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

Starting with your organic forms you appear to be drawing these with confidence, leading to smooth lines, which is great to see.

Some of your forms are sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, but you also have some with a bit of pinching or bulging through the midsection, or ends of different sizes, so make sure you keep striving to stick to the simple properties of two equally sized balls connected by a bendy tube of consistent width when practising these in future.

You’re doing a great job of varying the degree of your contour curves, which is an aspect of this exercise that is often overlooked.

I notice sometimes you place an ellipse on an end of the form that the contour curves tell us is facing away from the viewer. 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, in this case if 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions, your work is coming together very well. You’re doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms, and gradually building complexity piece by piece. In many places you’re establishing clear 3D relationships between the various pieces as you fit them together, which is helping to reinforce the 3D illusion of the constructions as a whole.

You’re demonstrating a strong understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space, and I have just a couple of points to cover that I hope will help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these is about how to make sure we build up the construction “in 3D” more consistently.

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 beetle in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that many of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image I marked in blue an example where it looks you'd extended off an existing form using a partial, flat shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how it actually connects 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.

I noted on your beetle a couple of places where you’re already applying this tactic really well to build spikes onto the existing construction, but I’ll go ahead and share a couple of examples of this in practice which you might find useful.

- Beetle horn demo

- 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 second point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were making an effort to use the sausage method on the majority of your pages. The sausage method is quite specific about where to place the contour curves, and I’ve placed some notes on your beetle which I hope will help you when using this method in future. By reinforcing each joint with a contour curve to show how the two forms intersect, we make adding stand-alone contour lines to individual sausage forms unnecessary. Looking through the set, I do see places where the contour curves are applied correctly, just keep working on doing so consistently as you move forward.

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 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.

I should mention briefly that I see your application of texture has improved from your lesson 3 work, as you are less reliant on filling in large areas in black, and more focused on implying small textural forms running along an object’s surface by drawing the little shadows that they cast, keep up the good work.

Okay, that should cover it. I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you work through the next lesson, they will apply to animal constructions too.