Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, overall these are done fairly well, but I do think that there are a few signs that you weren't as attentive to the instructions for this exercise as you should have been:

• Be sure to construct your organic forms around a central minor axis line - obviously you did this some of the time, but you weren't consistent in applying this step from the instructions to each one.

• Be sure to draw through each ellipse you freehand in this course two full times before lifting your pen - I noticed that you were drawing the little ellipses at the tips with just one round of the shape.

• You're fairly close to adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages, but not all the way there. Remember to avoid having ends of different sizes, and keep those ends circular in shape as well.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there's a lot of good here, that's for sure - lots of examples that your understanding of 3D space, and the way in which you're combining forms within that space, is developing nicely. I do have a couple suggestions that should help keep you on the right track and avoid little deviations, but there's actually one issue I want to stress more than anything else, and it's actually somewhat tangential to the main focus of this course: it's about how you approach the detail phase.

Overall, you're actually doing it pretty well - you focus a lot on the use of cast shadow shapes, on considering what kinds of shadows the insects' segmentation would cast on the surrounding areas and such. You do however go farther than that, in a way that is best left out of the work we do for this course. When it comes to figuring out how we want to tackle detail for a drawing, it helps to have a clear goal or target for what exactly it is we're trying to achieve. Here I think you're headed in the right direction, but you get a little distracted by the idea of decorating your drawings, doing what you can to make them more visually impressive. While that makes a lot of sense in most contexts, it's actually a little off the mark from what we're doing here in this course - specifically because decoration is an arbitrary goal with no clear definition. After all, it's not really clear when we've 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.

In a lot of cases, your detail work does focus on conveying this kind of information - but there are a few things that we can leave out for now to help keep the focus on that visual communication. As discussed back in Lesson 2, it's best to set form shading aside from our drawings here. Instead, we can reserve the filled black shapes for cast shadows specifically - even ignoring any local colour/patterns (like spots, or the blacks of their eyes). This basically means treating the whole object like it's covered in the same white colour, and focusing only on where forms will cast shadows upon one another.

This is particularly effective given our more limited selection of tools here, because the human brain will first try to interpret a black shape in drawings like this as a cast shadow. Only once it's realized that it's not looking at a shadow, will it start making sense of it as something else. Of course, once the viewer's brain has already spent so much time figuring out what they're looking at, we've already lost some of their suspension of disbelief. So instead, we play into what they expect.

As a side note, it's also easier to see what's going on with your construction when form shading is removed.

Going one step beyond that - and this part's really just a reiteration of Lesson 2's textural principles - make sure that every cast shadow shape you draw is designed to intentionally imply the presence of a particular textural form. It's easy to just put marks down to try to generally give an impression of something rough, or something bumpy, or something smooth - but here we specifically want to think about, "what is the nature of the specific bump that casts this shadow?" even as those specific shadows get merged into larger collective shadows cast by many forms simultaneously. It feels like a waste of time, but it really isn't. It's these smaller, individual shadow shapes which ultimately contribute to the larger silhouette of the big amalgamated cast shadow.

Now, moving on from that, the main other issue I wanted to call out is that there are some circumstances where you jump back and forth between interacting with your work as a 3D construction, and where you interact with it as though it were just a 2D drawing.

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.

Now while this specific issue comes up a little in your work (like in this caterpillar (where you started with a larger ball form, then cut right across it as you built up the significantly different caterpillar structure). In essence, we need to treat everything we add to a construction as though it is something solid and tangible - rather than jumping back into treating them as though they're 2D when it suits us. But again - this isn't an issue I saw from you very often.

There are other ways in which we can deviate from this rule of not altering the silhouette of a form that has already been added to the scene. For example, if we look at how you tend to build upon your legs' sausage structures, as shown here in this treehopper, you make little adjustments to those sausage forms' silhouettes by adding partial flat shapes to it. Again, this is an act occurring in 2D space, so it can serve to remind the viewer that they're looking at something two dimensional - even though that same treehopper's abdomen segmentation was built up really well, with a strong sense of dimensionality. It's factors like this - those that reinforce the illusion, and those that undermine it - which are always at odds in our drawings.

Instead of adding flat shapes to existing silhouettes, 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. You can also see this principle applied to building upon the sausage structures in this diagram as well as this one. You'll also find it in this ant leg demo and this dog leg demo (as this will continue to be relevant into the next lesson.

I'm glad to see that you were building on top of the sausage structure in the first place, but the manner in which we do so has a big impact. 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.

As a quick side note, I noticed some areas where you added contour lines through the middle of your sausage segments, so just be sure to review the sausage method diagram. It's got some specific requirements/rules laid out there that should be followed when building up that initial sausage structure, so it can balance the impression of gesture/fluidity, with its own solidity.

Now, I've called out a few things and have gone on at length, but I still feel that overall your work is demonstrating a good grasp of how to build structures up in three dimensions. While there are examples of you taking shortcuts in 2D, there are plenty of other examples of you building up in this three dimensional manner as well. I am happy to mark this lesson as complete.