Jumping right in with your organic forms with contour curves, these are mostly looking good - you're sticking pretty closely to the characteristics of simple sausaages, and your contour curves are confidently drawn and fit snugly within the silhouette of the form. There are however two points I want to call out, one of which is especially important.

• Firstly, the lighter of the two - make sure that you remain aware of how your contour curves' degrees should be getting wider as they move farther away from the viewer, as explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video. Right now you appear to be keeping them relatively consistent, which causes them to appear a little stiffer than they otherwise could.

• More importantly however, you have quite a few of these where you've used those little contour ellipses at the tips incorrectly. Those ellipses are no different from the curves - they're all contour lines. The reason we draw them as full ellipses is because they're placed on the tips of sausages that are facing towards the viewer, allowing us to see the whole way around instead of just a partial curve. The thing is, you're often placing them on ends that all the other contour curves tell us are pointing away from the viewer. For example, if you look at the sausage at the top-left of this page, the contour curves tell us that both ends are facing away from the viewer, and thus neither end should feature an ellipse. You can see on this diagram an arrangement of the different ways in which contour curves can be arranged. Note how the contour curves and ellipses work together to convey a consistent message. You need to be aware of what the marks you make are depicting, and ensure that they work together rather than contradict one another.

Looking through your insect constructions, I can see that you have made clear efforts towards figuring out how to apply the idea of starting simple and gradually building up complexity to the objects depicted in your references here. You're definitely heading in the right direction here, however there are some definite areas where I can offer suggestions to help ensure that you get the most out of these exercises.

The first of these is about identifying the distinction between actions we take that interact with our construction as though it is a solid, three dimensional entity existing in a world - for which the page itself is just a window, looking out onto this greater 3D space - and interacting with it as though it is just a drawing, a series of lines and flat shapes on an equally flat page. 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.

On one of your later beetle constructions, I've marked out a few areas that do attempt to modify the silhouettes of existing forms. In red, I've marked out where you've cut across the silhouette of existing forms - mainly the thorax and the head - as well as a spot in blue where you added a one-off flat shape by adding a single line that bridges across from one form to another.

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.

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 also see this in action in the shrimp and lobster demonstrations on the informal demos page. These, being newer, are more in line with this concept which we're trying to push more and more as time goes by. This will eventually be integrated into the lesson material more fully when my overhaul of the course material reaches this lesson (we're still working on refining Lessons 0 and 1) - but until then, it's mainly those receiving official critiques who get a sort of earlier preview of these more effective approaches to handling these kinds of constructional drawing exercises.

Before we move on from this, I did want to mention that I noticed in particular cases where you'd end up drawing, say, a ball structure as an ellipse, and running into this problem of cutting across its silhouette soon after. Sometimes we do draw ellipses a little more loosely due to drawing through them (they do get tighter with practice, as well as with more conscious use of the ghosting method and drawing using the whole arm from the shoulder). In such cases, be sure to treat the outermost perimeter of that ellipse's linework to constitute the outside edge of the resulting form's silhouette. This way we are able to keep all of the other linework inside of the silhouette, which helps maintain the solidity of the result. What you shouldn't do is pick an arbitrary perimeter from the many lines making up this ellipse, and leave others outside of it. Also, I should mention that we are only to draw through our ellipses two times before lifting our pen. Try not to exceed that, as it's easy to lose track of what the ellipse was supposed to be in the first place.

So! In summary of all this - every mark we put down is to establish a solid, complete, self-enclosed form, and every mark that follows should respect that this form exists, and not attempt to take shortcuts to either cut into or extend it in 2D space. We always want to ensure that each mark we add defines relationships between elements in 3D space - either by designing a new form's silhouette so it believably wraps around the existing structure, or by defining the intersection between them in the case of one form interpenetrating another.

Continuing on, I could see you making some use of the sausage method when constructing your insects' legs, albeit somewhat inconsistently, in that you often neglected to define the joint between the sausage segments with a contour line. There are also some other cases where you more completely set the sausage method aside, and opted to use a different approach.

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.

The last thing I wanted to call out is that when you finish up with your construction and move onto adding detail, you tend to do so with a general focus on "decoration" - that is, a process of doing whatever will make your drawing look more visually pleasing, often looking for reasons to put more ink down (and often leaning on form shading, which as discussed in Lesson 2 is not to play a role in our drawings for this course).

The thing is, decoration is not even that clear of a goal to aim for - after all, there's no clear point at which one has added 'enough' decoration. 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.

Just to make sure you fully grasp what I've laid out here, I'm going to assign some limited revisions below, so that we can catch any other issues prior to you moving forwards.