Hello Supers0nick,

Congrats on finishing Lesson 4! I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and today I'll be providing your work with some critique. I hope that my advice aids you in your Drawabox Journey.

Organic Forms with Contours

I would like to start by pointing out something that, while it's not quite a mistake, can still hinder your improvement:

• Grinding a single sausage rotation. There's at least three most important ones, and you should practice all of them. Here's a diagram that shows the different sausage rotations possible.

  • Onto your organic forms, they're coming along decently, but there's still quite a few that are misshapen and with their ends elongated or flat. Remember the characteristics of simple sausages: two spheres connected by a cylinder of consistent width.

A method you can use to address this is by using dots to plan out the general sausage shape and then ghost it.

• When it comes to your contours they fall victim to ellipse's degrees not having any variation, which ends up flattening the form. Remember that the degree of each circular cross-section gets wider as it moves away from the viewer as shown here and as discussed on the Youtube video about ellipses.

Insect Constructions

For your insect constructions I would like to start by saying that you've done a phenomenal job with them! I don't think there is much to critique here as you've employed the construction method correctly.

Here are the few things I see that you can improve however:

• In general, you're drawing way too small, which limits the amount of detail that you can add before making it look crowded, and makes it harder to work through constructional problems as things get confusing incredibly quickly.

• For Insect 6, you drew the weird things are it's end as shapes, when could have used the branch method for drawing the to draw it as forms, as well as drawing the sting(?) as a form, but that might have been because of how small the drawing was ( which is why it's better to draw it big ).

• For Insect 17, you drew the spikes on it's back as shapes instead of 3d forms, which flattened it out. A way you could have tackled it instead using forms would be with cones.

• Sometimes you have trouble with layered segmentation, here is a demo on how to approach layered segmentation.

• You also struggle with applying texture. Here is an informal demo on how to approach texture when drawing insects.

I would like to elaborate a bit more on this point. Remember that texture doesn't have to be applied to the entirety of the form because texture, just like construction, has a job to achieve which is visually communicating how it would feel to touch the surface. We as the artists can strategically place a few hairs and bumps to convey what the texture of the surface is, but by not completely filling in the form with texture we create points of detail and points of rest, which makes it easier on the eyes of the viewer while ultimately reaching our goal.

• Don't fill in parts of your construction completely black, even if it's for texturing reasons, when you do this three things happen: 1, it becomes difficult to analyze if you employed the construction method correctly. 2, It creates a point of detail that grabs the viewer's attention towards that point. And 3, you risk flattening your construction.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I believe you understood the purpose of these exercises and executed them properly, once you get past a few hurdles your work will go from great to incredible so keep practicing!

I'll mark this lesson as complete.