Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're generally doing okay, but there are a few important issues I want to call out and correct:

• Firstly, you're clearly making an effort to stick to the general idea of keeping to the characteristics of simple sausages, although when it comes to specific you do fall a little short. Remember that we specifically want ends that are circular in shape (many of yours are a little more stretched out), and equal in size, as well as connected by a tube of consistent width, without any narrowing through the midsection.

• While you're adding ellipses on some of the ends of your sausages, it appears you may not fully understand what those ellipses are meant to represent. They are in fact no different from the contour curves, in that they're the visible portion of a contour line. It just so happens that when the tip of a sausage faces the viewer, that the contour ellipse is visible all the way around. The thing is, in your drawings here, you fairly often placed a full ellipse on the end that the other contour curves implied was facing away from the viewer. Here's a list of different configurations we can have for the same sausage shape - note the relationship between the contour ellipses and the contour curves preceding them, and how they all convey a consistent story about how the given sausage is oriented in the world.

• Lastly, the choice of degree for your different contour lines appears to be somewhat arbitrary and random, with those contour curves suddenly getting wider or narrower without any clear reason for it. Remember - as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, your contour curves are generally going to get wider as we slide along the sausage away from the viewer. The way the sausage turns also impacts this, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb to follow. And of course, the degree of the contour ellipses you place on the tips must follow the trend defined by the contour curves preceding them, rather than always being circles.

Before we jump into your insect constructions, I want to address the point you raised about not really understanding what we ought to consider 'details' and how to think about them in the context of this course. In truth, there are technically both structural details (things we add to our drawing as part of the construction - generally these are going to be the smaller, subtler structures that don't really follow along an existing surface, and thus constitute a part of the overall structure), and there are textural details (little forms that run along the surface of a larger object). What we're dealing with here are textural details.

In general it does appear that when you get into details, you get more swept up with the general pursuit of "decoration" - that is, doing what you can to make the drawings more visually pleasing. This leans into that lack of direction, and knowing when to stop, as there's never any clear point at which one as added "enough" decoration.

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 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.

That's where we get into the use of implicit markmaking, as discussed in the Lesson 2 texture section. Also, remember that as discussed here, form shading is not something we incorporate into our drawings for this course, and in general, it's best to reserve our areas of filled, solid black, for conveying cast shadows specifically, as this helps keep the purpose of each individual tool in our arsenal more consistent towards a singular purpose.

Anyway, getting back into the construction itself, I think overall you're doing a pretty good job. There are some things I can share - and I will - on the topic of jumping between regarding what we're creating as a solid, three dimensional structure, and regarding it as a series of marks or shapes on a flatp age, but as a whole I do feel that you are spending most of your time thinking about what you're producing as it exists in 3D space. This helps you achieve more solid, believable results.

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.

For the most part across your work this happens in relatively small, subtle areas - redrawing the entirety of the jumping spiders' leg segments to make them wider and add bulk to the previous sausage structure (not a bad thought, but there are better ways to approach this that we'll get into), cutting into the cricket's initial head mass to gently refine its shape, and so on. While these are small things, they are operations that occur in two dimensions, and thus they undermine our own belief as we're drawing, that what we're drawing is actually 3D.

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 in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see this in action in the shrimp and lobster demonstrations from the informal demos page. Note in particular how at every step, every new form that is introduced is established as being solid and 3D before moving forward - and every subsequent step reinforces that illusion, rather than undermining it. 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.

Now, I should repeat - overall you are doing a pretty good job of holding to this, but the issues do come up here and there in small ways. One thing that may contribute to it is your tendency to use a lot of line weight, more aggressively than is strictly necessary. You don't actually need to go back over your entire drawing with line weight - rather, it's better to be more sparing and subtle with it, focusing it only on the areas where overlaps between forms actually occur (in order to clarify those overlaps) as shown with these two overlapping leaves. In your drawings, I am noticing a tendency to make your earlier marks much lighter and fainter, which itself can contribute to the sense that maybe they're not meant to be solid and 3D just yet. Of course, the nature of these exercises throughout this course requires every single form, right to the earliest one, to be solid and tangible.

To that end, refrain from splitting your drawings into these kinds of distinct underdrawing/cleanup pass stages, as explained here.

So the last thing I wanted to share was that while you're definitely holding to the core principles of the sausage method when constructing your legs (which is great, and you should continue doing so into the next lesson), we can hold to the principles of 'additive construction' discussed above even when building onto our leg structures. At the end of the day, we start with those simple sausage structures (which themselves serve as a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure), and then we attach new forms to them one by one. If that new form intersects with the existing structure, then we define that intersection with a contour line right at the joint (as in the form intersections exercise from Lesson 2).

Most of your forms however will wrap around the existing structure, and so we design those new masses' silhouettes to convey that impression, as shown here, and here. You can see this in action 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! I've shared a number of things for you to keep in mind, but all in all you are moving in the right direction - just make sure you get the issues I pointed out in regards to your organic forms with contour lines sorted out. As to the rest, you'll be able to continue addressing it throughout the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.