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

-Starting with the organic forms with contour curves, the shape of your sausages is turning out well in most cases although there are definitely a few times where both ends have a different size, just keep practicing so you can draw sausages that are most consistent throughout their length. When it comes to the contour curves there are some inconsistencies as to how you are approaching them, sometimes you’ll draw the ellipse that marks the point closest to us and then the next contour immediately turns away in an opposite direction, and there are plenty of sausages where the contours change direction, this is not incorrect but there are only two cases where this can happen. The first one is when both ends of the sausage are facing towards the viewer and the second is when both ends are facing away from the viewer and thus the ellipses become invisible to us. Whenever we have only one face towards the viewer there is no need to make the ellipses change direction, we do this for the sake of simplicity.

This is the diagram associated with this explanation https://imgur.com/CfKiLtt .

Insects

Moving on to your own insect constructions you are making some good attempts at breaking them into more simpler shapes so I will just explain what you could have done better and the actual techniques that you’ll need to be using in the next lesson.

oh but before I do that I wanted to tell you that you want to make sure that you are holding your pen roughly at a 90 degree angle in respect of the surface you’re working at, fineliners have a tendency to stop the flow of ink whenever held at different angles.

Starting with the main point, it's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the latter forms respect and even reinforces the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will 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.

Whenever we want to add anything new or change something to our constructions we can do so by introducing new 3D forms with a fully enclosed silhouette and defining how they relate to what is already present in the 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.

https://i.imgur.com/IINKdQA.png

This is particularly useful to construct things like the segmentation in the abdomen of many insects and crustaceans, rather than simply drawing lines we can draw full forms that wrap around each other. You can see some really good examples of this approach in the informal demos page like the shrimp demo and the lobster demo, if you haven’t drawn along them I highly encourage you to go ahead and do so before moving on to lesson 5.

Moving on to the last point which is leg construction you’re doing well but you are not using the method in its entirety. While you are indeed laying down a chain of simple sausages you are not pushing them further, keep in mind that once we have that structure laid down we can start to add additional masses to better capture the actual shape of these limbs as shown in this demo of an ant's leg ( https://imgur.com/7b9rc9e ) and this other showing it in the context of a dog's leg (https://imgur.com/97hS0XF). I also wanted to show you this demo which basically sums up these past two points https://imgur.com/t6oz7Tv

Just a final note on lineweight, which I think you took pretty far out here https://i.imgur.com/P3pd1TZ.jpeg , so remember to keep it subtle and limited to the parts where an overlap occurs.

Well I don't have a lot more to add so I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. You can keep working on all if these issues on the next lesson, good luck!!

Well it’s okay as long as you understand it