise in your warmups more frequently, to get the practice you require.

It is good to see that you're starting to experiment with varying the degree of your contour curves, though you're doing this quite minimally as you appear to be reluctant to push them past a certain width. 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.

I also noticed some places where it looks like you'd redrawn parts of your contour curves, presumably in an effort to correct them. In this course it is best to leave mistakes alone rather than attempting to correct them. Correcting a mistake will create the impression in our brain that the mistake was addressed, whereas really addressing the mistake would involve reflecting upon why it may have occurred and adjusting our approach to try and avoid the mistake in the future - something we usually do by giving ourselves more time to think through the actions we take while doing the work. Leaving the mistakes alone allows us to come back after the page is complete to assess where the mistakes occurred, and how we might do better in the future. On the other hand, redoing a line generally just makes the work messier.

Moving on to your insect constructions, these are heading in the right direction. You're doing a good job of starting your constructions with simple solid forms, and gradually building them up in successive passes, without attempting to add more complexity than can supported by the underlying structures at any given point. I'm very pleased too see that you've been conscientious about "drawing through" your forms and including the parts that are obscured in the reference. Pushing yourself to draw the entire form will help you to develop a stronger understanding of how all these pieces exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships, so please keep that up as you move forward.

Overall you're doing a good job, and I have just a couple of 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 rhino beetle in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already established for the thorax. One thing I did notice is that some of the instances I spotted of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On this mosquito I marked in blue some examples where it looks like 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. At first I wasn't sure what the little circles floating around some of your constructions were for, but on closer inspection it looks like you're using them to help plan where you want the joints of your legs to go. Planning is a good thing, but I find it works better to use a dot (as introduced in the ghosted lines exercise) as dots cannot be confused for structural forms.

It looks like you were striving to use the sausage method for constructing the majority of your legs, though I do see some experimentation with other strategies. 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.

One last note before I wrap this up. Make sure you maintain tight relationships between the various parts of your construction, even when you get to the smaller details. I noticed a few places like this where you'd left a lot of little gaps between tufts of hair or other smaller forms, leaving loose marks floating on the page. Just being more careful and investing more time into planning and preparing before each stroke should help with this.

Anyway, I think that covers it. You've done a good job and I think you're ready for the challenges of the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Please refer to the points discussed in this feedback as you tackle the next lesson, they will continue to be relevant to animal constructions.