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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves I can see you're working towards sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here. Some of them are a bit pinched in the middle, or have one end much larger than the other. Try to keep the width of the sausage even along its length. I saw one where you had redrawn part of it to correct a mistake. No matter how off a line is, resist the temptation to draw it again, as it can make your work look messy and confusing.

Your lines look pretty smooth and confident, and its great that the confidence appears to carry over for your contour curves too. I can see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves, which is good, though you seem to rely more on flipping the direction of your curves than being able to reliably control their degree. As a general rule of thumb the contour curves will get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

I think studying this diagram may help you, it demonstrates how to vary your contour curves to show a form in different orientations. Note which ends have contour ellipses on them. The contour ellipse on the end(s) is another contour curve, we just happen to be able to see the whole ellipse because the end is facing towards the viewer.

I've noted these points on your work here

Moving on to your insect constructions it is worth noting that you may not always be following all the instructions to the best of your current ability.

Let's take this wasp as an example. It looks like you were drawing along with the wasp demo.

Step 1 is fine and dandy, you drew the 3 major masses.

Step 2 is an additional form on the head, 4 forms on the thorax, and 5 contour lines on the abdomen. You drew something on the head, not what was shown, but an attempt. The forms on the thorax and contour lines on the abdomen are missing.

Step 3 is adding forms to the thorax where the legs will attach. It looks like you attempted this. There's some scribbling over the top, and it's not very faithful to the demo example but there is something.

Then there is a discussion on how to use the sausage method for leg construction.

Step 4 is constructing chains of sausage forms sprouting from the forms already established on the thorax. You did draw legs, all 6 of them. I'm pretty hard pressed to find a single sausage form among them, and you attached 2 of them to the abdomen.

Step 5 involves drawing the eye, the wing, more forms on the thorax and more forms on the legs. You got the eye and the wing in there, but it doesn't look like you attempted any of the additional forms on the thorax or the legs.

The last step involves more detail on the legs, wings, and segmentation on the abdomen, as well as antennae. I can see you added the antennae, albeit with a different method to what is shown.

These deviations from the instructions are quite substantial. When following along with any demos in the future I urge you to follow every step exactly as shown, to the best of your current ability. Just like you would with any of the technical exercises. The instructions and demos are there to help you, by applying them in a half hearted manner you're shooting yourself in the foot, so to speak. I suggest you watch this video which explains how to get the most out of drawabox and what your responsibilities as a student are.

At this point it's probably worth dropping in the feedback you received on this spider about halfway through the lesson.

"Stick to 2 or 3 passes on your ellipses, the abdomen is getting a bit confusing with so many lines there.

Remember to add a contour curve to reinforce the joints for your leg sausages.

I'm not sure what the scribbly bits I circled are for? If they're cast shadows they should be solid black (and I'm not sure what is casting them) and have a carefully designed shape.

Try drawing bigger. There's loads of empty space on your page. Drawing bigger makes it a bit easier to think through spacial reasoning problems, and to engage your whole arm. It should make it a bit easier to draw those pesky leg sausages."

I'm happy to see that you stopped scribbling on your work after this, and that you generally drew a little bigger and made a more reasonable number of passes on your ellipses. You sometimes go to 4 passes though, so make sure you're paying attention to the number of passes on every ellipse you draw.

The points about the size of your drawings and the number of passes on your ellipses had already been explained to you by Uncomfortable in your lesson 3 critiques. Make sure you're doing everything in your power to apply the feedback that you receive, you may want to try taking some notes so you don't forget.

Continuing on, I 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:

1 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.

2 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 ant in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this happens due to the looseness of your ellipses. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion.

On the same image I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist 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.

Another way we can accidentally break the 3D illusion is by leaving gaps in the silhouette. I've circled a few of the gaps you left on one of your constructions here, do try to close your silhouette, this is part of maintaining those specific relationships between stages of your construction and will help to make your drawing look solid and 3D.

I know I mentioned this on your organic forms exercise but I do want to stress that you should not arbitrarily repeat lines Every stroke you put down should be using the ghosting method (executing a single stroke at a time, always planning/preparing first, never acting reflexively), and you should not then apply additional strokes to correct mistakes. When you add line weight it should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like 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. I've drawn over one of your insects here to show you what we're asking you to do.

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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. I want you to be able to demonstrate that you can understand and apply this feedback so that you can continue to get the most out of these exercises in the future. Be sure to read through this critique thoroughly, and to refer back to it as often as you need to in order to understand, remember, and apply all the information that has been presented to you. Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.

Please complete 1 page of organic forms with contour curves and 5 pages of insect constructions.