Jumping in with your organic forms with contour curves, your work here is largely well done. You're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, and your contour curves are confidently executed and evenly shaped. Just two things to keep an eye on:

• Be sure to draw through those ellipses at the tips two full times - you probably mean to, but you tend to stop at 1.5 turns of the shape

• Don't forget that your contour curves should be getting wider as we slide further away from the viewer. You can review the Lesson 1 ellipses video if you're unsure as to why that is.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there is a great deal you're doing well here, especially when it comes to building up your constructions from simple to complex, and achieving a general sense of solidity and three dimensionality. I do however have some suggestions on how this can be pushed even further, some advice about leg construction, and finally some thoughts on how you're approaching the texture phase of your constructions.

Starting with pushing the illusion that these constructions are three dimensional even further, this comes down to creating a distinction in our minds between the actions we take that occur in two dimensions - basically putting lines and shapes on a flat page - and the actions we can take in three dimensions where we're continually focused on respecting and reinforcing the illusion that the existing forms and structures are indeed 3D, and not just lines on a piece of paper.

You're making a lot of those 3D decisions already, but we can push ourselves to be more conscious about which category each action we take falls into, so we can avoid the former and lean more and more into the latter. 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.

So for example, on this beetle I've identified some spots in red where you've made little cuts into the silhouettes of your forms, and in blue where you've extended off forms that are already present with partial/flat shapes. 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, I'm very pleased to see that you're generally making good use of the sausage method when constructing your legs. I did however want to provide some additional information on how we can then build upon those structures while adhering to the points above. 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, complete, fully self-enclosed 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).

Now the last thing I want to discuss is to do with how you're approaching the texture phase, once your construction is established. Right now you're doing an excellent job of effectively "decorating" your drawings - your results look lovely, and you handle the process of making them more visually pleasing very well. That said, decoration is not really what we're after in this course - mainly because decoration is itself rather arbitrary, and doesn't provide us with a clear goal (or a point at which we know that we're done, and that we've added enough). As a result this can leave us looking for any reason to put more marks down, which can distract us from the actual focus on the textural elements in our object.

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 they relate to the same core principles. They're just represented differently in the drawing.

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.

Anyway, that about covers it. As a whole you're still doing great, and your results here are something to be proud of. All the points I've mentioned can continue to be addressed into the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Keep up the good work.