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

Starting with your organic forms you're doing a good job of sticking fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here. I'd recommend trying some longer, thinner organic forms when you practise this exercise in your warm ups, as these will come in handy as building blocks for constructing legs. This will also give you a bit more scope to experiment with your contour curves.

Speaking of contour curves, I'm happy to see that these are smooth and confidently drawn, and that you're varying their degree, good work.

When we place an ellipse on the end of a sausage form, it's actually no different from the usual contour curves, aside from the fact that we're conveying the fact that this particular end is facing the viewer, allowing us to see the whole way around the contour line, rather than just a partial curve. I noticed on one of your forms you'd placed an ellipse where the preceding contour lines suggest the end is pointing away from the viewer. I've marked it here on your work, as well as adding two missing ellipses. 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.

Also concerning the ellipses on the ends of the forms, remember to draw around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This is something we ask you to do for all ellipses that you freehand in this course, you can read more about this here.

Moving on to your insect constructions you're demonstrating a decent understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space, however there are a number of ways in which your work could be improved.

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.

It's a little hard to tell because many of your photos don't show the whole page, but I get the impression that some of your constructions would have benefited from being drawn bigger. Drawing smaller than what the objects themselves require of you can impede your brain's spatial reasoning skills and also make it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing, leading to more stiffness and clumsiness. In not making full use of the space on the page you do yourself a disservice by making things harder than they really need to be.

When it comes to time, there are a couple of things that indicate you may be underestimating how much time these constructions might demand from you. The first issue that stands out simply comes down to observation. From what I can see, you're not spending as much time as is really needed studying your reference. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. This is explained in more detail in this section of lesson 2.

Right now, because there does appear to be a greater reliance on memory rather than direct observation (not everywhere - some parts come out stronger and more directly informed than others), there are definitely elements that come out looking highly simplified, or are missing entirely. For example this scorpion is completely missing the far side claw and all of the far side legs, when they are very obvious in the reference image, and there was space to include them on the page. The construction looks unfinished. Similarly on this ant the far side legs have been omitted, and there are clearly two antennae and two mandibles, and you've only drawn one of each.

The other indicator that you may not be spending as much time as you really need to on these is that there are places where your lines get a bit loose and sketchy. Remember each mark you add to your constructions should serve a clear purpose, and make sure you're using the planning stage of the ghosting method to decide what the mark you're about to make will contribute to your construction. It is important to maintain tight, specific relationships between each stage of your construction, leaving gaps between lines that are supposed to connect together is vague and undermines the solidity of your construction by forcing the viewer to decide where they think the silhouette of your construction is meant to be. For example I've drawn over some loose lines in red here. This is a mixture of construction lines that only connect at one end, and textural marks that don't connect to the construction at all.

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 work here in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes I think you accidentally cut inside forms you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes on your ellipses. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image I marked in blue some places where it looks like you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how that new addition was meant to exist in 3D space.

There are a couple places where you appear to be drawing a line wavering back and forth across the silhouette of a form you have already drawn. Here is an example. Not only does this flatten your construction by cutting and extending it in 2D space, it also breaks the third principle of markmaking that was introduced in lesson 1.

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've made an effort to apply the sausage method to the majority of your constructions. 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.

So - I've outlined some things to work on, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete, just be sure to actively tackle these points as you handle your animals. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid). If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.