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

Starting with your organic forms these are sticking fairly closely to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and it's good to see most of your lines are smooth and confident.

When choosing whether to place ellipses on the ends of your forms remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away. Here I have added ellipses where your contour curves expressed both ends of the form as being visible to the viewer.

On the same image note the correction to the alignment of one of your contour curves. Remember we're aiming to have these contour curves cut into two symmetrical halves by the central flow line.

It is good to see that you're experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves. Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions these are coming along very well indeed. Your constructions feel well thought out and for the most part there upholding the 3D illusion. Something contributing to this is your conscientiousness with drawing through your forms, by drawing each form in its entirety like you have "X-Ray vision" you have established how these pieces exist in 3D space. This not only helps to build a solid construction, but also reinforces your own understanding f 3D space, nicely done.

I do have some advice that should help you to build your constructions even stronger in future.

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.

Fortunately you haven't cut back inside forms you have already drawn very much at all. I have noted with red some small (possibly accidental) places where it looks like you cut back inside the sausage forms of one of your beetle's legs here. Sometimes I think you accidentally make small cuts inside forms you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes on your ellipses. It is perfectly normal for there to be some looseness to your ellipses, after all, we insist on students prioritising a smooth confident stroke over accuracy. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid 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. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

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 alter the silhouette of forms we have already drawn and undermine the 3D illusion of the construction is by extending off of existing forms with single lines or partial shapes. This doesn't really give the viewer enough information to understand how these new additions are supposed to exit in 3D space. I've highlighted with blue a few places where it looks like this is happening on your cricket. I have an inkling that some of these extensions are forms in their own right, but the way they have been added doesn't necessarily establish a solid 3D relationship between the existing form and the new one. By having the silhouette of the new form run exactly along the silhouette of the existing form we only establish a 2D relationship between the two pieces, and the new additions feel like pieces of paper stuck to the edges of the construction. Here I have made a few edits to the construction, showing how some of the new additional forms can be wrapped around the underlying structures to give them a firmer "grip" on the construction.

Something to be aware of is that contour curves will communicate which direction a form is facing (think back to the diagram I shared for the organic forms exercise) and in order for this illusion to work, we want to be consistent about the statements we make. If we take a look at this rhinoceros beetle you've used a contour curve on the abdomen that tells us the front of the insect faces away from us, and that the abdomen is closer. The way you've wrapped the segmentation around the abdomen also agrees with this assertion and supports the illusion that the rear end of the beetle is facing towards us. However the contour curves on the horns tell us that the horns are facing towards the viewer. The horn on the near side might be facing towards us, but the middle and far side ones should be facing away, in order for the orientation of your beetle to feel consistent.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you have made a real effort to stick to the sausage method as introduced here. 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.

When you want to build on top of these leg sausage armatures, remember to do so by adding complete forms as shown in this diagram, this ant leg demo and also in the context of this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

When you do build on your structures with complete forms, I'd like to make you aware that there are some approaches to building up structure on top of those base sausage armatures that work better than others. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

All right, you've done a good job and I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep these points in mind as you work though the next lesson, they will apply to animal constructions too.