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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did two pages of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both to be contour curves. This does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

The forms themselves are heading in the right direction. You've got a couple with one end larger than the other, or ends that get slightly flattened or pointy, but it's clear that you're aiming for characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here and some of them are pretty close.

Some of your ellipses are deformed which is a sign that you're prioritising accuracy over making a smooth, confident stroke. Instead, we want you to prioritise making a smooth confident stroke above all else, as accuracy will improve over time with practice. You can read more about this here. To help with this make sure you're using the ghosting method, rotating your page to find the best angle for each ellipse, and drawing from your shoulder.

Remember to draw around all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page, you tend to do this for the ellipses in the middle, but not on the ends. Drawing around your ellipses twice will help you to draw them smoothly and confidently, and is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, you can read more about this here.

Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines/ellipses should be shifting wider as we slide along the sausage form, moving farther away from the viewer. This is also influenced by the way in which the sausages themselves turn in space, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb to follow. If you're unsure as to why that is, review the Lesson 1 ellipses video. You can also see a good example of how to vary your contour curves in this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

Moving on to your insect constructions it is good to see that you've drawn through (most of) your forms here, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space. You're also demonstrating good observational skills, which puts you in a strong position.

Right now, most of your constructions appear to consist of a faint underdrawing, followed by your "real" drawing on top. With many of these, we could completely remove your initial ellipses and it would have no impact on the final result. This isn't really how constructional drawing works in this course. These first steps of your construction are not loose or vague guidelines, they are solid 3D structures, and once you have drawn them they cannot be discarded or ignored. I'd like you to reread this page where Uncomfortable discusses how to approach construction in this course. We want to maintain tight, specific relationships between each stage of construction, and rather than redrawing the whole structure at each step, we only add the parts that change.

What you're doing in these pages is something Uncomfortable calls a rough underdrawing and clean-up pass. While this is a perfectly valid technique for drawing in general, it is one we firmly discourage in this course. You can read more about this here. I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight only to clarify overlaps towards the end.

Now, this issue isn't present on all of your pages, but there are cases like this where you are unfortunately doing yourself something of a disservice, and making things harder than they need to be. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. On some of your pages it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. This leads to stiffer, wobblier lines, and not being able to fully explore all the forms present in your subject matter.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it. It does look like you addressed this already in some of your later pages, but it is still worth mentioning.

The next point I need to discuss 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 scorpion fly in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

Another issue that hurts the solidity of your constructions is redrawing lines (presumably to make corrections) and I've circled an example on the head there. I'd expect to see 2 or 3 lines here due to drawing through your ellipse, but here I've counted at least 5. In ending up with all these different lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing. Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to executing each mark to the best of your current ability.

On this beetle as well as highlighting cutting in red I've also marked in blue where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure 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 next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you 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.

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 examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. In effect, you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings, making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal. Usually by pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it, such as this page where you're copying colour patterns on your insects. This is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

Conclusion

Your work shows a great deal of potential, but there are a number of points I've raised here that are holding you back from getting the most out of these exercises. I will be assigning some revisions for you to address these issues before moving on to the next lesson.

Please complete:

1 page of organic forms with contour curves, not ellipses.

4 pages of insect constructions, the first 2 of which should focus solely on construction, with no texture. You may choose to add texture to the last 2 if you wish.

If anything that has been said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.