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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms that are introduced here. I spotted a couple of places where you make an end of your form a bit stretched out or pointy, like the bottom of this one. Try to keep both ends the same size, and rounded like half spheres.

Your contour curves look good too, I can see you're working on varying their degree. Just resist the temptation to redraw lines.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're doing a very good job. You're starting your constructions with simple forms and carefully adding complexity where you need it. You're showing a developing understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together. I do have some pointers for you that should help you continue to get the most out of these exercises in the future.

The first is a reminder of the principles of markmaking that are introduced in lesson 1. Your lines should be smooth, continuous and unbroken. It's not a problem on most of your work, but there are places where your lines do get quite sketchy. For example here on Mr Snippysnap, the line at the bottom is scratchy and broken, and the line at the top was repeated unnecessarily.

If you're repeating lines to correct them, don't. Sometimes despite our best efforts, carefully planning a line and using the ghosting method, we will have a line come out poorly. It may miss or overshoot where we wanted it to go. When this happens, resist the temptation to draw it again in an effort to fix it. Leave it as if it were correct and move on. Redrawing your lines will only bring more attention to the place where you feel you made a mistake, and can make your work messy and confusing.

On a related note, I think you may be overestimating how much line weight you need to add to your constructions, and misunderstanding where you need to put it. Line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here. You're going in to make it subtly thicker. This doesn't require the addition of much extra thickness, just enough to set it apart. Our subconscious will pick up on this difference even if our eyes don't immediately, and will understand the kind of hierarchy this is creating. So for example these legs didn't need any extra line weight, except perhaps right at the top where they overlap with the insect's body. This image shows in red the places where I'd suggest adding some subtle extra line weight to clarify overlaps. I do understand that it's easy to get confused with this because in the 250 box challenge we do encourage students to reinforce the silhouette of their boxes with extra line weight as a way of practising their superimposed lines.

Continuing on, the core of this lesson 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.

I've marked in red here on one of your spider's legs some small areas where you appear to have cut back inside forms that were already on the page to alter their silhouettes. This ties back to my earlier point about not redrawing things to correct them.

I've highlighted in blue here some places where you attempted to extend your silhouettes without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were 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.

The last point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I can see you're working on using the sausage method to build your legs, which is great, that's what we'd like you to do in this lesson and in lesson 5 too. Make sure you keep working on using complete forms instead of partial shapes, and that those forms stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, so don't make them start too complex or accidentally make them elliptical.

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 what we would like you to use for tackling animal constructions too.

Alrighty, there are some things that could be improved, but your work is coming along well and I feel that you are capable of addressing the points I've raised here as you work through the next lesson. So I'll go ahead and mark this as complete.