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

Starting with your organic forms, you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. There are a couple of small inconsistencies, such as the bottom middle form on this page swelling through its midsection, but it is clear that you're aiming for simple sausages and most of them are close.

Your contour curves look good. I can see you're working on keeping your stroke smooth and confident, as well as aligning them correctly and shifting their degree. We can also experiment with using the contour curves to express different orientations of our forms. I'd like you to take a look at this example showing how we can use contour lines to convey the form as bending so that both (or neither) ends of the form face towards the viewer.

Moving on to your insect constructions, your linework mostly appears confident and purposeful, and there are areas where you're showing a good grasp of your forms existing in 3D space and not just as flat shapes on a piece of paper. For example the segmentation of the abdomen on your first construction shows a clear understanding of the segments curving around a solid ball-like volume, nicely done.

I do have some points to cover that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these 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 this construction in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

There's another, smaller cut into this mantidfly which I've also marked in red. This one came down the ellipse being a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you picked 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 mantidfly you'll see I've marked out the abdomen and some of the legs with blue. These are examples of 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. For the abdomen, remember we want to start each construction with solid forms and if those forms should overlap, be sure to "draw through" and draw each one in its entirety, not cutting them off where they pass behind one another. This will allow you to develop a stronger understanding of how these forms exist in 3D space.

I noticed not drawing through your forms was the biggest issue raised regarding your plant constructions in your previous submission. You draw through your forms some of the time here, but not consistently, and that's something you'll need to keep working on. I've drawn through some of the various places where you're cutting off overlapping forms on your mantidfly as an example.

So, instead of altering the silhouettes of forms we have already drawn, 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 looks like you tried out la few different strategies for constructing legs. I think you had the sausage method in mind for some of your constructions, such as this weevil although you did not apply the method in its entirety, stopping at the first step (a chain of sausage forms) without reinforcing the joints with a contour line, or attempting to build any of the lumps, bumps and complexity that bring out the character of the leg.

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.

The process we employ for these constructions relies on us laying in a scaffolding of simple forms, and gradually building up complexity in successive passes. This didn't happen often, but I noticed on the mantidfly you jumped ahead into these complex shapes for the forelimbs without placing simple forms first. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer (and you) to understand how it exists in 3D space, so the more likely it is to fall flat. This quick example shows how we can build up this sort of structure by starting with a simple sausage armatures, then build up complexity piece by piece, by attaching more forms.

The last thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly, especially when blocking in the head/thorax/abdomen. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on, rather than letting them stand for themselves.

Now, as a whole the points I've called out can continue to be worked on as you move onto the next lesson, so I will be marking this one as complete. That said, this feedback is rather dense - so be sure to do whatever it is you need to do in order to address these points, so we can build upon them in the next lesson.