Hello BenZenLines, 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 appears that you drew contour ellipses for all but two of your forms, though the assignment was for both pages to be contour curves. It's fairly common for students to submit one page of each (as this was the assignment in lesson2) which isn't a huge deal, but with only 2 forms with the contour curves as assigned I don't really have a large enough sample size to asses how you're doing with them.

You're keeping the lines for your forms smooth and confident, well done. Some of your organic forms are sticking almost perfectly to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here. Some of them are a fair bit off, for example this form has one end significantly larger than the other, try to keep them even.

When it comes to your contour curves I'd like you to hook them around the form more, Uncomfortable sometimes calls it "overshooting" and it is explained here.

I can see that you varied the degree of your contour curves on one form, but not on the other. This diagram demonstrates how to vary your contour curves to show an organic form in different orientations. As a general rule of thumb these curves should get wider get as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This concept is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

One last point for this exercise- it looks like you started doing the organic intersections exercise here which does suggest you may want to double check which exercise you are being asked to do, and rereading the instructions for that exercise, before starting your homework pages in future.

Moving on to your insect constructions I can see you put a lot of time into your work, these are all very well observed, and I can see you put a lot of care into every mark you make.

You're generally working towards using the constructional methods as instructed in the lesson material, starting with simple forms and introducing complexity where needed, piece by piece. There are a few places where your basic initial forms are a little bit too complex. I've highlighted one such case on your work here. Sometimes this complexity occurs when you draw the ellipses slowly and carefully and they get a little wobbly or deformed. You want to draw ellipses confidently, from your shoulder, using the ghosting method, and as explained here you should be drawing through them two full times before lifting your pen.

I'm noticing a tendency to start your construction off lighter, and then increase the weight of your marks as you progress. This can encourage us to redraw more of the structure than we strictly need to. I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight only clarify overlaps as explained here towards the end.

The next point I wanted to talk about 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.

So for example, I've marked on this page areas where, in red, you cut back into the silhouettes of your forms. And here in blue an area where you attempted to extend your silhouette out 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.

You mentioned texture, and whether you should have added texture to more of your pages. The primary focus of this lesson is on construction, and texture is optional, so there's no need to worry there. When we use texture in this course, we are using cast shadow shapes to implicitly describe the smaller forms on an object's surface. We are telling the viewer how that surface feels. This has nothing to do with what color that surface happens to be. It can help if you imagine someone has painted the whole insect white, so we want to ignore things like a wasp's stripes, or a ladybird's spots.

The last point I want to talk about is leg construction. I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. 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 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.

There's a lot of skilled observation and accuracy in your work, but I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. Each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you may end up just creating further issues on top of them.

Please complete the following:

1 page of organic forms with contour curves.

2 pages of insect constructions. Avoid using a light underdrawing with a clean up pass, which is a valid method of drawing in general but not something we use in this course as explained here in Lesson 2. Focus on starting with simple, solid forms, and adding complexity step-by-step. Try to use the sausage method for leg construction.