Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, by and large you're doing quite well here. Just two quick suggestions:

• I would try not to make all of them so dramatically bent - while there's nothing incorrect about it, most of the sausages you encounter in our constructions are going to be, well, like sausages rather than beans. Longer, more flowing.

• Also, keep in mind that the degree on your contour curves should, as a rule of thumb, get wider as we slide farther away from the viewer, as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there's a lot you're doing very well. One of the main things I bring up with students at this stage is the importance of distinguishing between the actions they take in 2D space - drawing individual lines on a flat piece of paper, where anything goes because nothing's really stopping you - from actions we take in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms we've already established as being solid and unchangeable, building upon them with yet more forms that actually exist in 3D space, wrapping around the existing structures rather than just being pasted on top of them like stickers.

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 there's two ways to alter a silhouette, and you barely fall into the trap of cutting into your silhouettes, except for one significant spot, which I've marked out here in red. It's clear what happened - you drew a mass for your thorax, decided it was too big, or not shaped correctly, and changed it. But as a result, you undermined the solidity of that form - it would have been better to maintain that solidity, and accept that your drawing would not match the reference image perfectly. Matching the reference image isn't really a major concern for us - really, it's just a source of information, giving us a direction in which to work. At the end of the day, each drawing is just a puzzle - something that forces us to work in 3D space, and to consider how our forms exist within that 3D space.

Now, the other side of the same coin, is something you're much more prone to doing, building upon your constructions by adding one-off lines or partial shapes, which I've marked out in blue. This has a similar effect, and also flattens out parts of our construction (though not as dramatically).

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 (which you should definitely compare to your own ant construction's head). 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.

I did notice that you drew along with the lobster demo, and mostly you did a good job - except for the fact that the lower segmentation on the abdomen doesn't wrap around the mass you'd established for that abdomen, leading to a sort of visual contradiction.

Circling back to those areas I highlighted in blue, you do have a tendency to use them a fair bit in really small areas, especially along the legs. Other than that, you make excellent use of the sausage method in a ton of these - or at least parts of it. You're clearly following the methodology outlined here, but you tend to neglect to define the joints between the sausages with contour lines, and there are some cases (like in this ant) where you're more prone to drawing ellipses in some spots instead of sausages.

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). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that you should avoid drawing anything faintly early on. I'm actually not sure if you did this on purpose - looking at the fact that it only really comes up in this ant, and it's only present on the head and thorax, in retrospect I'm thinking now that you may have just had a pen that was dying on you, and after the second faint form, you switched up. In which case, well done! But just in case (because it does come up in this dragonfly as well), definitely avoid purposely drawing anything faintly, as it puts us in a situation where we end up having to go back over those lines, which results in unintentional little changes to our form's silhouette.

So! As a whole, you're making good headway, and are moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.