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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

There are a few places where you’ve reattempted or redrawn a line in an effort to correct it. The ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed planning, preparing, and executing each mark to the best of your current ability.

You’re doing a good job of fitting your contour lines snugly against the edges of your forms, but there are some noticeable signs of hesitation creeping into some of your contour lines, so remember to keep prioritizing a smooth confident stroke first and foremost.

You’ve made a good start with varying the degree of your contour 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. 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 these are off to a good start, I can see that you’re making an effort to utilize the construction methods shown in the demos, and there are places where I can see that you’re developing an understanding of how some of your forms exist in three dimensions, such as the segmentation of this scorpion where you’re being mindful of how the surface of the underlying form turns in 3D space and wrapping the segmentation around it. I do have a few things to discuss which I think will help you with these constructional exercises.

Firstly, when we start a construction is is crucial to establish simple solid forms for the head, thorax, and abdomen prior to moving forward. While you do usually do this correctly, this moth is missing the solid form for the abdomen. Instead it looks like you drew some individual lines which represent the visible sections of the abdomen peeking between the wings. Unfortunately these lines do not tell the viewer (or more importantly you) how the abdomen sits in 3D space, or how it is supposed to connect to the thorax. Always make sure you're drawing each form in its entirety. There may be places those forms get hidden behind other structures - like the wings here - but draw them anyway, so you can understand fully how they sit in space. Here is how this might apply to the abdomen of your construction- drawing a full ellipse to capture the bulk of that solid form. Once the ellipse was in place I attached an additional form to build out that pointy tip section.

That brings me to the next point. Once those big simple forms are in place there are various 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 mantis in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already established for the head.

It is also possible to alter the silhouette of an existing form by extending it. On this treehopper I marked in blue some examples 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.

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. It looks like you’ve made an effort to stick to the sausage method for most of your leg constructions, and you’re doing fairly well at laying down chains of simple sausage forms. Don’t forget to apply a contour curve at each joint to show how these forms intersect and connect together in 3D space. These little lines might seem insignificant, but they are a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction.

The keep in mind 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.

The next thing I need to bring up is a reminder to make every effort to adhere to the principles of markmaking as introduced back in lesson 1. Specifically that marks must flow smoothly. On some of your pages, such as this one, there’s noticeable stiffness and wobbling to a significant proportion of the lines. This suggests you may not be using the ghosting method, even if you think you are. I strongly recommend you review the instructions for the ghosted lines exercise here where the ghosting method is introduced, and making sure that you're using the ghosting method in full for every mark you freehand in this course. There’s also a possibly that you may be switching to drawing from your wrist in an effort to achieve more control, so you may want to review this section on using your arm. Other possible causes of wobbly linework can be gripping the pen overly tightly, or drawing on a soft or uneven surface, so you may want to check that neither of these are the case.

There are some aspects to some of your constructions which indicate that they would benefit from investing more time observing the reference. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. This is explained in more detail in this section of lesson 2.

There are subtle things across many of the pages, but something that stands out as not being based on observation are the arbitrary patches of hatching lines on the wings of this dragonfly. As far as I can tell, these patterns were probably based on what you remembered the wings looking like (or perhaps pulled from imagination) rather than the information that was actually present in the reference. Now, actually studying the reference to inform every line we draw when tackling veins in wings is incredibly tedious and time consuming, and if you find yourself losing concentration it is perfectly fine (and even encouraged) to take a break and split the construction up over multiple sittings or days if that is what it takes for you to perform the task to the best of your current ability.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. In effect, you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

All right, I think that should cover it. This feedback is quite dense, so I expect you may need to take some time to read through it all and study the various diagrams, demos, and linked sections of lesson material. Once you’ve had some time to absorb this information I’d like you to complete some additional pages to address the various points I’ve called out here.

Please complete 3 pages of insect constructions.