Hello Purplerains, 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 irregularities, such as the form on the lower right of this page which has one end larger than the other, but you're on the right track.

It looks like sometimes you struggle a bit to keep your contour curves aligned, and have them fit snugly against the edges of the forms. This is normal, as we insist on students prioritising making a smooth confident stroke over accuracy. It does look like you understand what to aim for with your contour curves, so they should continue to improve as you practise them in your warmups.

You're doing well at varying the degree of your contour curves, which is something many students have difficulty with.

I noticed that sometimes you've placed an ellipse on an end of one of your forms where the contour curves tell us is facing away from the viewer. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But, in this case if the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. 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.

Moving on to your insect constructions I can see you put a lot of effort into following the lesson instructions and you're doing a good job of starting with simple solid forms and building things methodically piece by piece. It is good to see you drawing through your forms when you construct your insects' legs, this will help you to develop an understanding of how all these pieces exist in 3D space.

I do have some points 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:

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 mantis 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 where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, or single lines, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure 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.

Here is how we could apply this to some of the extensions on your mantis, by drawing complete forms instead of single lines or partial shapes.

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.

This isn't an issue across the board, but I did note that there are some areas like the head of this fly where your linework gets a bit sketchy. The principles of markmaking that are introduced in lesson 1 should be followed throughout this course- we want to be working with lines that are smooth, continuous and unbroken.

Something that might be exacerbating this is that it looks like your pen may be running a bit low on ink. Some of your lines are coming out quite faint, especially in the early stages of your constructions. This can lead us to redrawing more of these structures than is necessary, rather than merely adding the parts that change. I would recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight only to clarify overlaps towards the end.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you experimented with a few different strategies 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 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.

It does look like you were working towards using the sausage method on a fair few of your constructions, and you've got the hang of drawing a chain of overlapping sausage forms. If you remember to include a contour curve for the intersections where these sausage forms connect together in 3D space as highlighted in red here, and apply the advice on taking actions in 3D from earlier in this critique, then you'll be able to use the sausage method effectively.

It looks like you've added some cast shadows to your constructions, and you're doing a pretty good job with them. Do try to make sure that you're only using solid black for cast shadows and nothing else. I've popped a couple of notes on your bee where it looks like you may have filled the eye in with black because it has a dark local colour, and there there's a large black patch on top of the hind leg that is not clearly explained by the forms present in your construction.

To help you keep control of your shadow shapes I recommend outlining them with your fineliner first, then filling them in carefully with the brush pen. If you paint them directly with a brush you'll get a clumsier result than what you're really capable of.

This isn't actually an issue in your submission, but I'd like to note that filling in large areas with solid black obscures your underlying construction and makes it more difficult to asses your work. So please don't make your shadows any larger or more extensive than what you have in these pages.

All right, you're doing a good job and I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please apply the advice provided in this critique and refer to the various diagrams I've shared with you here as you progress through the next lesson, as these points apply to animal constructions too.