Hello Lo999, 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.

Looking at your contour curves, there are a few places where these get a little bit stiff or hesitant, like you're not feeling fully confident with these lines yet. Remember to keep using the ghosting method here to help build your confidence.

Looking at this form in particular, there are a couple of things to note.

1- It looks like you redrew one of your contour curves to correct it. This is something I can see happening on a few of your forms. Sometimes despite our best efforts of carefully planning a line, ghosting it, and executing it with confidence, we still won't make the mark we wanted to. When this happens resist the temptation to redraw the line in an effort to fix it. This will only make your work messier, drawing attention to where you feel you made a mistake, and can even make your drawing confusing.

2- It seems that you placed ellipses on both ends of this form, even though the contour curves tell us that only the left end is facing the viewer. From the exercise page: "We can see the entirety of this ellipse because it's facing towards us - this also happens to serve as a very effective visual cue."

I think this was just a one-off as you've placed the little ellipse correctly on all your other forms, but just in case, I'd like you to take a look at This diagram showing different orientations of an organic form. That diagram is also a good example of how to vary the degree of your contour curves for this exercise, which is something I'd like you to try to do more of in the future. . As a general rule of thumb these curves should get wider get as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This concept is shown in this diagram and is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

Moving on to your insect constructions overall you're doing pretty well. You're doing a good job of starting simple and building complexity where you need to, and are starting to develop an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together, good work. I do have a few points to discuss that should help you continue to get the most out of these exercises moving forward.

The first is a reminder that we'd like you to do your best to stick to the principles of markmaking as explained in lesson 1, throughout the whole of this course. We're aiming for smooth, continuous strokes. This ties into my earlier point about redrawing lines. When you redraw lines, or build them from little choppy strokes, it breaks the flow of your lines and can interfere with making your drawings feel solid and cohesive.

The next point I wanted to talk about 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.

So for example, I've marked out on your ant areas where, in red, you cut back into the silhouettes of your forms. Sometimes this happens accidentally where there is some looseness in your ellipses. If there is a gap between passes on your ellipses please use the outer one as the foundation for your construction to avoid stray lines going outside your silhouette.

On the same image I've marked in blue some areas where you attempted to extend your silhouette out without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space.

In green I've drawn contour lines to establish how some of your forms fit together, so that your new additions feel like they are 3D forms instead of 2D shapes. I also noted that you did a nice job with the segmentation of the abdomen in this drawing, well done.

The last point I noted on this drawing was some stray lines. Mistakes will inevitably happen, but do make sure you're doing what you can to plan the marks you want to make and executing them with confidence, from your shoulder, using the ghosting method.

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.

Another way that we can accidentally remind the viewer that they are just looking at lines on a page is when we leave gaps in the silhouettes of our forms. I've circled a few of them on your dragonfly here. Fully enclose your forms to help them feel solid.

On some of your constructions you appear to be tracing back over sections of your silhouette to add line weight. 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. You can see an example of where to add line weight, highlighted in red on this simple insect

On a fairly minor note, in this course when we fill things in with solid black, we are describing cast shadows. We're not using black to describe things that are a dark colour. So in future I'd like you to avoid filling in the eyes with black as seen on this insect.

The last point I want to talk about is leg construction. I noticed that you seem to have employed a variety of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. 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 what we would like you to use for tackling animal constructions too.

Overall, you're not very far off from doing a really good job here. I would like to see you address the points about redrawing lines, as well as reserving line weight for clarifying overlaps before moving on. These two points have been brought up in your critiques before and I want to make sure that you understand what is being asked of you here. Each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you may end up just creating further issues on top of them. If anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.

Please complete 2 pages of insect constructions.