Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, overall you're doing pretty well here, although I do want to urge you to take a closer look at the characteristics of simple sausages. You're very close to adhering to them well, although you do have a tendency to stretch the ends out a little, making them more ellipsoid instead of circular, and at times widening the midsection a little.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, overall you've done quite well. I can see a great deal of thought going into how you're building these objects up using 3D forms, and the way in which those forms relate to one another in space. There are however three main points I'm going to call out, and the first of them is how this 3D thinking can be improved further as you continue to work through the exercises throughout this course.

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.

If we take a look at this beetle, I've marked out in red such cases where you've cut into your existing forms' silhouettes, as well as in blue where you've extended off existing structures with a partial shape.

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, overall you're making pretty good use of the sausage method, although aren't always adhering to every point mentioned in the sausage method diagram. Notably there are places where you deviate from the characteristics of simple sausages (though these are probably just unintentional mistakes due to this being considerably harder at smaller scales). More importantly however, you do more frequently tend to skip over the step of defining the joint between those sausages with a contour line, as noted in the middle of the diagram.

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 thing I wanted to discuss is to do with texture, detail, and decoration - and your tendency to approach the detail phase more as decoration, rather than applying the concepts from Lesson 2. So in effect, I'm talking about the details you added here and here. Rather than adhering to these principles from Lesson 2, which focus on understanding how each textural form sits in space, and considering the shadows it would cast on its surrounding surfaces as a result, you're generally leaning more towards just pulling what information you can from your reference to add directly on your drawing - more as decoration, rather than as actual 3D information.

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.

So! just something to keep in mind going forward, when you push beyond the core construction in your future drawings. Still, overall you're doing quite well, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You can continue to address these points in Lesson 5, where they all continue to be just as important.