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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a pretty good job of keeping your sausage forms simple as explained here.

I think this may have been a one-off but I'd better bring it up just in case- I noticed on the form at the top left of this page you placed a contour ellipse on an end of the form that was facing away from the viewer. When you draw an ellipse on the end remember that we can see the entirety of this ellipse because it's facing towards us - this also happens to serve as a very effective visual cue. You would want the contour curve next to it to curve as shown in this diagram.

I can see that you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves, but in future I'd like you to make this a lot more dramatic. As a general rule of thumb these curves should get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of a given cylindrical form. This concept is shown in the diagram linked in the previous paragraph and is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

Moving on to your insect constructions Your work is coming along well, I can see you're developing an understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together. You're mostly doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms and building your constructions methodically.

There are a couple of constructions where you're not quite starting with simple solid forms. Remember to draw a complete form for the head, thorax and abdomen, even if the form is partially obscured in your reference, complete the form and then you can clarify which structure is in front where they overlap by using additional line weight. Here is an example where you drew an incomplete form for your dragonfly's abdomen. What we're doing in these constructional exercises is similar to the form intersections exercise from lesson 2- drawing through our forms and then establishing how they connect together in 3D space, except now we're applying it to build a construction that resembles an insect.

Once we have our foundational structures in place, there are plethora of actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

1 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.

2 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 spider and also this spider in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

On the same images I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist 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 next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're making a good effort to use the sausage method for constructing legs. 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 shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this strategy is the one we would like you to use for animal constructions too.

So, moving forward, try to keep your leg sausage forms simple (like your simple organic forms from lesson 2, but smaller) and remember to apply a contour curve to reinforce the intersection where these sausages join together. These little contour curves might seem insignificant but they do tell the viewer a lot of information about how the forms are orientated in space as well as reinforcing the structure of your legs by establishing how the forms connect together. So try to remember to include them in future. However you don't need to add extra contour curves along the length of the sausage forms, as noted in the sausage method diagram, and explained on your work here. This diagram also shows where to place contour curves when using the sausage method.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. Sometimes you're getting a little caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - sometimes 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, at minimum.

I've made some notes on one of your constructions here.

In green I noted where you did a good job of using shadows cast from the body onto the legs.

In green I noted where you used cast shadows to describe the pitted texture of the wing casings. This is acceptable, but using the same detail density across the whole form looks a little flat. You can see what I mean here in this example of bush viper scales. Consider how the light hits the curved surface, and which of those little holes will contain mostly shadow, and which will contain less shadow. How to think about textures with holes is explained in this diagram.

In red I noted two different ways you're employing form shading which is something we don't use in this course.

I also noted that you should be ignoring changes in local colour, such as spots, stripes, or dark colored eyes, when doing these exercises.

All right, that about covers it. You're doing a good job, but be sure to refer back to this feedback frequently as you progress through lesson 5, as the points I've raised here should be addressed as you move forward. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, best of luck in lesson 5.