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

Starting with your organic forms you've done a good job with the majority of them, sticking fairly closely to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as introduced here. There are a couple of places where one end gets pointy like this instead of round, or where the form is "bloated" and swelling through the midsection, like this.

Your contour curves are well aligned, and you're doing a good job of hooking them around the form. Some of them look a little stiff or hesitant. Remember these contour curves are the visible part of an ellipse, so you may find it helpful to ghost the motion of the entire ellipse (only placing your pen down for the section of the ellipse you want to draw) to give a smoother, more confident result.

I can see you're working on varying the degree of your contour curves, which is great. Most of your contour curves do have quite a narrow degree, so I would urge you to experiment with them more. You have a tendency to flip the direction of your craves rather than actually changing the degree very much. 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 as is explained in the ellipses video from lesson 1, here.

Whether you place an ellipse on a given end of your form or not appears to be an arbitrary decision right now. 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, which is also a good example of how to vary the degree of your contour curves.

Moving on to your insect constructions you've done a good job of starting with simple forms and carefully building up your constructions step by step. There's plenty that you're doing well, although there are some areas where I can provide advice to help you continue to make the most out of these exercises.

I see you submitted two attempts at the louse demo, and on both of them you appear to have struggled to add the ribbing/segmentation correctly. It's this step from the written instructions, and I strongly suggest you watch the accompanying video from the same page, where Uncomfortable draws a simplified version of this step line by line in real time, explaining what he is doing and why. The issues I can see in your work are that the curves you're drawing across the form are shallow and stop abruptly instead of curving around your forms, which makes them look flat. They also don't break the silhouette which is a concept we introduced during the texture section of lesson 2. I've redrawn some of the ribbing on one of your pages here to show you the difference. When following along with any demos in the future I urge you to follow every step exactly as shown, to the best of your current ability, just like you would with any of the technical exercises.

There are a couple of traits in your work that suggest you may be underestimating just how much time you need to invest in these constructions. Some of this comes down to observation. From what I can see, you're not spending as much time as is really needed simply 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. On this page it looks like you went to a lot of trouble to extract as much information from your reference as you could, which is great. This one is simplified to the point that I'm pretty sure some of the legs are missing significant joints.

Once you've identified a form you wish to draw, make sure you spend as much time as you need planning and ghosting that form before you put pen to paper. There are some areas- like the antennae on this insect (which have significant asymmetry) that look slightly out of control, and I think a little more time planning and ghosting should help with that.

The next point I wanted to talk about relates to differentiating between the 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 work here in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. Sometimes this happens due to the looseness of 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 this image I marked in blue some of the places 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 last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you're making an effort to use the sausage method for constructing legs. Try to stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms for your leg sausages- like you learned to do in the Organic Forms exercise. So no pointy, bloated, or uneven forms.

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.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. Each lesson builds on what is taught in the previous ones, so if you move forward with unaddressed issues we may end up exacerbating them.

Please draw along with the lobster demo from the informal demos page. Follow each and every step, line for line, as closely as you can.

Then draw 2 more pages of insect constructions, applying what you learned in the demo. I'd like you to use this weevil as a reference for one of them, please.

Make sure to spend as much time as you need to draw these to the best of your current ability. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability- taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark.