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

Starting with your organic forms You're generally doing a good job of keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here. Occasionally you have a form with one end larger than the other, for example here so try to keep them more even in future. There also a few ends that are squashed flat, think of the ends as being half spheres, try to keep them smooth and rounded.

With your contour curves you're consistently not hooking them around and where the curves are shallow they’re flattening your forms instead of supporting the 3D illusion we're trying to create. This is something you initially did correctly in your lesson 2 homework, and is listed on the exercise instructions as a common mistake, so I can only assume that you weren't careful enough when you reread the exercise instructions before doing these pages.

I'm happy to see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves. The idea we're trying to get across here is that these curves should generally get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form as is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here. On some of your forms you have this "degree shift" reversed. I'd like you to take a look at this diagram, which is a good example of how to vary your contour curves to show an organic form in a variety of orientations.

Looking at that same diagram, notice which ends have little ellipses on them, and which do not. These ellipses are no different from the contour curves, we can see the entirety of these ellipses because the end is facing towards us - this also happens to serve as a very effective visual cue. So, if you look at this form and again at this diagram, hopefully you'll see that there should be a contour ellipse on both ends of this particular form, as your arrangement of contour curves tell the viewer that both ends of this form are facing the viewer.

One last note, when you draw the little ellipses on the ends, remember to draw all the way around the ellipse two full times before lifting your pen, which is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, as explained here.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're on your way towards understanding how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. You're mostly keeping your lines smooth and confident, which is great.

I have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these 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.

For example, I've marked on your mantis in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. This was a particularly prominent example, but it's happening to some extent on most of your constructions. here is where you cut into the ellipse you had established for the cephalothorax of your spider.

On the your mantis I also marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space.

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.

Remember that for constructional drawing we need to maintain specific relationships between different phases of construction, so if we look at the horns on this beetle the top one is more convincing than the lower one. This is partly because the top horn has a more specific relationship between the shape of the horn and the contour ellipses you've laid out. They're connected together, and the viewer can understand what this means in 3D space. The lower horn is more ambiguous and confusing because most of your ellipses are floating in the middle of the shape, with arbitrary gaps.

The other reason the lower horn is falling flat is because you've tried to add too much complexity with a single form. Remember that for constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported at any given point. We need to establish simple, solid foundations, and build things piece by piece.

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 lots of 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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

So, it does look like you were thinking of using the sausage method to construct your legs, but the method is quite specific so:

• Stick to simple sausage forms for your base armature, sometimes you start with more complex forms, which feel flat, or ellipsoid forms, which feel stiff. Here is a reminder of the characteristics of simple sausage forms.

• Overlap your forms, and define the intersection where the two forms join with a contour curve.

• When you add complexity to your basic structure, use complete forms, not single lines.

I also have a few reminders of things that were brought up in your lesson 3 critique and still need to be addressed.

Remember to draw all the way around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, even if you feel that you can nail them in a single pass. This is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, as explained here.

Sometimes your line weight gets heavy and aggressive, for example here on your scorpion's tail. Line weight should be kept subtle. It is a whisper, not a shout. Usually one super imposed line will be enough to create the effect you need. Line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here. Line weight should not be used to hide mistakes, or to indicate which side of a form faces away from the light source (this is a type of form shading which is something we don't use in this course.)

When it comes to texture, I think you're getting a bit mixed up between form shadows, which we ignore in this course, and cast shadows, which we can use to imply the smaller forms that exist on an object's surface. I've made a note here to help you understand the difference. I recommend rereading your lesson 3 critique, where ThatOneMuchroomGuy wrote a thorough explanation on how to approach texture in this course. If anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.

Conclusion

I have given you quite a few things to work on here, so I will be assigning some revisions for you to address these points. Each lesson builds upon each other and I'd like to make sure you understand a few of these concepts a bit more before potentially creating more problems in the future.

Please complete 1 page of organic forms with contour curves and 3 pages of insect constructions. For these pages I'd like you to focus on construction only, please don't fill in any shadows or add texture.