Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, there are two main issues that I'm noticing. Neither are particularly grievous, but they do need to be addressed:

• Most importantly, you're placing your ellipses on the wrong side. These go on the ends facing the viewer (since that allows us to see the whole way around the entire ellipse), whereas you've fairly consistently placed them all on the end facing away from the viewer. Here's a diagram showing sausages in different orientations - note where the ellipse is visible and where it's not.

• Additionally, I'm noticing that you're going back over a number of your lines here. The only situation in which you'd do that is drawing an ellipse, where we draw around the shape two full times before lifting the pen. Given that this is not possible with a partial curve, you should only be drawing them in a single stroke. In general, you should not be going back over a mark automatically.

Moving onto your insect constructions, overall you're doing quite well here, although there are a number of things I want to call out to ensure that as you move forwards, you approach the work in adherence to the various points raised previously in the course, and avoid the kinds of small shifts in approach that distract from the core focus of what we're looking to achieve here. That said, I think you are demonstrating a well developing understanding of how your constructions sit in 3D space - though this can be improved, and we'll discuss this in the first point.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will 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.

As shown on this beetle, in red are the areas where you cut into your forms' silhouettes (this was somewhat harder to spot because of your tendency to start your drawings very faintly, which we'll talk about in a moment), and in blue are the areas where you added partial shapes or otherwise extended off the existing silhouettes (this was sometimes caused by having line weight jump from one form to another, which is another thing we'll discuss shortly).

Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure - forms with their own fully self-enclosed 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 accepting that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for 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 I've 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.

So, above I alluded to talk about the tendency to start your constructions with fainter lines, and your general use of line weight. Both of these kind of go hand in hand - you're starting your constructions out with lines that are effectively designed to be replaced, and then going back in to apply a clean-up pass of thicker lines to replace them. While this is a valid approach in general, it is one we firmly avoid in this course, as discussed here in Lesson 2.

Line weight itself should (again in the bounds of this course) not be applied so broadly, but rather focused on clarifying overlaps between forms in the manner described here.

Continuing on, you appear to by and large be making pretty good use of the sausage method when constructing your legs. There are a few places where you forgot to define the joint between sausages with a contour line, but generally you apply that in the majority of situations, so just keep an eye on it. I did however want to share a chunk of the usual explanation I provide to students when they're not using the sausage method consistently, as it describes how to approach building upon the sausages structures once they're established:

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 here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well).

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

As a whole though, you are doing quite well, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Just be sure to address these points as you move into Lesson 5, and be sure to review this feedback as much as you need as you continue to move forwards.