Hello mikerad83, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms you’re drawing your forms confidently, and usually doing pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. Make sure you’re actively aiming for those simple properties for each form (and putting adequate time into the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method to help) as I noticed a couple like the ones in the right upper and lower corners of this page which are a long way off.

You appear to be quite confident with shifting the degree of your ellipses, but much more tentative about applying the same principle to the curves. They’re communicating the same information, so should behave in a similar manner. Keep in mind that barring any actual bending of the form, a sausage is essentially a cylinder which follows the same logic explained here in the ellipses section of lesson 1. This means that the degree of the contour curves 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. You can 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've done very well, and are demonstrating developing spatial reasoning skills with some fairly solid constructions. There are a few points I want to draw to your attention, some of them are points from previous lessons you may have forgotten, or aspects of techniques you may have neglected to apply, although the biggest point is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had.

Starting with this main point, it's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the later forms respect and even reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

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 Hercules beetle in red some areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that many of the smaller instances of cutting into forms (though not all) 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.

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 your grasshopper I also marked in blue some places 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. While this approach worked 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 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 second thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you had the sausage method in mind for the majority of your leg constructions, which is a great start. 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.

I’m happy to see that you’ve taken a swing at building onto your sausage armatures on many of your pages, adding the sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that you observe in these structures, arriving at a more characteristic representation of the leg in question than what can be achieved with the sausages alone. I have some diagrams to share with you that I hope will help you to build onto your leg structures “in 3D” more consistently as you move forwards.

• These diagrams show how we can add to the construction with complete 3D forms instead of flat shapes and one-off lines.

• This diagram shows how instead of fully engulfing an existing form within a new one, we can establish a clearer relationship between the existing form and the new addition by breaking it into two pieces.

• This ant leg demo shows how we can take the sausage method and push it further, adding all kinds of lumps bumps and spikes to the sausage armature.

• I’d also like to share this dog leg demo with you, which shows how the sausage method can be applied to animal legs. This is important, as we’d like you to continue to stick with the sausage method of leg construction when tackling your animals in the next lesson.

The third point I wanted to mention is that throughout this course we’d like you to use line weight in the manner demonstrated in this video from lesson 1. By reserving additional line weight for clarifying overlaps between forms, and restricting its application to localised areas where those overlaps occur, we can ensure it is added with a specific purpose in mind, and with a single confident stroke.

For these constructional exercises we discourage adding line weight more liberally or tracing back over larger sections of the construction to reinforce existing linework as this tends to take initially smooth and confident lines and make them wobblier. In general try to keep a fairly consistent line thickness through the various stages of construction, drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves.

The last point I want to mention only really occurs on this Hercules beetle, but is still worth calling out. Here it looks like you got carried away with decorating the drawing using a brush pen in a rather painterly manner, rather than intentionally designing shadow shapes by outlining them with your fineliner and then filling them in carefully- using a brush pen to fill in larger areas if necessary. While the resulting drawing certainly looks impressive, it is not really following the guidance for texture introduced in the texture section of lesson 2. You’ll get more out of the drawing (in terms of this being an exercise in spatial reasoning) if you follow the specific 3 step process discussed in these reminders. It is also worth noting that covering large sections of the construction with solid black obscures the underlying construction lines, making it more difficult to asses, which may result in reducing the accuracy and helpfulness of the feedback we can provide.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your construction skills are coming along well and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you tackle the next lesson, they will continue to apply to animal constructions.