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

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing a good job of drawing your forms with smooth confident lines, and you're getting some forms that stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, the one at the top left of this page is spot on. You’re also getting some forms with subtle inconsistencies, such as ends of slightly different sizes, but nothing far enough off to be too concerning.

It is good to see that you’re experimenting with varying the degree of your contour curves, although you do so quite conservatively, as though you’re reluctant to push them past a certain width.

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 overall your work is pretty well done. I can see that you’re making careful observations of your subject matter, and putting quite a bit of thought into how to translate what you’re seeing into simple 3D forms, and replicating those forms on your page. You’re doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms, and patiently building up complexity piece by piece.

I think you’re heading in the right direction and I have a few 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:

• 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 on your pyrops candelaria in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. On the same image I marked in blue an example where you'd extended off an existing form using partial, flat shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how it actually connects 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.

I did want to note that I do see plenty of places where you’re already building onto your basic structures with complete additional forms and establishing how the new form connects to the pieces that are already in place. One such example would be here on your beetle horn, which I’ve marked in green. I’ve also shown how we can continue to employ this tactic to build the smaller spikes along the horn, using 3D forms instead of single lines. Here’s one more example on a section of your trilobite beetle.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I’m honestly pretty happy to see that you’ve been making an effort to use the sausage method of leg construction throughout the set, and once you apply the above point about building up in 3D to your leg armatures, I think you’ll be building some fantastic legs. I have some diagrams and demos to share with you that I hope will help you to build onto your leg sausages with 3D forms as you move forward though the next lesson.

While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined as shown here.The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made. We also want to make sure each addition is a complete form, instead of working with single lines as shown here. We can see this process being pushed even further in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

Keep in mind that we ask students to draw around all ellipses 2 full times before lifting the pen off the page, as this helps to execute them smoothly, as introduced in this section. I noticed that you often stop short of two full circuts around your ellipses.

Another thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw some of your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly, particularly when placing the ellipses to represent the basic forms of the head/thorax/abdomen. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves.

When it comes to adding line weight, the most effective use for line weight (within the bounds and limitations of this course) is to use it to clarify overlaps between forms, and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur, as discussed in this video. The video was added after you completed lesson 1, so you may not have seen it yet.

I noticed a couple of pages, such as this grasshopper consisted of a fairly small construction surrounded by a lot of blank empty space. By artificially limiting the amount of space you give to a construction (by drawing smaller than the space on the page allows) it can make things more difficult than they really need to be. Drawing smaller restricts the brain’s capacity to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these constructional exercises, as well as making it more difficult to engage the whole arm and make smooth confident marks. I recommend using as much of the space available on the page as you can for your constructions as you move forward.

Finally let’s tackle the question you had:

Despite working through all the material I found myself struggling a lot with identifying how to communicate rather delicate texture, especially when reference images weren't as high res as I would have liked. Aside from repeated practice do you have advice on how to develop a better..."grasp" on how to translate texture from 3D to 2D?

I’m not sure what you mean by delicate texture. If the textural forms are unclear in the reference, you can either find a clearer, or more high resolution picture to work from, or choose not to include texture on that part of the construction.

Our goal isn’t to replicate the reference image at all costs, rather, we treat the reference image as a source of information. You can move your light source from what you see in the reference in order to design cast shadows for your texture that help to convey information about the 3D forms that are present.

It is not uncommon for students to feel like they don’t really grasp texture, as what we introduce in lesson 2 is designed to “plant a seed” in your head that will grow and develop over time. That being said, if you’re working from a photo reference, your task isn’t just translating 3D to 2D, as you said, it’s actually a little more challenging than that. You’re looking at a flat, 2D reference image, trying to understand what that image represents in 3D, then reproducing those 3D forms on the 2D space of the paper. Or in the case of texture, implying those forms by drawing shadows that they cast. That’s a pretty big ask. If you have access to Discord I suggest reading through Uncomfortable’s additional explanations on texture here.

All right, I've outlined some things to keep in mind, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete, just be sure to actively tackle these points as you handle your animals. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid).