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

Organic Forms

It looks like you're aiming for the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and your second page is heading in the right direction. Keep striving to keep the width of your forms consistent, avoiding any bulging through the midsection or ends of uneven sizes.

You're doing a good job of keeping your linework smooth and confident, and your contour curves are well aligned.

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.

Insect Constructions

Firstly, on this page it looks like you used a pencil underdrawing and attempted to erase it. Drawing with pencil is not permitted in work submitted for official critique, and attempting to hide the fact that you did so does you a disservice. Drawing in pencil encourages students to be wasteful with their marks, and put less thought into each line they draw, generally making a mess and learning less from the exercise. By drawing in pen every line is visible, including our mistakes. It can feel scary, having mistakes on show, but they're totally normal and this is a helpful part of the learning process. We can analyse these mistakes, understand why they were made, and adjust our approach in future attempts. However when we erase mistakes it is like they never happened, and we'll be less likely to remember and learn from them, and more likely to repeat them. Remember the final result of these exercises is far less important than the specific steps we take in the process of working on them, so you should not be altering those steps in an effort to make the final result more pleasing. I'd like you to re-watch this video which explains the recommended tools and reread this section from lesson 0 which goes over the reasons why we draw in ink in more detail. I did check your previous submission, and saw that ThatOneMushroomGuy already gave you a reminder to work with the recommended tools, so consider this a final warning. We may refuse to critique future work that does not stick to the recommended tools.

Moving on to your actual work, things are a bit mixed. I'm seeing some places where you're clearly putting a lot of thought into how the various pieces of your constructions exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. For example, I'm pleased to see the approach you used to add the two horns to this beetle, where you drew them as complete new forms, and established a clear 3D relationship between the horns and the existing forms they're attached to.

On the other hand, there are some constructions where large portions have been drawn using partial, flat shapes, not providing enough information to show how the pieces fit together in 3D space. For example, if we look at this grasshopper and this fly it looks like you drew a ball form for the head, then cut off the thorax and abdomen where they pass behind the head. If a form is partially visible in your reference you should strive to draw the entire form, including the parts that may be obscured, as this will help you to develop a stronger understanding of how the form exists in 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. I'd like you to take a good look at this diagram showing the various types of actions we can take on a construction, using the example of a sphere.

Instead of adding in 2D with one-off lines and flat partial shapes as I've marked with blue here, and here 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 like this - 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. I can see that you're making an effort to use the sausage method as introduced here, and you're doing a pretty good job of constructing chains of sausage forms and applying a contour line to each joint to show how these forms intersect in 3D space. You're on the right track, and I've made a few notes on your grasshopper that I hope will help with your leg constructions in future. "Draw through" and complete your leg forms, rather than cutting them off where they pass behind other forms. Observe your reference to pick out the smaller or subtler elements that make up the specific character of the leg you're trying to draw, and once your leg sausages are in place, construct the lumps, bumps and other complexities with additional forms.

Remember 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.

All right, I think you understand the construction techniques covered in this lesson, so I'll be marking this as complete. Please make sure you refer to this critique (including the various diagrams and demos I've shared here) as you work through the next lesson, addressing the points discussed here as you tackle your animal constructions, where they will continue to be just as relevant.