Congratulations on finishing this lesson.

I will highlight what is most important and what needs to be improved.

Contour shapes:

The shape of the sausages is simple and clear, excellent. On the other hand, you've overdone it with the contour curves; many of these make your shapes look artificial.

You can achieve the same illusion of depth with just a couple or three curves.

Insects:

• Most of the insects are very well constructed, and the application of lineweight and shadows is effective.

I must highlight the simple and sharp style of some of them, such as the crab (page 2) and the mantis (page 7). They look quite defined, without the need to rely on textures or details. That's the main thing to look for here in Drawabox. Try to stick with that.

Simple shapes with clear intersections and moderate details communicate much more than a chaos of shadows and textures like the top drawing on page 1. (Seriously, I don't know what that is!)

• When you must work on legs that have complicated structures, start with the basic sausages and build the complicated stuff on top of those.

Sometimes you've tackled all the detail on these in one go, like on the larger insect on page 7 or some of the crab.

Cutting off the shape and its detail at the same time makes the shape look flat, rather than having been built up progressively.

This diagram may help (especially the bottom section),

• Finally, I would recommend that you make your drawings more in the center of the sheet; or do just one on each sheet. Some insects were cut off like the spider's legs on the first page. This affects the presentation.

• I will not leave you revisions today. It looks like you have understood the basics of the lesson, and the rest you can improve as you go along.

Good luck in what's ahead!

Hello Far, congrats on finishing Lesson 4! I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and today I'm going to be offering you some critique. I hope that my advice is helpful to you in your drawabox journey.

Organic Forms

Let's start off with your organic forms, you're doing well by maintaining the simple sausage characteristics.

You're relying too much on contour lines in order to show your forms, but counterintuitively this just serves to flatten them.

Those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it. In truth, they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line, but in practice their usefulness is somewhat limited.

In your case when adding contour lines you need to think about what that contour is supposed to convey in your drawing, and think of how to approach it efficiently. By trying to draw several contour lines you set yourself up for failure, as in this case every single one of those contours is competing with one another to convey the form, and so all of them must be perfect, because if a single one is wrong in comparison to the others it will throw off fhe solidity of your entire form.

However it's pretty difficult to get hundreds of contour lines to be completely accurate, which is what hurts your forms, not only that but you're not making use of the ellipse degree shift in your forms, as such, your contours are too consistent.

• Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to mak whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will 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.

Insect Construction Section

Moving on to your constructions you have good work here and you're showing a lot of potential as your constructions are looking tridimensional, but there are a couple of problems which are holding you back from your full potentisl. Your constructions are often being cut off at the edges because you're trying to add too much stuff to your page. By planning your usage of the page before committing to any drawings you're artificially limiting how much space you give each individual construction, making it harder to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises. Drawing small also makes it harder for you to fully engage your shoulder when drawing.

Draw bigger, it's completely fine for you to have a single construction per page, only after you finish your first construction should you analyze and gauge if there is enough space on the page, if yes, go ahead, if not, you didn't lose anything.

You're often jumping into complexity too soon on some of your constructions, for example in this crab you're drawing it's legs as complex forms instead of following the sausage leg construction method.

This is not only present in your crab, but you often don't adhere to the leg construction method in other constructions as well.

Keep in mind that the sausage method isn't about capturing the legs in their most accurate form, instead it's about laying a foundation that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb equally, where other techniques often lean too far one way or the other, aiming for anatomical accuracy but coming out stiff, or focusing on the flow and energy of the limb, but coming out flat.

Once we've got out sausage party in place, we can then build on top of it with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg.

Some of the legs you drew were way too skinny, this doesn't allow you to apply the sausage method to it's full potential.

There are a couple of places in your constructions where you're not drawing through your forms.

• Drawabox seeks to develop your skills through the use of exercises and drills. As such it's important to follow all instructions as they are written, otherwise you won't be getting the most out of each study session. You should be drawing through all of your forms, no matter how much it would be logically obscured by other parts of the construction or obscure said parts. This allows your brain to work through these spatial reasoning problem to it's full extent and leaves the relationships between each form clear and defined.

We also want to make sure that everything we're drawing is a solid form, there are a couple of cases such as here and here where you build extra details as single lines, this doesn't define any forms and serves only to flatten your constructions, remember the lobster claw demo and how it shows how bumps and other small forms can be built on top of preexisting structures.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different structures and texture focusing on communicating the small forms that run along the surface of an object, essentially texture is a way of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that surface.

None of this has to do with decorating any of our drawings, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our construction. As introduced here, we can notice that we should focus on each individual form and how it casts a shadow on neighboring surfaces, understanding how each individual form sits on a 3D space, and analyzing all of this information present in our reference to be able to translate it to our study. The shape of this shadow is important as it's the shape that defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, as such you should design your shadow shape in a way that feels dynamic, as shown here.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive, but in the long run this method of texture is the one who enforces the ideas of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideas, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing more on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2. Going forward here are a couple of final reminders of how texture in Drawabox is approached.

Final Thoughts

Overall your work is looking good, you only need to make sure you're taking more time which each individual construction and giving it the time it requires, as well as making sure you're using the methods introduced in the lesson more throughly.

I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete since I believe you've understood the purpose of this lesson, don't forget to keep practicing these exercises during your warm ups.