Jumping right in with your organic forms with contour curves, there are a few points I do want to call out here:

• I noticed that on your second page, you skipped over the step of defining your central minor axis line. Be sure not to skip any steps.

• It does appear that you're generally trying to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, as per the instructions, but there are some areas where you deviate - mainly on the second page again, but there is this one on the first page whose ends (especially the bottom one) are more stretched out, into more of an ellipsoid shape rather than circular, and where it continues to widen through its midsection.

• Right now most of your contour curves maintain a roughly consistent degree - remember that as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the form, we want the contour curves to get wider, as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video. This of course is impacted as well by how the sausage itself is turning towards or away from the viewer, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb to follow.

Continuing onto your inesct constructions, I can certainly see that you are making a clear effort to develop these from simple to complex, building up to the structural complexity of the final result in steps, rather than skipping ahead. That said, there are a few areas in which I can either call your attention to points you may not be following as directly from the lesson material as you should, or where I can offer additional advice to help you continue to make the most out of these exercises.

Starting with the latter, let's talk a bit about how we can engage with our constructions - either in two dimensions, as drawings and collections of lines or shapes on a flat page, or in three dimensions where we're dealing with solid, three dimensional forms - and drawing new ones such that they respect and reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is indeed three dimensional.

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.

You definitely do indulge in this a fair bit across your constructions - we can see it most clearly in this ladybug where I've highlighted in red where you cut back into your masses, and in blue where you'd build off the existing silhouettes by adding partial shapes or one-off strokes (there was a lot of the latter, where you'd bridge across one form to another with a stroke, effectively enclosing an additional flat shape against them, but without providing enough information for us to understand how it's meant to exist in 3D space, in relation to the existing structure.

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.

Continuing on, I noticed 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 are admittedly applying aspects of the sausage method, but skipping others - most notably, you neglect to define the joint between them with a contour line.

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.

The last point I want to mention is a simple, albeit far-reaching one: right now it appears that you're deciding how much time you spend on a given construction on something other than what the complexity of the given object you're drawing demands. It's not at all uncommon for students to feel the compulsion that they need to finish what they're doing before they give up - almost like "you'd better finish your plate before you get up from the dinner table!" Of course, no such rule exists here. In fact, the singular responsibility students have to give every form they construct, every shape they draw, and every mark they execute as much time as they individually require to be done to the best of the student's ability contradicts it entirely - since it means every mark demands a certain amount of time, based on its own characteristics, and giving it less time because we have to get up in an hour would break that responsibility.

Instead, you should feel absolutely free to split a given drawing across as many sittings and days as you require to meet that requirement. So, do not allow anything else to dictate how long a drawing takes - not how much time you have, not how you feel about how quickly you should be able to pull it off.

Now, while the last point is something of notable concern, overall all of the issues I've addressed here will continue to be just as relevant into the next lesson, so I'll leave you to continue to tackle them there. Just be sure to do whatever you need to continue addressing these points. My feedback can be quite dense, which can make it easier to forget important points, only for them to be raised again in the next critique.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.