Hi Cynsh, I've checked your submission,

Starting out with your organic forms, I'm seeing that you are pretty close to the average simple sausage, though in a lot of them you are finishing them very abruptly, losing a lot of sense of 3d form, also in some cases you are making the middle sections thinner. Now, keep this characteristics in mind, remember that the sausages we make are two equal size balls that are separated and connected by a tube.

Also, seeing your contour curves I noticed that they look really stiff and almost not round at all, take a closer look at them and you will realize that a lot of those contour curves are communicating that your sausages are almost flat. Another thing to remember is tovary the degrees of the contour curves, this will help you out to make your forms not look stiff.

So, moving on to your insects constructions, I'm seeing that you are striving to building up your constructions, though in some cases it looks like you are not building enough, or you are adding additional masses without giving them much thought.

The important thing about construction is that we start out with simple forms and keep on adding simple forms to gt more complex constructions (like you did on your lobster claw!). Now what I'm seeing that is happening in a lot of your insects is that you are just building the firsts masses and really not building much on top of them! For example in your lady bug, you are adding the shell like it's part of that first base form you draw, when in reality, it should be an extra mass that sits on top of that mass and wraps around it. Like here! One of your constructions that is taking good steps into that direction is your steg beetle, though again, remember that your additional forms should alwayswrap around your underlying forms.

On the same topic, when we construct, every form we add on top of our other forms should have a purpose and be three dimensional. Seeing your second page of your desert ant, I'm noticing that you are connecting your original forms, with very complex forms to which you didn't really give them a 3d though. I can see that you needed to connect those forms, so that's why you applied them, but remember that we can't just start adding forms without thinking of their three dimensionality (the least you can do is giving them some contour curves).

There are two things that you can do to solve this issue; first of all, building a solid base of 3d forms that will help you with your construction, this is key since some good underlying structure will set you up for success on the rest of your construction. What happened on your ant is that you it looks like you draw two balls for the abdomen, which didn't give you much room to keep adding masses. And secondly, you should add simple forms to create complex forms, do not jump straight into trying to add a mass that will solve all your problems, remember that, the more complex the form is, there more difficult is to draw it as a believable 3d form. This is how I would have approach that construction.

One thing that I'm noticing is that the legs that you are building are more like stiff sausages, rather than what it's shown on the sausage method that we are supposed to apply for this part of the construction. The point of the sausage method is to capture the gesture of the legs, while also constructing a base of 3d forms in which we can still build up more forms to give them solidity. Here is an example of this, I know that it doesn't look pretty at first, but remember that all this construction is about building up our forms and making them more solid as we go!

Lastly, I haven't talked a lot about cast shadows, which was what you were struggling with. First, I wanted to apologize because last lesson, when I critique your work, I told you that cast shadows where part of the construction phase, It turns out I was wrong, there are more on the texture side of things. Though, when applying cast shadows what you need to take into account is mainly that their form is dictated by the form on which they are being cast on.

Now, before marking this lesson as completed I want you to do some more pages of constructions, trying to apply the concepts that I talked in here.