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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here, and the lines for your forms look smooth and confident, great job. There are a couple of cases where you drew the far end smaller than the near end like this. I understand how this makes sense with the far end getting smaller as it recedes in space, however for the purpose of this exercise we'd like you to keep both ends evenly sized.

Looking at your contour curves, there are just a few that show some signs of hesitation. Keep working on using the ghosting method to execute these with confidence, from your shoulder. I can see you are working on varying the degree of your contour curves, good work. I think looking at this diagram will help you to understand how to vary the degree of your curves to show your forms in a variety of orientations, and also which ends(s) to place the little contour ellipses on. The little ellipses are also contour curves, we just happen to be able to see the whole ellipse because they're on the end of the form that faces us. I've drawn on your work here to demonstrate this, adding ellipses to ends we can see (according to your contour curves) and crossing out one ellipse that we should not be able to see. I hope that helps.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're making good progress, developing an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. I did notice that you completed 12 pages of insect constructions when he homework assignment is for 10 (4 without texture and 6 with the option to add texture) which suggests you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions. I do have some points to discuss that should help you to continue to make the most of these exercises.

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.

I've highlighted in red on your copepod some places where you appear to have cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you had already drawn. One way this can happen is if there is some looseness to an ellipse and you choose the line you like best for the base of your construction, or hop around between different passes instead of sticking to just one of them. Where there is a gap between passes of your ellipse, you should base your construction on the outer line, to prevent any stray lines going outside of your silhouette.

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.

Sometimes you redraw sections of your silhouette to add line weight. Going back over your lines in this manner causes small sections of silhouettes to be cut out, and small sections to be extended. These extensions are all the more likely to occur when we allow that line weight to "bridge" from the silhouette of one form to another.

Instead, line weight should always follow the silhouette of one form at a time, and should be reserved to the specific localised areas where overlaps occur between forms, in order to help clarify those overlaps, as explained here.

On some of your earlier pages I noticed 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 as discussed above only towards the end.

There are a few pages where you're not really making the most of the space available on the page, such as here, here, and here. Remember this feedback from Uncomfortable on your lesson 3 homework "You definitely want to avoid situations that artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, as it limits your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. 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 (I noticed you stuck to just one even when there was loads of empty space). 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."

The last point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're making considerable efforts to use the sausage method for constructing your legs. That's great, it's what we'd like students to do for this lesson, and we'd like you to continue to use this method for leg construction in lesson 5 too.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method, 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 the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

Conclusion: I understand that your phobia made it very difficult for you to look at some of the references and/or follow along with some of the demos. Which probably made this lesson particularly challenging for you. You will need to address the points raised in this critique, but they can all be applied to animal constructions. So I'm going to move you on to the next lesson with the understanding that you will do your best to apply this feedback to your homework as you move forward. Best of luck, and of course if anything I've said here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.