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

Starting with your organic forms it is great to see you're keeping your lines smooth and confident, and most of your forms are sticking closely to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

You're also doing a pretty good job of varying the degree of your contour curves to show how these forms turn in space, well done.

This isn't necessarily a mistake, but be aware that drawing the central flow line completely straight will lead to forms that feel stiff and rigid. One of the things that makes these sausage forms so useful as building blocks in this lesson and lesson 5 is that by including a subtle curve along the length of them we can introduce some gesture (also known as movement, or flow) to our constructions, which helps them to feel more natural, so keep that in mind.

Moving on to your insect constructions I've been using this lesson as a good opportunity to share with students the distinction between actions we take in 2D space - where we're just thinking about drawing lines on a flat page and not necessarily considering whether or not they directly impact the illusion we're trying to convey - and actions we take in 3D space, where we are actively thinking of every new addition as a complete, self-enclosed form, that exists in 3D space with the other forms around it. Actions we can take that respect and reinforce the illusion, rather than contradicting and undermining it.

Where I run into trouble, however, is when a student... already considers almost all of their actions in three dimensions. It's not a problem because it leaves me without something to say (though that can be a problem), but it puts me in a position of weighing whether not mentioning it may cause such issues to come up later, since it was never directly addressed (it will be when the course overhaul reaches lesson 4, but for now really just addressing this as a "free preview of future concepts" for those on the official critique track).

You are indeed doing it correctly, and it's great to see- but I am going to take a moment just to make sure you understand why it's correct. And for that, I'm going to use some prewritten text:

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.

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.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. So, again - you're doing this very well, and I hope to continue to see it going forward. I did spot just a couple of small spots where the construction wasn't quite as solid and 3D as it could be. Here is an example, on the abdomen of the fungus gnat. Most of the segments appear to wrap around the underlying sausage form, connecting to the existing structures in 3D space, but the one I've highlighted right at the end in blue isn't wrapping around anything, but has been extended off the existing forms as a partial shape, not quite providing enough information for the viewer to understand how it connects to the rest of the construction in 3D. I've redrawn it in green, giving it its own, fully enclosed silhouette.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is good to see you're working with the sausage method here, and for the most part you're applying it pretty well. 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 diagrams, in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

So, while you're making good headway with your leg construction, I've popped a couple of notes on your gnat here to bring to your attention some scope for improvement.

• You're doing a good job of drawing simple sausage forms for your base armatures, but sometimes their overlap is minimal, or nonexistent.

• This leads to you being a bit intermittent about applying the contour curve at the joints. This is something you did really well on this spider.

• It is great to see that you've jumped in with building extra bulk and complexity onto some of your legs with additional forms. In general, try to avoid entirely engulfing an existing structure in the new element you add. This can limit how much actual contact the new mass's silhouette has with the existing structure, and therefore defines a weaker relationship with it. Instead, we can break apart the new mass into separate pieces, defining each one's relationship individually, and ultimately yielding a stronger, more solid result.

The last point of note here concerns the application of texture and detail. You've done some good work on some of these constructions, such as this mantis where you've implied some of the smaller textural forms by drawing the shadows they cast. On this dragonfly it looks like you've filled a substantial form shadow with solid black. In this course solid black should be reserved for cast shadows only. I've popped a diagram on your work to show the difference between a form shadow (which occurs when a form turns away from the light source) and a cast shadow (which is projected from one form onto another). You may also find it helpful to revisit this video from lesson 2 which introduces cast shadows and explains how they differ from form shadows.

All right, I think that covers it. You're showing a strong understanding of the concepts we aim to teach in this lesson and I'll go ahead and mark it as complete. Please refer to the diagrams and demos I've shared here as you work through the next lesson, they should help you to get the most out of your animal constructions.