Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, by and large you're doing a good job. You're sticking fairly closely to the characteristics of simple sausages (with some small deviations, in terms of midsections that get a bit wider, or ends that are more stretched out rather than circular, so continue to keep an eye on that), and your contour curves are confidently drawn, and fairly well controlled. Do keep in mind however that the degree of your contour curves should be shifting gradually towards getting wider as we slide farther away from the viewer along the length of a cylindrical structure, as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there's a lot you're doing very well here, but there are a few important pieces of advice I want to impart. The first of these pertains to the importance of distinguishing between actions we take in 2D space, by drawing lines and shapes on a flat page, and the actions we take in 3D space, by actually thinking about constructing complete, fully self-enclosed forms in 3D space, and considering how they interact with one another as we build upon them.

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 some examples of this here where in red I've marked out spots where you cut back into the silhouettes of forms you'd laid down. This can also occur where we extend off a given form's silhouette using one-off strokes or partial shapes that do not fully enclose themselves without using the edges of other existing structures.

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. 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.

There actually is already a ton of solidity to your constructions here, but these are small ways in which you risk undermining them. It also occurs a lot with the more general use of line weight, where you're frequently going back over lines after first having put them down more lightly and faintly, as if putting down a rougher sketch. This approach - while entirely valid and used plenty by other artists - should not be used here. Instead, line weight itself can be used more effectively by limiting its use to defining how different forms overlap, especially by placing it only in those localized areas (where the overlaps occur) as shown here.

The next point I wanted to discuss is about how you're approaching the pages themselves. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. - for example, on this page you've got loads of space to make each of those drawings quite a bit bigger. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that by and large you are generally making good use of the sausage method, in that you're sticking pretty closely to the characteristics of simple sausages. Many students have a tendency to stray from those sausages, especially when they feel that the legs of a given insect don't seem quite "sausage-like". 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. So, again - that's something you're generally doing well.

That said, these legs are - specifically when you then build upon them - cases were you're more prone to working in 2D. This of course can be managed while holding more closely to the principles of "acting in 3D" as discussed above - 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).

That about covers it - all in all you're making great progress, and everything I've mentioned here can be addressed as you move into the next lesson (where they all continue to be relevant). So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.