Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, the first thing that jumped out at me is just how much blank space you left on the page. While many of these would be better off drawn bigger (so as to give your brain more room to think through the spatial problems involved, and to make it easier to engage your whole arm from the shoulder), you may want to reflect on what standard you used to determine when a page was done, as this seems to be quite arbitrary, and without concrete basis.

Another point that stands out is that while you've got a number of sausages here that adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages (as noted here in the instructions), you also have quite a few that deviate from it quite dramatically, which suggests to me that you may not have been aware of this requirement, and thus may not have actually reviewed the instructions. Do not work from memory, as it is not reliable.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I can see both elements that stand out as significant strengths, as well as some notable areas for improvement. Starting with the former, I want to talk specifically about this praying mantis' abdomen, as it is exceptionally well constructed. Reason being, you've taken full advantage of the segmentation/plating of chitin along the abdominal structure and allowed it to not only respect the solid nature of the underlying structure, but to also reinforce the fact that it's 3D by believably wrapping around it. In effect, you're using those forms in the same way we wrap contour lines around a given structure, and it makes a big difference.

This speaks to the difference between actions we can take that occur in 3D space, and those that occur in 2D where we're just drawing marks on a flat page, with all the freedom to undermine the solidity of our construction that entails.

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 at first glance it does appear that you avoided this in many cases but I think it is more because, like in the organic forms with contour curves where you picked an arbitrary point to stop, you have a tendency here to stop at a much simpler stage of construction, and only have a few limited cases where you pushed further. We'll talk about this briefly in a moment, but in the interest of staying on topic, I merely wanted to point out that when you do run into these issues of working more in 2D space, it's when you're delving more into pushing the boundaries of your constructions' complexity.

As shown here on this beetle I've marked out some spots with this kind of issue. In red you'll find cases where you cut into your forms' silhouettes, and in blue where you extended them through the addition of partial shapes, but without providing enough information to help us understand how they're meant to attach to the existing structure in three dimensions.

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.

Now, getting back to the topic of your tendency to stop at fairly simple levels of construction, it may help if I explain the distinction between construction and textural detail, as it's possible that you're simply stopping early because you may be viewing what falls under construction as being "detail".

Construction focuses on building up solid, three dimensional forms. Not just your big, general ones, but it also includes the smaller ones we add as we build up that complexity through successive phases. So for example, your praying mantis' abdominal segmentation is absolutely construction, because it's made up of yet more solid, three dimensional forms. So, looking at the same praying mantis, if we look at its arms there's a ton of additional complexity there:

• The segmentation on the extra section hanging off the main arm structure

• This knobbier bit at its "elbow"

• The various spikes coming off the structure

And so on. Now, you may feel that the sausage method doesn't allow for this, but that suggests a bit of a misunderstanding of what the sausage method entails. 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 be sure that when you're building up the initial sausage structure, that you're adhering as closely to the points mentioned in the sausage method diagram as you can. That means sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, allowing the sausages to overlap, and defining the joint between the sausages with contour lines. Based on how you're approaching your sausage structures right now, you may not be following that diagram as closely as you should.

Now, moving onto the "detail" phase - that is, what we do when we've taken construction as far as we reasonably can, the goal here is pretty specific, but based on that last beetle drawing, I think you approach it with more of a focus on decoration. That is, doing what you can to make the drawing appear more visually pleasing. Unfortunately, decoration does not really give us a concrete goal to work towards - after all, there's no clear point at which one has added "enough" decoration.

As discussed above, this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - but the important thing to keep in mind is that 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.

Now, this critique is pretty lengthy, so I'm going to call it here, and assign some revisions below, so you can demonstrate your understanding of the points I've raised above, and address those concerns.