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

Starting with your organic forms it looks like you're aiming for the characteristics of simple sausage forms introduced here, and your second page is working well. On the first page some of the forms are swelling through their midsection, or have ends of different sizes, keep striving for a consistent width along the length of your forms when practicing this exercise in future.

Your contour lines are mostly 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. 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.

Remember you should be drawing around all your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page, this applies to the small ellipses on the tips of your forms. This leans into the arm's natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute the ellipses smoothly. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse freehanded in this course as introduced here.

Moving on to your insect constructions these are coming along well, I'm happy to see you're holding to the principles of construction by starting each drawing with simple solid forms, and building up one step at a time, without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given stage. It looks like you're developing an understanding of how all these pieces exist in three dimensions and connect together with specific relationships.

I do have some advice that should help you to build up your constructions in 3D space more consistently as you move forward.This concerns 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.

Fortunately you don't appear to cut back inside forms you've already drawn very much, but I wanted to make a point of bringing it up, as it is something we'd like you to stick to as you continue forwards in the next lesson. While you seldom cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, sometimes you do alter their silhouettes by extending them with one-off lines or partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I've marked a couple of examples of this in blue here. While we encourage students to add detail to leaves in the previous lesson by extending their silhouette with single lines, it is important to note that leaves are paper thin, so altering their silhouette in this manner won't flatten them further. As discussed in this section when we're building onto solid forms we need to use a different strategy.

So, 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.

Continuing on, I've made a few notes directly on your beetle of things to keep in mind.

• Tracing back over your linework tends to take your initially smooth and confident lines and make them wobblier, undermining the solidity of your forms. While you're not exactly performing a clean up pass you do appear to use line weight in places that seem a bit arbitrary. Given the bounds and limitations of this course, the most effective use of line weight is to clarify overlaps between your forms, and restrict it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. For a demonstration of how to use line weight in this course please watch this video.

• On a similar note, there are a few places where your lines get a bit sketchy, such as those contour lines on the abdomen I'd pointed out. The ghosting method (which you should be using for every line you draw in these exercises) emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Redrawing lines, or scratching them together from shorter marks breaks the first principle of markmaking, and will make the construction messy and confusing.

• The note in blue is a reminder to draw through your forms and complete them wherever possible, as this will help you to develop a stronger understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space.

• The last point I wanted to call out on this image is that there are a few places where you appear to be filling in areas with black based on things that appear dark in the reference, rather than thinking through the forms that are present and reserving black for cast shadows only. If you're unsure how to approach texture and detail in your constructions, these reminders from the texture page of lesson 2 are a good section to review.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working with the sausage method in mind for the majority of your pages, although there is some variation in how closely you adhere to all of the specifics of this method. I've provided a couple of notes for you to keep in mind on your beetle. We want these sausage forms to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages (as introduced in the organic forms exercise) and it is important that these forms overlap, so we can show how the forms intersect by applying a contour curve at each joint. When we want to add complexity to our leg constructions we do so by adding complete new forms, attaching them to the surface of the sausages in 3D. You are doing these things intermittently and I'd like you to do so more consistently as you move forward.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method, 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.

Okay, I think that should cover it. Overall your constructions are coming along well. I've outlined some things to keep in mind, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Please 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).

Edit

I should probably mention that the heic image format isn't ideal. As I do not have an Apple device, I can view them just fine, but editing them to provide draw-overs is a bit of a faff. If it is not too much trouble, it would help if you upload your files as jpeg or png for your next submission.