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

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves there is something to call out, it seems you did a mixture of contour ellipses and contour curves, though the assignment was for both pages to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

It is good to see you drawing your forms with smooth confident lines, and it looks like you’re aiming to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. I did notice a few forms which swell through their midsection and become bloated, such as the one in the bottom right corner of this page. Keep striving to keep the width of your forms consistent along their length, because bloated forms tend to feel stiff.

I’m happy to see that you’re experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves/ellipses. 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.

Remember that the small ellipses on the tip(s) of the forms are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. The degree of the contour ellipse (in terms of telling us about the orientation of that slice) does matter. It should match up closely with the contour line preceding it (doesn't have to match perfectly but it should not be a very dramatic change). I noticed you tend to draw the contour ellipse on the tip way too wide, telling us that there would have been an abrupt turn towards the viewer at the tip. If that's what you were after, then you could add an intermediary contour line in between to gradually walk us through that turn - but alternatively, as shown here I adjusted it to make the degree of the ellipse narrower so as to better flow with the preceding curve.

Moving on to your insect constructions before I get to critiquing your work, I couldn’t help but notice the comments you’d left on your pages. If you’re experiencing numbness and cramps as a result of drawing, make sure you take breaks and allow your nerves and muscles a chance to recover. It seems all your constructions were done within 4 days, and there really is no need to cram so many into such a short period of time, especially if you’re in physical discomfort. Aside from concerns about your well-being, pain is distracting, and will prevent you from doing the work to the best of your current ability.

I can see that you’re thinking through how your forms sit in 3D space on many of your pages, and I think your stick insect shows that your understanding of 3D space is starting to develop nicely. The tube forms you’d used to construct the body feel solid and convincing, and you did a good job of attaching the legs to the body with specific 3D relationships.

Some constructions are better than others (which is normal) and the goliath beetle does feel a little flat. As the first stage of each construction, we want to establish solid forms as discussed here on the lesson intro page. Notice in those examples that each form is complete, and where they overlap Uncomfortable has “drawn through” as though we have X-ray vision, including the parts that may be obscured behind another form. If you take a look at these notes on your goliath beetle, you’ll see that I’ve highlighted with purple the head and thorax which appear incomplete- this leaves us missing some information that we need in order to understand how the 3 major forms connect together in 3D space, so they are likely to fall flat. Instead, as I’ve shown in the diagrams off to one side, we want to be drawing complete forms for the head, thorax, and abdomen. If the forms penetrate one another we can use a contour line where they intersect to establish how they fit together in 3D space. Once this solid foundation is in place we can build onto it with more forms.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that the more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer (and you) to understand how it is supposed to sit in 3D space, so the more likely it is to feel flat. We can see an example of this here on your mantis, where the shape filled with purple tries to achieve too much in one step and falls flat. The issue you remarked on in your submission comment has little to do with the texture, as the drawing was already flat at the construction stage. Instead, we make sure the first forms we draw are dead simple and gradually build up complexity in successive passes, as discussed in this section of lesson 2. Based on the corresponding reference, I’d probably start with these simple forms to construct the mantis.

The next point I need to talk about 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.

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.

Fortunately you’d don’t cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn very often, although I have marked an example of this in red hatching on your Hercules beetle.

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 image as well as here on your mantis 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.

In the case of your mantis we can complete the silhouette of the additional piece wrapping around the underside of the thorax, and draw through and complete the forms of the legs to improve the 3D illusion. 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 tried out a few 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 as shown in these examples here, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5. Make sure you start with the sausage forms as shown in the sausage method diagram, and only add one contour line to each joint, to show how the forms intersect.

Before I wrap this up, I see you had a question about texture. The shadow shapes you’d added to the abdomen of your goliath beetle are curving in the opposite direction to the surface of the form, telling us that the wing casings are concave, which is why it isn’t “selling” the form. Recall this section of the dissections exercise which discusses the importance of the texture following the curving surface of the underlying form. If you’re unsure which way the curves should go, ask yourself what direction a contour line would curve, if you were to add it to the form. Admittedly the reference you’ve chosen for the goliath beetle isn’t the easiest to work from for this kind of study, when photos are taken directly overhead like this it flattens out some useful 3D information. References at a three quarter angle, like the Hercules beetle, are generally easer to interpret because there is no mistaking whether the forms are pointing towards the viewer or away.

All right, there is (by necessity) a lot of information here, and you may need to read through it a few times to absorb it all. Once you have had a chance to do that, I’d like you to complete a few additional pages to solidify your understanding of these points before moving onto the next lesson.

Please complete 3 pages of insect constructions.