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

Starting with your organic forms, these are coming along well. If we take a look at this page, the top left and top right forms have ends of different sizes, (try to keep them even) and the top middle form is a bit pinched through its midsection (try to keep the width consistent). The two forms at the bottom of the page are sticking pretty close to the characteristics of simple sausages that we're aiming for, as introduced here, good work.

It is good to see you're experimenting with including some variation in the degree of your contour curves. 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 your work is honestly very well done. You're doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms and building things up patiently, piece by piece. You're demonstrating a strong understanding of how all these pieces exist within the same 3D space and connect together with tight specific relationships. It's good to see you drawing through your forms in these constructions, as this will help you to continue to develop your spatial reasoning skills.

I do have a couple of pointers that should help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises in future.

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 you don't cut back inside forms you have already drawn very much at all. I did spot two small sections on this dragonfly that I've marked in red, where it looks like you drew the segmentation inside the boxy form you had established for the thorax, leaving a stray line outside your finished construction, which undermines the 3D illusion somewhat.

On this section of your crab I've highlighted in blue where the claw had been added as flat partial shapes, which doesn't quite provide enough information for the viewer to understand how those additions are supposed 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. I'm happy to see that this is is something you're doing effectively throughout your constructions.

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 do have a tip for you that should help you to maintain the solidity of your constructions a bit more effectively. I noticed that on a few of your pages, your construction escapes off the edges of your page. This isn't necessarily a problem, in fact I'm happy to see that you're making full use of the space of the page, as drawing large makes it easier to think through these spatial reasoning puzzles, and will encourage you to engage your whole arm. If something gets cut off the end of the page, always cap off the form, don't just let it kinda run with two parallel lines and then stop suddenly. Capping it off helps reinforce the form, whereas leaving it open flattens things out. Here is an example of what I mean, on one of the antennae of your mantis.

On the same image I wanted to highlight a case of where you'd done an excellent job of building the spikes on the mantis' forelegs with complete 3D forms, and an area where you'd added them as partial shapes, in the same manner that we added edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson. As explained in this section this strategy only really works for forms that are already flat.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. For the most part it looks like you were working towards using the sausage method, although I can see a degree of experimentation with non-sausage forms as well. 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.

I can see that you've jumped right in with building additional forms onto your leg structures, although there are some approaches to building up structure on top of those base sausage armatures that work better than others. 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. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, 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.

This can be taken much further as seen in this ant leg demo and also in the context of this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

All right, you're doing a great job so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.