Hello DouglasSales, 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.

You've done a reasonably good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms. Sometimes one end came out a little larger than the other like this. Occasionally there's some swelling through the midsection, as seen here. Try to keep the ends evenly sized and the width consistent all the way along the sausage's length.

Your lines are mostly looking smooth and confident, and I can see you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves, nicely done.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is well done. I can see you put a lot of time into these, carefully observing your reference and planning every mark you made. You've mostly done a good job starting with simple, solid forms and building up complexity where you need to. You're demonstrating an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3d space and connect together, which is great to see.

One exception to this would be this fly where I can see you started with a simple sausage form for the abdomen, but the thorax started way to complex. You may want to check this section from the lesson page for a recap. While you certainly weren't loose or sketchy here, you did jump ahead into a very complex form without establishing a solid foundation first. Fortunately you are starting with simple solid forms on most of your pages.

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.

I've marked in red on your work here some places where you appear to have cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you had drawn. Sometimes this happens when there is some looseness to your ellipses. If there are gaps between passes of your ellipse, use the outer one as the foundation for your construction to avoid any stray lines outside your silhouette.

On the same image I marked in blue some places where you extended your silhouettes without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space. Although some of those blue marks may have been where you cut inside your silhouette, it's a little hard to tell.

You should absolutely avoid trying to add a lot of complexity with a single wavy line as seen in this scorpion claw as this breaks the third principle of markmaking, as well as undermining the solidity of your construction.

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.

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.

Sometimes you redraw sections of your silhouette to add line weight. Going back over your lines in this manner causes small sections of silhouettes to be cut out, and small sections to be extended. These extensions are all the more likely to occur when we allow that line weight to "bridge" from the silhouette of one form to another.

Instead, line weight should always follow the silhouette of one form at a time, and should be reserved to the specific localised areas where overlaps occur between forms, in order to help clarify those overlaps.

I can see that you read and understood Uncomfortable's explanation about texture, detail and decoration on your lesson 3 critique. I'm seeing a lot less form shading in your lesson 4 homework, good work. Remember that areas of filled black should be reserved for cast shadows. I noticed you filled in areas of some of your insects' eyes, and I don't know what form is casting a shadow onto them, so I think you may either be using form shading or responding to changes in local color.

I'm not completely sure without seeing the reference, but I have a hunch that the hatching on this insect's wings might be describing a color pattern. Usually I'd expect the texture of insect wings to be either veins or scales, rather than a series of parallel striations in patches.

The last point I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're making considerable efforts to use the sausage method for constructing your legs. That's great, it's what we'd like students to do for this lesson, and we'd like you to continue to use this method for leg construction in lesson 5 too.

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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

Conclusion Overall you're doing a good job, and I'm happy for you to move on to the next lesson. Make sure to refer back to this critique frequently as you go through lesson 5, and try to apply the points I've discussed here to your work as you move forward.