Starting with your organic forms with contour curves:

• You're doing an excellent job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages

• You appear to have misread the assignment, which was to draw two pages of organic forms with contour curves - you went with one of ellipses, one of curves. Not a huge deal, just a sign that you may want to take more care in reading the instructions.

• Be sure not to draw back over a mark multiple times just because it didn't go as intended - each mark should be drawn once, and then allowed to stand for itself. No correcting mistakes.

• I would recommend adding a contour ellipse on the tip of the sausage facing the viewer. In effect it's not any different from the contour curves - it's just that because that end is facing us, we can see the full way around the contour line. It really helps to make the form feel more three dimensional.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I've been using this lesson as a good opportunity to share with students the distinction between actions we take in 2D space - where we're just thinking about drawing lines on a flat page and not necessarily considering whether or not they directly impact the illusion we're trying to convey - and actions we take in 3D space, where we are actively thinking of every new addition as a complete, self-enclosed form, that exists in 3D space with the other forms around it. Actions we can take that respect and reinforce the illusion, rather than contradicting and undermining it.

Where I run into trouble, however, is when a student... already considers every action in three dimensions. It's not a problem because it leaves me without something to say (though that can be a problem), but it puts me in a position of weighing whether not mentioning it may cause such issues to come up later, since it was never directly addressed (especially currently as I'm overhauling the lesson material, eventually planning on incorporating it but for now really just addressing this as a "free preview of future concepts" for those on the official critique track).

You are indeed doing it correctly, and it's great to see- but I am going to take a moment just to make sure you understand why it's correct. And for that, I'm going to use some prewritten text:

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.

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.

So, again - you're doing this very well, and I hope to continue to see it going forward. Although I should note that while you're not strictly relying on all the contour lines you've been drawing to achieve this, you are using a ton of them. I'd urge you to make sure that you're asking yourself, "do I really need this, what's it meant to contribute, is it the best mark for the job" for every contour line you add (and really every line you draw), as part of the planning phase of the ghosting method. Contour lines simply run into diminishing returns very easily - and when it comes to building up additional masses (which we get into more in Lesson 5), it's very easy for students to draw them carelessly, then cover them in contour lines, instead of taking the time to design their silhouettes more purposefully from the beginning.

Anyway, continuing on, there's really just one concern I have to mention. I noticed 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. 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 - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

And with that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You've done very well, so keep up the great work.