Hello Bludgeon4U, congratulations on completing the assignments for lesson 4.

Starting with your sausages with contour lines you’re doing an excellent job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms, though there are a couple of things to call out.

Firstly, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment for lesson 4 was for both pages to be contour curves. Not a big problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

Secondly, it seems you’ve completely skipped this step where we add a small contour ellipse to any tips of the sausage which face towards the viewer. This is much more of a concern, as Uncomfortable identified issues for you to address with these in your lesson 2 feedback, and I can’t tell if you’ve understood what he was getting at if you avoid including them altogether.

Looking at your second page, there are a number of forms where your contour curves indicate that the form is bending so that both ends face away from the viewer, so you were correct not to include small contour ellipses on those. There are also cases like this form where the left end faces towards the viewer, so we should be able to see a small contour ellipse on that tip. 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 I can see that you’ve been quite conscious about sticking to the construction methods demonstrated in this lesson- starting with simple solid forms, and building up complexity gradually, working your way towards smaller and more subtle additions, while paying consideration to how the pieces fit together like a puzzle. It looks like you are thinking about how your forms sit in 3D space across a number of these, and there appears to be quite a bit of growth in this area as you moved through the set.

You’re on the right track, though I do have a few recommendations for how your work can be improved further still. Some of these are reminders of things covered in previous lessons, and some are additional information that we share with students on the official critique track, rather than an actual mistake you’d made, given the information you had.

Firstly, I noticed a lot of your pages feature much more liberal and aggressive use of additional line weight than what was instructed in this video. It isn’t that the way you’re adding line weight is wrong for drawing in general (and outside the exercises in this course you can use line weight however you please), but rather that everything we do in these exercises serves a very specific purpose. Here we use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localized areas where those overlaps occur. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight.

Keeping the use of line weight more localised also allows us to apply it with a single confident, ghosted, superimposed stroke, adhering to the principles of markmaking. As explained here in the form intersections exercise when students go back over more extensive areas to add line weight it tends to take initially smooth lines and make them wobblier, reducing the solidity of the forms.

Another factor that may be contributing to this, is it looks like there are areas where you’re conflating line weight and cast shadows. While they're similar in some ways, line weight and cast shadows have to adhere to different rules. Line weight can cling to the silhouette of a form, but has to remain very subtle and light, rather than getting super heavy and dark. It relies on relative changes in thickness that one's subconscious will notice. It's like whispering, rather than shouting. Cast shadows on the other hand do not cling to the silhouette of a form, and instead are cast onto a different surface. They can be much broader and heavier, but we can't have them floating arbitrarily in space without an actual surface to receive them. Take a look at these notes on your weevil. On one of the spines on the abdomen I’ve called out where you’d added a lot of extra line thickness to the lower edge, presumably in an effort to add shadow. This is basically the same issue as this common mistake from the organic intersections exercise, shadows sticking to forms. On your weevil I’ve added a green shape that would be a more correct cast shadow, because it happens as a result of the spine blocking the light from hitting another surface.

The next point I need to talk about relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• 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.

• 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 its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form that 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 don’t cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn very much at all, and the example I’ve marked in red here just came down to picking the inner line of your ellipse as the silhouette of the abdomen, leaving some stray lines floating outside. 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.

While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. On the same weevil and this silverfish I also marked in blue some areas where you'd extended off existing forms using flat partial shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. While adding one-off lines worked fine for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

Instead, when we want to build on our constructions 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. W 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.

This is something you’re already starting to apply in some areas, and I used green to trace over a nice example on your weevil construction. 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 with 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.

One other thing I wanted to mention briefly, is that if part of your construction won’t fit on the page, it helps to “cap off” the form with an ellipse as shown on the silverfish instead of running it off the edge as a pair of lines. It gives the form a clearly defined boundary which helps retain its solidity, much like how we always place an ellipse at the end of the tubes we draw in in the “branches” exercise in lesson 3.

If your constructions extend further than what is shown in the images you submitted (possibly pages 8 and 10) then please be more careful to show the entire construction when taking photos of your work in future. This will help us to provide feedback that is as accurate and helpful to you as possible.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working with the sausage method in mind for a lot of your constructions, which is a good start. The sausage method does have quite specific requirements though, so make sure you’re actively aiming for the characteristics of simple sausages (and not more elliptical forms, which tend to stiffen the leg) as well as reinforcing the joints by applying a contour line where the forms intersect.

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 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 the base structure or armature that captures that captures both the solidity and gestural flow of the 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, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to build up the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this ant leg demo. I'll also share this dog leg demo as an example of how to apply the sausage method to animal legs because the sausage method should be used throughout lesson 5.

I've shared a few points here for you to work on, but as a whole you're still doing very well. You can continue to address each of these points in the next lesson's work, where they will continue to be equally relevant. Just be sure to take your time in absorbing this feedback, and if you feel it'll help, you can take notes of the major points so you can more easily remind yourself of what you need to be focusing on.