Hello Boxybox09, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms most of these are fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. I did notice that the two forms furthest to the right of this page have some pinching towards their midsection, try to keep a consistent width along the length of these forms.

Most of your contour curves look smooth and confident which is great. You appear to rely on flipping the direction of your contour curves, rather than actually varying the degree of these 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. 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.

When you do add a contour ellipse to the end of a form, remember to draw around it 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, as explained in this section of lesson1.

Moving on to your insect constructions on the whole these are coming along really well. You're doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms and gradually building complexity piece by piece, without attempting to jump ahead and skip any steps.

I do have some points to discuss that should help you get even more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

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.

Fortunately you haven't cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn very much at all. What I am seeing though is a fair few places where you've extended 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. I've highlighted a few examples of this in blue your work here. The area I've highlighted in red isn't really a shape at all, but a collection of loose disconnected lines with gaps between them. It looks like you were drawing fur texture here. Remember that when drawing texture in this course you're using cast shadows to imply small textural forms running along an object's surface, and for that to work the texture needs to be drawn onto an existing surface. Drawing texture with no construction underneath results in a vague amorphous blob, not a solid construction. As noted here by extending the legs from this series of loose disconnected lines we are not given a very clear sense of how the legs actually attach to the body. Instead, we want to connect the legs to the solid form of the thorax as shown here. This will help to maintain tight, specific connections between each stage of construction, and explain how the legs connect to the body in 3D space.

It will also help you to develop your spatial reasoning skills and build solid three dimensional constructions if you draw through your forms wherever possible. On the same image I have shown an example, where I've drawn through one of your leg forms, so that is is a complete 3D form instead of 2 flat partial shapes.

So, 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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you've made a considerable effort to use the sausage method for constructing legs, though I noticed you're quite frequently leaving out the contour curve for the intersection where these sausage forms connect together. I've highlighted the curves in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram for clarity. These contour curves might seem insignificant, but using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively.

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.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. There are some pages, like this one where, in effect, you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

Conclusion

So, I've outlined some things to work on, but these are all things that can be applied in the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Please refer back to the advice and diagrams provided in this critique as you tackle your animal constructions, they are designed to help you get the most out of the next lesson.