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

Starting with your organic forms I can see you're working towards sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here. Sometimes your line gets a bit hesitant on one end of your forms, causing them to get flattened, or distorted. Keep working on using the ghosting method and drawing from the shoulder to help you execute these with confidence.

I can see you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves, I've marked out one form on your work here that you did particularly well. Sometimes there is no change in the degree of your curves, or they change erratically, so it's something you will want to keep practising. I think this diagram may help you, as it shows how to vary your contour curves to describe forms at different orientations.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is coming along well. You're demonstrating a developing understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3d space.

You're starting many of your constructions with much fainter lines, and going back with heaver marks at later stages to darken the lines you want to keep visible.

This approach is something Uncomfortable refers to as a "rough underdrawing with a clean-up pass", and while it is an entirely valid approach in general, it is not one you should be employing in this course as explained here. At its heart, it's because it results in students tracing back over their linework, which itself causes them to focus on how those marks run along the flat page, rather than how they represent the edges of forms in 3D space. In this focusing shifting towards the 2D, we end up breaking principles of the lesson. 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. Line weight should be kept subtle and should be applied with a single, confident, ghosted, superimposed stroke.

I have some points that should help you get 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.

For example, I've marked on your ladybird in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this happens if there is a gap between passes of your ellipses, like at the back end of the abdomen. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your 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.

I marked some smaller examples of cutting inside the silhouette in red on your mosquito.On the same image I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist 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.

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 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 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.

So- Make sure you draw the whole sausage form, not a partial shape. Make sure the form sticks to the characteristics of simple sausage forms, don't make them elliptical or start with something complicated. Make sure your forms overlap, and remember to add a contour curve at the joints to describe how the forms intersect. this diagram may help you.

The last thing I need to talk about is texture and detail. I urge you to reread your lesson 3 critique, where Uncomfortable explained the purpose of texture in this course. On the pages where you added texture it appears you got distracted by the idea of decorating your drawing to make them look pretty. They do look pretty, but you're deviating from the way we describe textural information in a number of ways.

When we add texture in this course we're using cast shadow shapes to implicitly describe the smaller forms running along the surface of the construction. We're telling the viewer how that surface feels if your run your hand along it. This has nothing to do with what colour that surface happens to be. For the purpose of these exercises you can imagine your insects are all one color. So there is no reason to describe the dark eyes or stripes on this bee or the colour pattern on the abdomen of this spider.

On the bee you're also using some form shading, this section of lesson 2 explains what form shading is and why we don't use it in this course.

Hatching can be used to flatten the legs on the far side of a construction and "push" them back, if you wish, but it should not be used to transition between dark and light. We work in solid black and white in this course.

All right that about covers it. Overall you're doing well. The points I've talked about do need to be addressed, but they can be applied to animal constructions, so I'm going to mark this lesson as complete on the understanding that you will do your best to apply this feedback to your homework as you move forward.