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

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing a pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and it is good that you’re drawing the forms themselves with smooth confident lines.

There are several places where it looks like you've gone back over a contour curve, presumably to correct it. 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.

I noticed sometimes you’re placing your contour curves in an arrangement that tells us that both ends of the form are facing towards the viewer, but only place a small contour ellipse onto one of those ends. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.

Moving on to your insect constructions overall these are coming along very well, and the biggest issue you’re running into here is one I called out for your organic forms exercise- redrawing lines.

One of the reasons we draw with ink for these exercises is because it makes a bold dark line, there is no need to go over your lines a second time to reinforce them. Everything we do in this course serves a specific purpose, and for additional line weight that purpose is to clarify overlaps between forms, restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. Please rewatch this video which explains and demonstrates how to apply additional line weight. What this keeps us from doing is adding line weight to arbitrary places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind additional line weight. Generally speaking, line weight should also be kept subtle - like a whisper to the viewer's subconscious, rather than being applied too heavily to create overly thick areas. When things get too thick, they can start to flatten the form down into a graphic shape.

One of the main points I usually discuss in lesson 4 critiques is 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 their actions in three dimensions. It's not a problem because it leaves me without something to say, 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 (especially currently as Uncomfortable is overhauling the lesson material, eventually planning on incorporating it but for now really just asking me to share 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.

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. Again, this is something you’re doing well, although I will go ahead and share a couple of examples of this in practice which might be useful for taking your constructions a step further. 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. I’m happy to see that you’ve made an effort to use the sausage method, and you’re doing a pretty good job of constructing chains of overlapping sausage forms. Make sure you only draw around your sausage forms one time. We insist on students drawing around ellipses 2-3 times before lifting the pen off the page because this leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute them smoothly. Sausage forms require a different series of motions to draw, so going around them twice isn’t helpful, generally it just makes the construction messier.

You’re applying the contour lines to define the intersections at the joints often enough that I can see you understand how to do so, but sometimes they are missing and this is an important step to remember to reinforce the solidity of the construction.

I’m happy to see that you’ve taken a swing at building onto some of your sausage armatures, adding the sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that you observe in these structures, arriving at a more characteristic representation of the leg in question than what can be achieved with the sausages alone. I have some diagrams to share with you that I hope will help you to continue to build onto your leg structures as you move forwards.

• These diagrams show how we can add to the construction with complete 3D forms instead of flat shapes and one-off lines.

• This diagram shows how instead of fully engulfing an existing form within a new one, we can establish a clearer relationship between the existing form and the new addition by breaking it into two pieces.

• This ant leg demo shows how we can take the sausage method and push it further, adding all kinds of lumps bumps and spikes to the sausage armature.

• I’d also like to share this dog leg demo with you, which shows how the sausage method can be applied to animal legs. This is important, as we’d like you to continue to stick with the sausage method of leg construction when tackling your animals in the next lesson.

The last thing I wanted to mention before wrapping this up is about contour lines, specifically the additional contour lines on the spikes of this weevil. The direction of these curves is important, because they tell us how the form is oriented in space. As I’ve noted on your work there, the spike on the right is being projected back into space, away from the viewer, so those lines should curve the opposite way.

Contour lines fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want.

Unfortunately, that first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns, where adding 2 or 3 may not have any more impact than just one. Be sure to consider this when you go through the planning phase of the contour lines you wish to add. Ask yourself what they're meant to contribute. Furthermore, ask yourself if you can actually use the second (form intersection) type instead - these are by their very nature vastly more effective, because of how they actually define the relationship between forms. This relationship causes each form to reinforce the other, solidifying the illusion that they exist in three dimensions. They'll often make the first type somewhat obsolete in many cases. If we circle back to your weevil, here I’ve removed some of those contour lines altogether, and we can see that the forms still stand up as solid, primarily by virtue of the design of their silhouette, which has a clearly defined connection to the underlying ball form.

All right, I think that covers it. Your constructions are coming together well and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you move forwards, they will continue to be applicable to the next lesson.