Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, the main issue I want to point out here is that you don't appear to be entirely focused on maintaining the characteristics of simple sausage forms as mentioned in the instructions. You're not far off, but there are definitely plenty of instances where the width of your sausage swells through the midsection, and where the ends are not maintaining the same size. These characteristics are important, especially as we move into using these kinds of forms as base elements in our constructions. Keeping them simple will help them appear as solid as possible. We then achieve greater complexity by building on top of them - not by making each individual form more complex.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, it's very clear that you are focusing heavily on understanding how your forms exist in 3D space, making them feel individually three dimensional and pushing away from the simple idea that we're dealing with flat shapes on a flat page. While this focus is certainly correct, it has led you down a bit of a side path.

Most specifically, the biggest issue I'm seeing is that you're seriously overusing your contour lines. This is not uncommon for students, but when they cover their drawings in loads of contour lines, it very clearly suggests that the student isn't necessarily thinking about what each contour line is meant to accomplish, and instead piles them on because that's what they feel they're supposed to do. Given a series of tools, the answer seems to be to use them as much as possible.

This unfortunately isn't correct. Contour lines suffer from diminishing returns - this means that adding one may help a form feel 3D a great deal, while the second may have much less impact, and the third even less than that. This means that the vast majority of the contour lines you added weren't necessarily contributing much of anything, and the drawing would have appeared just as 3D and solid had you not included them.

Furthermore, there are two different kinds of contour lines that were introduced in lesson 2. The ones that sit along the surface of a single form (which we used in the organic forms with contour lines exercise) are the easiest to understand, but also the weakest option in our toolbox. Those covered in the form intersections however - that is, the contour lines which actually define the relationship between forms, as they exist in 3D space, are extremely impactful and can in many cases make the first kind unnecessary.

To put it simply, by defining the relationship between the forms we're connecting together, we can make those forms feel 3D with the use of minimal actual contour lines.

Before I move on from this, one last point - you don't appear to be drawing through all of your ellipses (like when you're using contour ellipses), so be sure to do so for every ellipse you draw within this course.

Next, take a look at this beetle. I marked out where you cut into the silhouette of the thorax to "refine" the form. Unfortunately, cutting back into your form in this manner - or more accurately, cutting into its two dimensional silhouette generally makes your drawing feel flat. The silhouette of a form is like the footprint an animal leaves behind in the mud. The footprint can tell us a lot about the type of animal it was, how big it was, how fast it was moving, etc. but if we were to modify the footprint, we wouldn't be changing anything about the animal itself. We'd just make the footprint a lot less useful.

Similarly, the silhouette is a two dimensional shape. It is not the form itself, and so if you cut back into it as you've done here, interacting with it in two dimensions, you will simply reinforce the idea that the drawing itself is two dimensional.

There is a more correct way to apply "subtractive construction", by actually cutting along the surface of the given form using contour lines (basically splitting the form into two pieces that could exist independently without appearing flat) as explained here. Generally speaking though, we don't use subtractive construction when dealing with organic subject matter, and instead opt for additive construction, where we build things up steadily through the introduction of new forms, wrapping them around the existing structure, or connecting them to it in some manner.

The last point I wanted to call out was the fact that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. 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, 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 - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

I'm going to assign some additional pages below for you to demonstrate that you understand what I've explained here, with one major restriction: I don't want you to use any contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form. You are still encouraged to use contour lines that define the relationship between two forms in 3D space, but the ones that just wrap around one form should not be used.