Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are coming along fairly well, but it's really important that you not forget to adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages. You're not far off, but there are signs, with some of these sausages getting more pinched through the midsection and some ends getting a little more stretched out (rather than remaining circular) that suggest it may be slipping your mind here and there.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I am largely pleased with your results. I think that over the course of the lesson your grasp of how each of these forms combine together to create a solid, believably 3D result improves and the idea that you're constructing things in 3D space improve with each drawing. There are a couple things I want to address however, to help keep you on the right track.

The first thing I'm noticing is the heavy use of contour lines in places where they're perhaps not serving much of a purpose. For example, looking at the rhinoceros beetle's smaller horns, you've got a lot of contour ellipses in there. Take a look at this - notice how I can get away without a single contour line along the length of the horn? There are contour lines there, but they're very specific ones that define the relationship between different 3D forms, and in doing so, they create a very strong sense that these are all existing in 3D space. Not all contour lines are equal - you can often get away with just one or two, if you focus on putting them where they do the most work.

This is a principle we actually talk about as part of the sausage method (you'll see it mentioned in the middle). When using the sausage method, you have a tendency to include contour lines in the middle of your sausage segments - you shouldn't. Instead, focus entirely on all of the major aspects of the sausage technique:

• Sticking to simple sausage forms. That is, two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width.

• Ensuring those sausage segments overlap one another properly.

• Reinforcing the joint between them with a single contour line, with no others elsewhere along their lengths.

That first point may be difficult for you to apply when looking at many of these insects. For example, if we look at the monkey hopper at the end, they've got legs that get narrower in some places, larger in others. How do we achieve that with simple sausage forms? We do this by breaking the process into multiple steps, just like the constructional method as a whole. First we lay down a simple armature of sausages, adhering to the sausage method. Then, once it's in place, we add additional forms as shown here to add bulk wherever it's needed. It's a matter of adding forms and defining how they wrap around the existing structure. As long as these spatial relationships are defined, the legs will still feel solid as they did with the sausages, and will still maintain the same sense of fluidity. It's just a matter of building things up more gradually, rather than trying to tackle many different things all at once.

This will continue to come up in the next lesson as well, as we'll be using the same technique to construct our animals' legs.

So, with those points laid out, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to keep them in mind as you continue on.