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

Starting with your organic forms it is clear you're aiming to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of your forms are pretty close.

You're doing a good job drawing your forms with smooth confident lines, and I'm happy to see that confident approach carries over to the majority of your contour curves too. (There are a couple of little wobbles on a few of the contour lines, so keep striving to prioritise executing a smooth stroke.)

I can see some subtle variation in the degree of your contour curves, although there is a lot of scope to push this further. 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. 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, overall you're doing a pretty good job. You're starting your constructions with simple solid forms, and building onto those forms piece by piece, figuring out how all these pieces fit together with specific relationships. I do have some advice to offer you which should help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises as you move forward.

That advice comes down to something we don't actually talk much about in the lesson proper, but Uncomfortable has plans to expand it in that direction, and it's good to know going into the animals material. It's about the difference between actions we take in 2D space - just putting lines down on a flat page - and 3D space, where we're actually defining solid, three dimensional structures and thinking about how they relate to one another within that three dimensional world.

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.

While you don't cut back inside your forms all that often, I've marked one case on your beetle in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already drawn for the thorax. One thing I did notice is that most of the other instances of cutting back inside forms 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 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. In purple I circled some places where I wasn't sure whether you'd intended to make a form smaller or larger, but the silhouette of a form had been altered.

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.

There are a fair few places on your constructions where you're doing this quite well already. On the same beetle construction I used green to draw over some complete additional forms you'd built onto the head.

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.

The sausage method is quite specific, so let's walk through it.

• Stick to simple sausage forms for your armatures, as closely as you can. They have the same properties as the organic forms exercise. Rounded ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width.

• The sausage forms should have a healthy overlap at each joint. I noticed on your bee and your dragonfly that you'd drawn your leg forms just touching instead of overlapping, which gives a 2D connection between the forms rather than a 3D one. It also makes the next step impossible.

• Once you've drawn the sausage forms, we reinforce each joint by drawing a contour line where the forms intersect in 3D space, much like the form intersections exercise from lesson 2, except instead of intersecting boxes and cones, we're intersecting sausages.

• Next we will usually have to add more forms to the construction, to build onto the chain of sausages any lumps, bumps, or complexity that could not be captured with sausages alone.

I have one more point to note before we wrap this up. I noticed you'd used single lines to draw the antennae of this grasshopper and the lower legs of this bee. A single line is infinitely thin, so for these exercises a single line doesn't give the viewer enough information to understand how these pieces are supposed to exist in 3D space. We'd have to find another strategy to construct these forms- so the sausage method for the legs, and probably something similar to your wasp for the antennae.

Anyway, as I said earlier on, overall you're doing good job. While the points discussed here are important, and you should strive to apply them into the next lesson, you're doing very well, and I'm seeing your grasp of 3D space developing quite nicely as you work through this material. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Happy Christmas.