Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are generally moving in the right direction, but there are a couple things to keep in mind:

• You're keeping things pretty simple, but remember that the [characteristics of simple sausages]() we're aiming for are pretty specific - we want to maintain two circular ends of equal size (so avoid stretching them out and making them pointier), connected by a tube of consistent width (this you're mostly doing a good job of).

• Slow down a bit with your contour lines - specifically, invest more time in the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method. That'll help you achieve more accuracy. While you're not doing too badly in terms of accuracy, there are plenty that don't quite fit snugly within the silhouette of the sausage, which breaks the illusion that these lines are running along the surface of the form - especially on the second page, where you definitely appear to be in more of a rush.

Now, that sense of rushing is something that follows you into the insect drawings for this lesson. I can see for the most part that when it comes to the principles of this lesson, you are doing well (although there are a few areas where this can be improved), but when it comes to the core mechanics of how you're approaching your markmaking, there are a lot of places where you're slipping back into the mindset of sketching rather than drawing with planning, purpose, and intent.

While this is no doubt an early page, and one that is unique in your set, this one definitely reflects this most of all. You're thinking on the page, figuring out what kinds of marks you want to make as you draw, rather than as a separate step preceding each stroke. This results in a lot of additional marks that do not contribute to your final construction, but furthermore, actually serve to contradict it and remind the viewer that they're looking at a drawing on a flat page.

This coconut crab is in a lot of ways, showing a lot of signs of strong construction and consideration for how it exists in 3D space. There are however a number of aspects of how it was approached that break the illusion that it is in fact three dimensional, and remind the viewer that they're looking at a drawing (similarly to the previous page I referenced).

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.

So in that coconut crab, as shown here, there are a lot of cases of this where you've established a form in space, but then decided that the "actual" form you wanted to convey existed within the bounds of the shape you'd drawn. Basically you cut into that silhouette, or altered it to refine the shape, and in so doing, broke the connection between the three dimensional form it was representing and what was on the page.

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.

This isn't a set of procedures or rules that I expect you to follow with drawing in general - rather, it's important to always come back to the fact that the drawings we do in this course are exercises. Construction itself is an exercise - a puzzle that has you attempt to start from simple forms (because simplicity is what helps us achieve the illusion of solidity), and to build upon them towards that intended result. It's unlikely you'll perfectly reproduce that reference image, but it's not really the intent. The reference is just a source of information as we try and construct something tangible and believable on the page, whilst having maintained that illusion of solidity throughout, even as we built up its complexity.

You can also see this process demonstrated quite well in the more recent shrimp and lobster demos on the informal demos page.

Another point I noticed was 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, I'd say you employed the sausage method to some degrees, but generally left parts of it aside. The technique has specific requirements - adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages for each segment, have them overlap/intersect one another, and define that intersection with a contour line. They're all important.

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). This approach also lines up well with the idea of building up further forms and masses in 3D space, rather than interacting with the drawing in two dimensions (which is what we do when we refine/alter those silhouettes).

Now, while these are definitely things you'll need to address, I do feel you'll be better served addressing them in the next lesson, as opposed to having further revisions assigned. Each issue I've called out here will be as relevant there (after all, each lesson is just looking at the same problem through the lens of a different topic). So, I am still going to mark this lesson as complete - just be sure to apply my feedback as you get into drawing animals.