Hello Osbornnick, 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 pages 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.

It is clear that you're working towards the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of your forms are pretty close.

It is good to see you're keeping your lines smooth and confident, and you're also doing a good job of hooking your contour curves around the forms so that their curvature accelerates as they reach the edge of the forms.

I can see you've made a deliberate effort to vary the degree of your contour curves, good work. Something to keep in mind is 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 you're doing a good job of following the construction methods shown in the demos, and applying these to your independent constructions. I'm seeing a developing understanding of how the various pieces of your constructions exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. This is helped along by your conscientious attention to "drawing through" your forms, and including parts that may be obscured in your reference. This is a great strategy for reinforcing the 3D illusion of your constructions, and by pushing yourself to figure out how the whole form exists in space and drawing as though you have "X-Ray vision" this helps to develop your spatial reasoning skills, so I hope to see you continue with this approach as you move forward.

Speaking of strategies to reinforce the 3D illusion:

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 beetle in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. One thing I did notice is that some of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image I marked in blue 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.

So, here I've made a couple of edits to your beetle. Instead of cutting back inside the ball-like form you had established for the thorax, I wrapped the shell around the form you had already drawn. While this may lead to some proportional issues, for the purpose of these constructional exercises this is preferable to undermining the 3D illusion. I've also shown how the extension to the head can be added by drawing a new form, and by giving it a complete silhouette we can show how it connects to the existing ball form of the head.

I noticed a few places where you had redrawn something to correct it, for example with the far side hind leg of this weevil. Here the viewer is given 3 possible interpretations of where they think the leg is supposed to be, and whichever one they choose, there will always be others present on the page to contradict that interpretation and remind them (and you) that the construction is just lines on a flat piece of paper. If, despite your best efforts with observing your reference carefully and frequently, and planning your lines with the ghosting method, something ends up in the wrong place, it is not usually a big deal as far as these exercises are concerned. Try your best to work with your mistakes, as attempting to correct them will make your work messy and confusing.

Something else which will help to maintain the solidity of your constructions, if a part of your subject won't fit on the page, rather than running it off the edge of the page as a pair of lines, which leaves the form open-ended and flattens it out, it helps a great deal to "cap off" the form (usually with an ellipse) as shown here with this spider.

Remember to always draw around your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page. This will help you to execute them smoothly, and is something we ask students to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, as explained in this section.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is great so see that you've been striving to use the sausage method for constructing the majority of your legs. (This most notable exception being the front legs on this construction which are quite far from simple sausage forms.) 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, 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.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled.

• On the far-side wing and the abdomen of this moth you appear to be employing form shading.

• On some constructions, such as this weevil you've filled the eyes in with black. During this course solid black should be reserved for cast shadows only and should not be used to describe changes in local colour.

• On the thorax of this beetle you've done a good job of drawing the shadows cast by small textural forms on the surface of the shell, implying their presence, well done! The texture on the nearside wing of this moth appears to be much more explicit.

In effect, you're sometimes getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), 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.

One last little note, if you choose to add hatching to something, such as the cast shadow under this beetle remember to use the ghosting method for every line, and do your best to keep them parallel and evenly spaced. In this example they appear to have been quite hastily done, and in places your lines are zig-zagging, which breaks the 3rd principle of markmaking.

All righty, your work is coming along well and I think you're ready for the challenges of the next lesson. Please refer to this critique as you work through the next lesson, so you can actively tackle the points discussed here. They will continue to be relevant to animal constructions. If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.