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

Starting with your organic forms it is clear that you’re aiming to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and most of your forms are pretty close. You’ve got some forms which are spot-on, this one is really solid. I think where forms aren’t quite as simple, such as this one, largely comes down to spots where your line gets slightly hesitant and uneven. It is honestly quite subtle, but it does make a difference. Make sure you’re prioritising a smooth confident execution of your lines, so you can continue to adhere to the second principle of markmaking. It is very common, as students get further through the course, to get a little lax on going through all 3 phases of the ghosting method for all of their lines, being less rigorous on the planning and preparation phases, resulting in combining them into the final execution step. This results in a wavering line, which is not what we’re aiming for. Most of your lines are smooth, this is just a reminder to be consistent with applying the ghosting method as you move forward.

It looks like you’re making an effort to keep your contour curves aligned so that they are cut into two symmetrical halves by the central flow line, which is great. There are two factors I think you could be more aware of when drawing your contour curves in the future.

• Right now you’re keeping most of the contour curves the same degree. 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.

• Aim to have the contour curves fit snugly against the sides of the forms, you have quite a few that float arbitrarily. While this is easier said than done, given that we have to prioritise a smooth confident mark first and foremost, is is something we can work towards.

Moving on to your insect constructions you’re doing a good job of starting your constructions off with simple solid forms, and I’m happy to see that you often “draw through” your forms and include parts that may be obscured in the reference, figuring out how these pieces exist in their entirety and connect together in space. This is good as it will help you to develop a stronger understanding of how your constructions exist in 3D, and not just as lines on a flat piece of paper. I do have a few points to bring up that I think will help you get more out of these constructions.

Starting with how you're arranging your constructions on the page, you are unfortunately doing yourself something of a disservice in this regard, and making things harder than they need to be. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on the page, deciding to leave room for a second construction before you’d started the first one. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give each drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. This gets exacerbated on pages like this one where the constructions don’t make full use of the half page you had allocated for each one, leaving lots of blank space that could have been used for your drawings. Notice how these two constructions are so tiny that they came out oversimplified because there simply wasn’t room to construct the smaller elements.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

The second point I need to talk about 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.

For example, I've marked on your ant in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. 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.

The third thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working towards using the sausage method for the majority of your pages, although there is some variation in how closely you were sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms, and you often leave out the contour line for the intersection at each joint. I believe drawing your constructions larger will make it easier for you to tackle both issues.

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.

The fourth point to cover is additional line weight. I’d like you to watch this video which explains how to use line weight in this course. It was added after you completed lesson 1, so you may have missed it. We use line weight to clarify overlaps between forms, restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. Avoid using additional line weight to reinforce large portions of the silhouette of a drawing, as seen on this weevil as going back over your lines in this manner tends to take an initially smooth and confident line and make it wobblier. Line weight should be kept subtle, it relies on relative changes in thickness that one's subconscious will notice. It's like whispering, rather than shouting.

Before I wrap this up there are a couple of things I should mention briefly:

• Remember to draw through your ellipses, completing two full circuits before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single circuit.

• Your application of texture is moving in the right direction, I’m happy to see that you’ve stopped filling in large form shadows as per your lesson 3 feedback. Make sure you’re investing enough time into every mark you add to a construction, there are a few spots where your details look just a little hasty, such as spots where you started zigzagging your lines to capture fur.

• This is a really minor thing, but in future if you add a cast shadow underneath your bugs, it is better to leave it as an outline instead of filling it in. Filling the shadow in creates stark contrast between the black fill and the white paper, drawing the viewer’s eye to the shadow, when we want the shadow to be a supporting character, and the construction to take centre stage and attract the viewer’s attention.

All right, I think that should cover it. I think by and large you are heading in the right direction, but as there are a number of points where I would like you to demonstrate your understanding I will be assigning some revisions. For these I would like you to stick to one construction per page, to encourage you to draw larger.

Please complete 3 pages of insect constructions.