Hi there!

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, but there are a couple things to keep in mind:

• Remember to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1 - you're forgetting to do this for the ellipses on the tips of your sausages.

• Remember that the contour curves should be shifting wider in their degree as we slide farther away from the viewer along the length of the sausage. The reasoning for this is explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Also, for the organic forms with contour ellipses, be sure to execute your ellipses more confidently, using the ghosting method, to keep them smooth and evenly shaped - right now they're quite uneven and stiff, as a result of a hesitant execution. I should also point out that this exercise was not assigned here - it was two pages of organic forms with contour curves.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I think you're showing a great deal of improvement over the set, with many of your earlier constructions being more hesitant, where you're definitely not as confident in the choices you're making and the marks you're putting down, but the later constructions definitely improving on all of those areas. As a result, your forms come out feeling more solid, and your constructions become more cohesive as a result. That said, there are still a few pieces of advice I can offer to help you get the most out of these exercises going forward.

Firstly, let's take a moment to talk about the importance of noting the difference between actions that we take that occur in 3D space versus actions we can take that occur in 2D. 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.

I've marked out some examples of this here, with areas cutting into silhouettes marked in red, and those extending off existing forms' silhouettes in blue.

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. 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 forward, I wanted to mention that you're definitely doing a good job of consistently using the sausage method in the construction of your insects' legs. This is a good start, but the key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are, and so we're not actually finished with simply laying down a chain of sausages - 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).

The last thing I wanted to call out is that there are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

So! All in all you're definitely making progress and I'm very glad to see that the later drawings definitely demonstrated a much more solid grasp of the material. So, I'll leave you to address the rest as you move forwards into the next lesson. You may consider this one complete.