Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, overall you're moving in the right direction here, but there are some ways it can be improved. Firstly, you're clearly making an attempt to keep the sausage forms simple, but you are still straying from [the characteristics of simple sausages]() as described in the instructions. You should be aiming specifically to keep the ends equal in size and circular in shape, avoiding stretching them out, and avoiding one being bigger than the other. This is something you still need to work at.

Additionally, I noticed that while in some cases you would attempt to shift the degree of your contour lines, especially in situations where you had them reverse in their curvature through the midsection, there were many other cases where you stuck to roughly the same degree throughout the length of a given sausage. This suggests to me that you do understand that the contour lines should get wider/narrower as you slide along the length of a sausage, but that you're not necessarily thinking about it consistently as you work through it. If instead you don't fully grasp why this occurs, you can find an explanation in the lesson 1 ellipse video.

As a whole, I do feel that your contour lines - both curves and ellipses - are coming out rather stiffly, being somewhat unevenly shaped. This suggests two things - firstly, that you may not be executing the marks from your shoulder as you should be, and secondly that you may not be as consistent in your use of the ghosting method (specifically the planning and preparation phases) as you ought to be. These are all things you need to make conscious choices with, purposefully choosing how you execute your marks rather than relying on whatever feels normal, natural, or comfortable for you right now.

Moving onto your insect constructions, there are aspects of your drawings that are coming along nicely, but there are some key issues that need to be addressed. First and foremost, I'm noticing that you're approaching your drawing in two apparent stages - first you put your initial masses down with fainter lines, then you draw on top of them (sometimes disregarding those fainter lines) with darker, more committed strokes.

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.

We can see you doing this throughout your drawings, one example being the shrimp where the masses you started with were cut into quite liberally.

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.

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. Instead, choosing to treat the process as though we are merely making marks on a piece of paper - like how you're drawing with fainter lines, then feeling that because it's just a drawing, you can alter things freely. Accepting that what you're doing is building something solid and real, something that cannot be changed at a whim, but rather has to abide by strict rules, is key to achieving solid, believable results.

Now, that issue aside, beyond your initial masses, you did work with greater respect for your overall forms, considering how they wrapped around one another - this is something you need to do from the beginning, and is also something that will benefit from more attention.

Going through your work, I can see that you made an effort to apply the sausage method to your constructions, although again - this can be improved considerably by sticking closer to the characteristics of simple sausages for your segments. They are admittedly hard to draw at smaller scales though, so taking greater advantage of the space available to you on the page will help a great deal. For example, in the last page, the drawing in the bottom half has loads of empty space around it. It could have been much bigger.

Simple sausage forms are important because the sausage method is just a starting point - it establishes a base structure or armature that you can then build upon. 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.

Before I finish up, I'll address your questions:

• When it comes to texture, the principles discussed back in Lesson 2 are critical. Specifically the fact that you are not to simply draw what you see, but rather observing your reference image is the first step. Through that observation, you identify the little textural forms that are present there. It is from that which you determine the nature of the actual shadow shapes that you'll draw - each one you draw needs to be drawn with a focus on how the shadow shape relates to the form casting it. From what I can see, that was the step you've been missing when attempting to capture your shadows.

• Proportions aren't actually a major focus of this course. It is something that improves with practice and by investing more time in continually observing your reference, comparing how the size of one element in it compares to another, but as far as we're concerned in this course, we're not trying to reproduce the references perfectly. We are using the references as sources of information to help us choose which forms to add to our construction, with the focus being on creating something solid and believable, even if it is a little out of proportion at times. When you're through this course, there are others that focus on actual techniques that can refine your grasp of proportion, but for now just make sure that you spend the vast majority of your time observing your reference, and only look away for long enough to draw a specific form - its characteristics matching what it is you observed. The biggest source of trouble with proportion and accuracy generally comes from students trying to take in too much at once, and trying to draw it all without looking back at their reference frequently enough.

I'm going to assign some revisions below so you can address the issues I raised in my critique.