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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of drawing your forms with smooth confident lines, and you’re getting a mixture of some forms that stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and a few that are getting a bit too complex. There are a couple of forms that are swelling through their midsection and becoming bloated, and one with a sharp corner, which you’ll want to try to avoid when practising this exercise in your warmups. By sticking to the properties of two round ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width, these organic forms become very useful building blocks for insect and animal constructions.

I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with shifting the degree of your contour curves, as this is an aspect of the exercise that students often overlook. It also looks like you’re taking due care with trying to keep your contour curves aligned, so that they are cut into two symmetrical halves by the central flow line.

When deciding whether to place a small contour ellipse on the tip(s) of your forms, remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.

Moving on to your insect constructions I’m seeing some pretty significant growth across the set, with the mosquito hawk in particular showing that your observational skills and control of your markmaking are developing nicely. It is good to see that you’re starting each construction with simple solid forms, and building them up piece by piece, without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given stage. On the whole you’re on the right track, and you’re making good use of the methods demonstrated in the lesson material, though I do have a few things to discuss which I think will help you to get even more out of these exercises in future.

When you’re laying down the ellipses for the head/thorax/abdomen, or indeed any ellipse you freehand in this course, remember to draw around it two full times before lifting your pen off the page, as introduced in this section. This leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute them smoothly. It looks like you’re intending to draw around your ellipses twice, but sometimes stop short of that, at about one and a half turns, so try to tune into exactly what actions you’re taking when drawing your ellipses.

Throughout this course there are two things we must give each of these drawings in order to get the most out of them. These two things are space and time. You’re doing really well in terms of space, it looks like you’re drawing your constructions as large as the space on the page will allow. There are a couple of indicators that suggest some of the constructions would have benefited from a little more time, and it really comes down to observing your reference more carefully, and more frequently. When starting out a drawing, it's definitely a challenging point - you're putting down those initial masses, and they make a lot of major decisions that'll determine how a number of important things turn out. For example, your proportions – in this grasshopper you definitely ended up starting out with the proportions off in terms of how the head and abdomen were drawn in relation to one another, and as a result, the head ended up coming out huge.

Now, it's true - spending more time observing your reference would have helped, and I can see a number of things across your homework that suggest that you probably could be looking back at it more frequently. But what I think is particularly important is the fact that even though your proportions ended up being off, you stuck to them. You didn't try to tweak things after the fact or correct your mistake. You'd made a decision, you'd committed to it on the page, and you held to it through the entire process. That is a very important element to construction, and you definitely get points for doing that.

This brings me to next point I want to talk about, which relates to differentiating between the 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.

While this isn’t something you do often, I've marked on your tortoise beetle in red where your use of line weight and shadows makes it look like you cut back inside the silhouettes of the additional forms on the thorax and abdomen after you had already established them on the page.

Instead, (as you frequently do already) 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.

Something I see more often than deliberately altering the silhouettes of forms you’ve already drawn, are places where you appear to accidentally alter your form’s silhouettes by going back over some of your lines, presumably to either reinforce or correct them. I’ve circled a couple of examples here on a section of your grasshopper. What this does is it forces the viewer to choose which line they think is supposed to represent the edge of the form, and in doing so reminds them that they are looking at lines on a flat piece of paper, undermining the 3D illusion we seek to create with these constructions. Instead of going back over some of your lines arbitrarily, it helps a great deal to reserve additional line weight for clarifying overlaps, and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. Please watch this video which explains how to use additional line weight in this course. It was added after you completed lesson 1, so you may have missed it.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It is great to see that you’ve made an effort to use the sausage method of leg construction, and while there are a couple of spots where it looks like you had difficulty keeping your leg sausages simple, or found it fiddly to apply a contour curve at each joint it’s not too concerning at this stage as you’ll be getting plenty of mileage practising this method in the next lesson.

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 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.

So! I’ve called out a few things to work on, but these can all continue to be addressed as you move through the next lesson, so I’ll go ahead and mark this one as complete.