Hello Bichorraro, 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 one page of contour ellipses, 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 looks like you're working towards the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, though you'll want to keep working on avoiding any pinching, bulging, or ends of different sizes when practising this exercise in future.

There are a couple of spots where it looks like you'd redrawn a form, presumably to make corrections. In this course it is best to leave mistakes alone rather than attempting to correct them. Correcting a mistake will create the impression in our brain that the mistake was addressed, whereas really addressing the mistake would involve reflecting upon why it may have occurred and adjusting our approach to try and avoid the mistake in the future - something we usually do by giving ourselves more time to think through the actions we take while doing the work. Leaving the mistakes alone allows us to come back after the page is complete to assess where the mistakes occurred, and how we might do better in the future. On the other hand, redoing a line generally just makes the work messier.

It looks like you've placed contour ellipses on both ends of almost all your forms. Remember that these ellipses 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. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away. You're also getting a little bit overzealous with the number of times you're drawing around some of these small ellipses, try to stick to 2-3 passes around the ellipse as going around more times than that tends to make it unclear what ellipse you intended to draw.

The majority of your contour curves are sticking to the same degree. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions right off the bat there are a few points I noticed that stood out, as they were addressed in the critique of your Lesson 3 work. This was of course almost a year ago, but it is often necessary for students to take their own steps in ensuring that they do what they need to in order to ensure they're addressing the issues that have been called out. It's very easy to simply come back from a break and continue forwards with the next lesson without consideration for things you have been advised to correct (or perhaps having them more loosely in mind, but without specifics), and each student needs to decide what it is they need to do to apply the information they're given as effectively as they can. For some that means reviewing the past feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely.

Firstly, how we use the space available to us on the page makes a big difference. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

Second, you're treating the early stages of construction more like loose or general suggestions, to either follow or not follow as needed. Constructional drawing relies heavily on treating those earlier phases of constructions as though they're written in stone - each one makes a specific decision, and every subsequent step adheres to the decisions made before it. For example, if we look at the branch on the right of this page it looks like you drew it once, then changed your mind about how big you wanted it to be, and drew it again. we do not redraw the entirety of the object from step to step - we merely draw the parts that change, allowing much of the previous structure to stand for itself, as that is what allows the solidity of the simpler stages to carry forward as we build up more complexity.

You're starting all of your constructions off with much fainter lines, either using much less pressure or a completely different pen, and then coming back at a later stage with a rich dark line to go over the parts of your drawing that you'd like to keep visible. This is something Uncomfortable calls a rough underdrawing and clean up pass and while it is a perfectly valid method of drawing in general, is is something we firmly discourage throughout this course. Instead, keep a more consistent line thickness through the various stages of construction, then as a finishing touch you can apply a bit of extra line weight to clarify overlaps, restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur.

Thirdly, while I definitely get the overall impression that while you've put a hell of a lot of time and effort into these drawings, you've done so largely pursuing goals that were your own, rather than goals that were set out by the course or assignment itself. To put it simply - you've focused too much on detail/decoration, and not nearly enough on the execution of individual marks, and on the construction of individual forms. As stated here on the homework assignment section, 4 of your pages should be purely constructional with no texture or detail.

I get it - detail is a lot more fun to get into, and it also leans into things like drawing more from the wrist. It may be a more comfortable area to focus your time, whereas drawing tight, even ellipses where you need them to be may be a lot more daunting. But the thing is, these drawings are just exercises.

We aren't to focus on reproducing the reference image at all costs, or to have our drawings come out looking impressive - rather, each drawing is just a puzzle. We start with a reference image that helps us determine the direction of our goal, and we start out with simple pieces, gradually building them up piece by piece until we're able to achieve something more complex, somewhat closer to our reference than when we started. That process involves considering how different forms sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it - it's by forcing our brain to think about these things as though they exist in three dimensions that helps develop that mental model of space, and our underlying spatial reasoning skills.

The fourth issue that was raised in your previous critique is that you don't always draw through your forms. If we look at this spider as an example, a number of the overlapping sections of legs have been cut off where they pass behind something else. In order for you to develop a stronger understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space it is important to push yourself to draw each form in its entirety. The legs don't stop existing in space where they pass behind one another, they merely become obscured in the reference. To create a convincing lie we want to establish how the whole form exists, and how it connects to the rest of the construction with specific three dimensional relationships.

Okay, you've got quite a bit to chew on there already, but I do need to talk about a few things that are introduced here in lesson 4.

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.

For example, I've marked this construction in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

On the this image I marked in blue some examples 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.

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 last 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 as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

Unfortunately, even though there is certainly no lack of ability here, (some of your drawings are really rather attractive, and show significant skill) you've deviated far enough from the goals of these constructional exercises that I cannot move you onto the next lesson just yet. Keep in mind that one of your key responsibilities as a student is to follow the instructions as closely as you can. If this idea seems strange to you, I strongly recommend you watch this video from lesson 0, which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox.

This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and I'd like you to take as much time as you need to read it thoroughly, as well as reviewing the relevant sections of lesson material. Once you've done that I'd like you to complete some extra pages to address the points I've raised here.

Please complete the following:

1 page of organic forms with contour curves.

4 pages of insect/arachnid drawings that are purely constructional with no texture or detail.

If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.