Hello StingS, 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 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.

Your lines appear smooth and confident, and you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

This confidence carries over to your contour curves, and I'm happy to see that you're working on varying the degree of your 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. You've done this on the majority of your forms, but not all of them. 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 your work is top notch, and there honestly isn't a great deal to criticise. So I'm mostly going to be discussing the reasons why these constructions are so strong, and maybe give you a few pointers for the next lesson along the way.

You're doing a good job of following the principles of construction, starting with simple solid forms and establishing how they connect together in 3D space. You're gradually building up your constructions piece by piece, and never add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given point. I'm happy to see that you've drawn through your forms, including the parts that are not visible in your reference images, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

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 are already following this rule pretty closely throughout your work, which is fantastic. I just wanted to take a moment to lay this rule down clearly, as we would like you to continue to do so throughout the next lesson too.

I did see one spot where you might have cut inside a form you had already drawn. If we take a look at this claw there's a fairly straight line running across the rounded form that you'd used as the basis for constructing the claw. If this line is intended to be a part of the silhouette of the construction, then that leaves the area I highlighted in red outside of your construction to undermine the 3D illusion. If the line is intended to be a contour curve on the rounded form of the claw, then I would expect it to curve more as it wraps around the surface, you can read more about this in this section of the organic forms exercise.

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.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. I can see you're doing a pretty good job of using the sausage method for constructing your 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, in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

With regards to this bee 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. 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.

I'm noticing a bit of a tendency for some of your additional forms to run over long distances, for example on the legs of this fly. Try to keep your additional masses more limited in scope, having them individually accomplish a more focused, specific job. When things try to accomplish too much, they have a tendency to flatten out.

When a part of your construction won't fit on the page, such as the claw on this scorpion it can help to support the 3D illusion if you "cap off" where you truncate the form, instead of running it off the edge of the page and leaving a gap in the silhouette of the form. Here is what this might look like.

Overall great work, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.