Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, for the most part you're doing a decent job of adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages when drawing the sausage shapes themselves. When drawing the contour curves though, they are admittedly a little sloppy. Not too far off, but you do need to take a bit more time in drawing each one, and be sure to use the ghosting method and execute those marks with your whole arm to avoid more erratic strokes. Also, when drawing those contour ellipses at the tips, be sure to draw through them two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1. This is necessary for all the ellipses you freehand in this course.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, as a whole you're doing very well. I think you're paying a good deal of attention to the importance of building up your constructions step by step, building up to greater levels of complexity rather than jumping right into them too early. As a result, your constructions tend to feel quite solid and believable.

There are a few little issues of minor concern that I will address, though:

• I did notice a bit of a tendency to start your constructions out a little more faintly, and then get darker as you move forward. Try to avoid this - it's important that you draw each and every form with the same kind of respect/regard, treating them all like they're solid, three dimensional forms being added to the world. When drawing them more faintly, it's easier to end up treating them more like flat shapes, and to take certain liberties with them that one wouldn't take with a solid three dimensional mass in the world. For the most part I didn't see you taking these liberties, but it is best to avoid drawing more faintly altogether. If you take a look at the shrimp and lobster demos at the top of the informal demos page, you'll see clear examples of how every step is drawn with the same line thickness. We only add line weight in key, localized areas at the very end, to help clarify how specific forms overlap one another.

• While, as I said earlier, you did generally do a good job of building up your constructions step by step, I did notice that in this grasshopper's head you seemed to work a little less solidly, and actually ended up taking the initial cranial mass and extending it to build the rest of the head. This kind of modification of an existing silhouette is a bad idea - it treats the drawing like it's just a series of flat shapes on a page, and actually undermines the solidity of the resulting construction. Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, 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. You can see this at work in this ant head demo, which shows a very different approach, and a more solid result.

• I noticed that while you did appear to try to stick fairly closely to the sausage method when constructing your insects' legs, you ended up deviating in certain ways that you might not be entirely aware of. For example, there are definitely places where you end up drawing ellipses rather than sausage forms (like in the front legs of this moth, or deviating from the characteristics of simple sausages in other ways. Sometimes you'll pile on the contour lines, though the sausage method diagram says specifically to stick to only placing them right at the joint between forms. As a whole you're still doing a pretty good job in adhering to them - but even then, they can actually be pushed farther than just this basic structure. 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).

So! As a whole, you're doing quite well, so keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, and leave you to tackle the points I've raised here in the next one.