Starting with your organic forms exercises, I noticed that you appear to have done one page of ellipses and one page of curves. While it's not a huge deal, I did want to note that the assignment was to do two pages of organic forms with contour curves - be sure to keep a closer eye on what is being assigned.

Overall you're doing a pretty decent job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages - keep working on ensuring that the ends are circular in shape, try to avoid the cases where they get a little more stretched out. Also, I do feel that you could stand to take a little more time on the individual contour curves - they're definitely drawn very confidently, which is great and achieves a smooth execution and an even shape, although putting a bit more time into the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method should help you increase your overall control. And of course, do not go back over your contour lines as you do here. That is reserved only for ellipses, because drawing around the shape multiple times without lifting the pen tends to lean into the arm's natural desire to draw ellipsoid shapes.

Moving onto your insect constructions, there is a lot you're doing quite well here, along with some important suggestions I can offer to help keep you on the right track, and ultimately to help you get the most out of these exercises. While we will talk about how we can push this much farther, I do find that one of your biggest strengths here is that you are clearly thinking about how the forms you're placing in the world are arranged in three dimensions, which really helps to convey a lot of the general depth and 3D nature of the insects themselves. For example, if we look at this cricket, there is a clear sense of how the head is closer to the viewer, the thorax is behind that, and the abdomen behind it - rather than being arranged on a flat page, the entirety of which is roughly equidistant from the viewer, there's a clear sense of "closer" and "farther" and it really goes a long way. This is primarily achieved through the overlaps between those forms, along with some subtler elements that arise from your own internal understanding of the nature of what you're drawing.

This can however be taken further. While the arrangement of the forms is very strong, there are things you're doing here that cause individual forms to themselves come out flatter than you intend. This comes down to distinguishing between the actions we can take in 2D space, where we're just putting marks down on a flat page, with all of the freedom that entails, versus actions we can take in 3D space, where we're actively thinking about each form we add as being something solid and three dimensional, and also drawing them in such a way that every new mark respects and reinforces the 3D nature of the structure to which that given form attaches.

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.

Looking at this weevil construction, I've noted out a number of places in red where you've cut back into the silhouettes of forms that had already been established, and in blue where you'd extended off those forms' silhouettes, expanding them in two dimensions but without providing the viewer with enough information to understand how those additions exist in 3D space.

One thing I did notice is that many of the instances of cutting into forms (though not all) came down to the fact that your ellipses would come out a little loose (which is totally normal), and then you'd pick one of the inner edges to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately would leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it.

Now, getting back on track - 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.

Another point I did notice was that while you were definitely making a conscious effort to apply the sausage method when constructing your insects' legs, you did have a tendency to draw ellipses rather than sausages (often ending up doing so because you were drawing through those shapes, which as discussed above leans into drawing ellipses rather than sausages). You also often neglected to draw the joint between the sausage segments, which is an important part of the technique, as shown in the middle of the sausage method diagram.

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.

Now, as a whole I still think that your underlying spatial reasoning skills are developing well, and each of the technical/procedural issues I've outlined here can continue to be addressed into the next lesson, where they are just as relevant. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - just be sure to take notes on what I've said here and revisit my feedback to ensure that you are continually focusing on addressing these points as you move forwards.