Hello Gyanyu, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique. I know this isn’t your first rodeo with this lesson, so I expect this’ll be pretty straightforward.

Starting with your organic forms there are a few cases where one end of a form gets a little bit pointy, or the ends are slightly different sizes, but on the whole you’re doing pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

You’re keeping your linework smooth and confident in this exercise, which is great. I did notice that sometimes you’re overdrawing the forms by completing one and a half circuits around the form before lifting your pen off the page. We’re pretty adamant about drawing around ellipses two full times, because this leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to keep them smooth and even. These sausage forms require a different series of motions, so drawing around them more than once isn’t particularly helpful, it just makes the work messier.

I’m happy to see that your smooth linework carries over to your contour curves, and you’re generally quite successful at fitting them snugly against the edges of the forms.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t look like you’ve made a conscious decision to vary the degree of your contour lines, which is a common mistake. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions,, these show that your spatial reasoning skills are already developing nicely. You do a good job of starting with simple forms, and your use of centrelines shows that you’re thinking about how these forms are oriented in 3D space, not just as flat shapes on a piece of paper. I thought the construction of the tail on this scorpion was nice. The flow line captures the curving gesture of the whole tail, and those boxy forms show that you understand how the segments sit in a real 3D world and move through space. I would just call out that the linework gets a little loose in that tail. We want to keep tight specific relationships between each piece of the construction- leaving gaps between lines that should connect together makes it unclear where the edge of a form is meant to be, which undermines its solidity somewhat.

So- overall you’re doing well, and I have just a couple of points to discuss which I hope will keep you on the right track as you tackle the next lesson.

The first of these 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 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 I didn’t see you cutting back inside the silhouettes of existing forms very often. I’ve marked in red on your scorpion some small areas where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this can happen accidentality if there is a gap between lines passing around an ellipse (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 this image 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 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.

When you use the sausage method, remember to include a contour line at each joint. These little curves might seem insignificant, but by adding them we define how the sausage forms interpenetrate (just like the contour lines introduced in the Form Intersections exercise) welding them together and reinforcing the solidity of the construction. They’re a necessary step specified by this construction method, so don’t forget them.

The last point I need to talk about is that with this spider you’d filled in a lot of large areas with solid black, essentially colouring in the dark stripey markings. In effect, you got caught up in decorating that drawing (making it more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal, pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

All right, I think that should cover it. You’ve done a good job and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please refer to this feedback as you tackle the next lesson, the points discussed here will continue to apply to animal constructions.