Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 4 homework

Organic Forms

Starting by the organic forms with contours you’ve done well trying to keep them evenly shaped and most of them are turning out quite nicely, although there are definitely a few of them that swell, like the one on the bottom left corner of the second page so keep doing your best to keep them evenly sized without any sudden swelling or pinching as it is a really important element to make them feel more solid.

The other important element are the contour lines, and you are moving in the right direction with these ones, although I think that you may be putting many of them in. The main problem with this is that you are giving yourself more opportunities to make a mistake by continually adding more contours, just one of them going wrong can make the whole form feel less solid.

By trying to draw less contours you are forcing yourself to be more deliberate and careful with the execution of those marks which is the main point of these exercises.

Insects

-Moving on to the insects there are many good things here, I can see that you were definitely thinking about how to break down these into more simpler components and they are turning out quite well seen as finished drawings.

But we know that these are not drawings but exercises, I say this because in some cases your approach leaned more heavily on capturing what you saw in your reference than trying to break it down into simpler shapes, this is more easily seen in the praying mantis, once you get to the abdomen you've drawn one part of it but the other is cut off by the wings and it lets me see that there is not any initial form that is helping to inform the decisions that you are making or to guide your strokes, there is only a few loose lines here and there but nothing concrete as an initial form or shape.

Instead what you should try to do is to start from dead simple, like on the wasp demo, just place some balls and simple forms that will help to build the head, abdomen and thorax and form then start to add any further complexity bit by bit. I’ll show you some more concrete examples later.

Another area where you can change your approach is leg construction. I can see that you were definitely aware of the sausage method shown in the demos but sometimes you strayed from it.

It is common for students to think that the legs don’t look like a chain of sausages and instead use other methods. But the sausage method is not about capturing the shape of the legs precisely as they are, it is about laying down a basic structure that captures both the natural flow of these limbs while maintaining a good sense of solidity, once that structure is in place we can start to add the more complex part bit by bit, as shown here in these demos:

• https://imgur.com/7b9rc9e

• https://imgur.com/t6oz7Tv

  -https://imgur.com/97hS0XF

This approach is really helpful for the legs of insects like the spider you drew, because it lets us break these things into more simple tasks making it simpler and easier to draw, also don’t forget to draw simple sausages without swelling or pinching, as I’ve already said it is super important to give them solidity and define the intersection between them too.

In the last half of your drawings I think your approach is more solid when drawing legs but there are cases like on the weevil where the initial stages of the construction for the main body are not clearly defined.

Keep in mind that 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.

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.

-https://i.imgur.com/IINKdQA.png

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.

These concepts have not been fully integrated into the lesson material, but you can see more concrete examples in the informal demo page, like the lobster demo and the shrimp demo.

Anyways, before I mark this lesson as complete I will assign you some additional work, good luck!!!