No problem. Thank you for uploading again, they’re all there now. Don’t worry about some of the pages being upside down, it happens a lot and I have tools to rotate the images if needed.

Overall you've done very well, and are approaching your constructions in the manner we hope to see, starting with simple forms and building up complexity gradually, and establishing specific 3D relationships where these forms connect together by drawing contour lines where they intersect. These elements tell me that you’re feeding your brain the right questions, asking yourself how this thing really exists in a 3D world, and how to build your constructions up like puzzles, so you can convince yourself that what you are drawing doesn’t just exist on a flat piece of paper, but has a solid structure to it.

I do have a few pieces of advice to help you improve further, although the biggest point is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had.

Starting with this main point, it's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the later forms respect and even reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

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 the head of your grasshopper in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of a form you had already drawn.

While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. On the tail of the shrimp I also marked in blue some places 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. While this approach worked for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

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 is great to see that you’ve used the sausage method for almost all of your leg constructions, and you’re doing an excellent job of sticking to the properties of simple sausages, as well as using a contour line at each joint to define how the pieces fit together in 3D space.

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, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5 too.

Line weight can be a bit tricky, and something that can make it more manageable is to restrict it to localized areas where overlaps occur, as shown in this video from lesson 1. This will help keep the superimposed stroke smooth and confident. I’d recommend that you avoid tracing back over large sections of existing forms, as this tends to take your initially smooth and confident lines and make them wobblier, which is what appears to be happening on the top of the firefly

Before I wrap this up I wanted to take a moment to discuss texture. I really like some of the textural work on this page where you’re exploring describing the texture implicitly by drawing the shadows cast by small textural forms onto the object’s surface, without outlining the forms themselves, nicely done. Remember that in this course we reserve areas of solid black for cast shadows only. So if we think about the forms that are physically present in the construction, there’d be no reason for the eyes of the firefly to be sitting in cast shadow, as they bulge and protrude from the underlying head form.

Alright, I think that should cover it. You’ve done a very good job and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you tackle the next lesson, they will continue to apply to animal constructions.