While it's always good for students to reflect upon their own work, it's best not to include that with your submission - we prefer to look at one's work with a blank slate, and to avoid having the student's own impressions get in the way of forming our own.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, as a whole you're doing a pretty good job here. You're sticking fairly closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, though you do often end up with one size a little larger than the other, and that smaller end tends to get a little more stretched out instead of remaining entirely circular. Still, you're getting pretty close, so that's great.

One thing to keep an eye on though is that while you do seem to be understanding that the degree of your contour lines should be shifting as we slide along the length of the form, you appear to be doing it in reverse. Where you've got the contour lines getting narrower as we move farther from the viewer, they should actually be getting wider. This is demonstrated in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, overall I do feel your work is moving in the right direction. I can see that you're paying quite a bit of attention to how you can build up your constructions through the addition of new forms and components, working from simple to complex rather than jumping ahead to more complexity than can be supported by the existing structure.

There are some issues that I will address, but as a whole you're moving in the right direction.

The first point I wanted to call out is one you've mentioned yourself - it's where you talk about "disrespecting" forms, and you're more or less correct about that. Every phase of construction establishes some truth about the thing you're drawing, or answers a question. We want to always build off the masses we've put down with a clear relationship between what we add, and what is already present - and when you engulf one mass which was perhaps too small, in a larger one, you don't end up with such a clear relationship.

Ultimately, mistakes will happen - you will misjudge proportions, and you'll end up deviating from your reference image. But that's entirely okay. It's more important that you stick to the forms you've built up, and the answers you've given, than attempting to completely replace them in order to get closer to what your reference image shows. After all, our goal here is not to replicate the reference - it's to create something that feels solid and tangible, while using the reference as our source of information to do so.

So, in situations like this, you'd either find a way to build up from the structure that you'd started with (the smaller mass), perhaps by adding smaller chunks one at a time, ensuring that each one is built off the existing structure, defining clear relationships all the way through - or, you'd simply stick to the smaller mass and keep going despite the deviation from your reference. Often times the latter is the better option.

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.

While there are a few instances where you cut back into the silhouettes of your forms - like towards the tip of this spider's abdomen where drawing through the ellipse made it larger than you perhaps wanted, and you seemed to darken the stroke of a smaller ellipse, and where you tried to start with a box on this dragonfly's head and then built the head inside it (with a very, very loose relationship between the box and the resulting structure), I think the most notable examples are actually where you extended the silhouettes of your established forms. We can see this in the ant's head where you took the initial ball form and then extended its shape out to create the mandibles not as 3D forms, but as 2D elements.

Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, 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.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. Definitely look at the difference in how the ant head demo compares to your own ant construction. 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.

There are a lot of cases where you're moving in the right direction in regards to all of this, however. Despite you 'disrespecting' the initial masses on this earwig, I felt that the overlal construction was still fairly well done, and showed a lot of respect for how every newly added element was its own complete 3D structure.

One last thing I noticed is that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. 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. In your case, you did try to apply the sausage method a lot, but you were very inconsistent in following all of the rules listed in the sausage method diagram. For example, you used contour lines quite generously throughout those segments, even though the diagram states to specifically only place contour lines at the joints between the sausage forms.

Beyond that, 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). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

One thing I want to point out about this approach of wrapping more limited forms around the sausage structures instead of adding a whole bulge all the way around it is that this approach allows for far more contact between the silhouette of the new mass, and the sausage structure. Compare that to how you approached building up the legs in this beetle - there you end up with a much looser relationship between the sausage structure and the mass engulfing it.

That about covers it. As a whole, I still think you're moving in the right direction, and I feel that the points I've raised here can all be worked on into the next lesson - so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.