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

Starting with your organic forms it is clear that you're working towards the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and the majority of your forms are pretty close.

You're drawing your forms with smooth confident lines, which is great. Something to work on when you practice this exercise in future is to carry that confidence through to your contour curves, as there are a few of them which show some signs of hesitation.

You're doing an excellent job of varying the degree of your contour curves when you want to draw a form with both ends facing the viewer. When you draw a form with one end facing the viewer you're tending to keep the degree of your contour curves quite similar.

When you draw a form with one end facing the viewer 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 you're doing a good job of starting your constructions with simple forms, and gradually building complexity piece by piece. I'm seeing a developing understanding of how the various pieces of your constructions exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

I do have some points to discuss 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 work here in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that on some of your constructions, some of the instances of cutting into forms came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

I've given this bee the same treatment, marking cuts in red, and I also marked in blue 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.

So, here I've redrawn some of the extensions on the bee, using complete 3D forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes.

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.

Something else that will help you to build more solid constructions is to maintain a more consistent line thickness through the various stages of construction. Right now many of your constructions are being started off with much fainter lines, and this can lead students into thinking of those first major forms as being less solid, or less real, than the later stages of construction. Starting with faint lines is also forcing you to come back and redraw sections of your ellipses to make them more visible, we can see an example of this on the abdomen of your spider. Tracing back over your lines in this manner causes your initially smooth and confident lines to get wobblier, which makes the form appear less solid. Instead of completely redrawing forms you have already established, at each stage we only add the parts that change, and as a finishing touch we can use some additional line weight to clarify overlaps and restrict it to localised areas where those overlaps occur.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is good to see that you've been striving to use the sausage method for constructing your legs, and it looks like you gained confidence in its application as you progressed through the set. 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.

This last point is a small nit-pick, but still worth mentioning. On this mantis it looks like you've hatched a section of the far side foreleg where it passes behind the near side leg. This is a little bit visually confusing, as you've hatched in something that isn't visible. If you want to hatch the far side legs to help organise your construction that is fine, but in future you'll want to apply it to the visible sections of those legs, as shown in this step of the black widow demo.

So - I've outlined some things to work on, 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). If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.