I'm glad to hear that you're seeing improvement in your other drawings! That is ultimately the goal - that your underlying instincts gradually develop beneath the surface, and over time, bubble up into the very way in which you perceive and interact with your drawings. That is, instead of simply introducing students to a bunch of techniques for them to memorize, and consciously apply at every turn.

Jumping right in with your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing a good job for the most part of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as noted in the instructions. There are however a couple things you're forgetting:

• Firstly, do not skip the step where we place a line through the center of the sausage, to serve as the minor axis for our contour lines. Always be sure to go through the instructions again when a given exercise is reassigned later in the course, just to ensure that you're not missing anything.

• Be sure to draw through all the ellipses you freehand two full times before lifting your pen - in this case, that would be the contour ellipses placed at the tips of the forms.

• I noticed some weirdness in terms of the way your contour lines on some of these shifted in their degree, wider or narrower, throughout the length of their given sausages. In some cases, you did it correctly, considering both the natural shift towards a wider degree as we slide away from the viewer, while also incorporating shifts that reflect the actual turning of the sausage form at certain points. There are others however that either seem to work more arbitrarily (like this one where the sausage appears to be straight, but the contour curves get narrower moving from the left tip, towards the right, then suddenly start widening again), or those where the degree remains entirely consistent throughout the whole sausage, as seen here. I suspect this is simply something you're going to have to think on a bit more actively when doing this exercise.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there's a lot here that you're doing well. I can see a number of examples that clearly show a good grasp of how the things you construct exist in 3D space, specifically in terms of having forms wrap around those that precede them, building up your construction in a three dimensional manner. There are however cases where you interact with your constructions in two dimensions - treating them more like drawings on a flat page. Which, of course, they are.

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.

To be honest, I don't actually see a whole lot of cases where you're strictly cutting into the silhouettes of forms, but there are plenty of cases where you either add partial shapes or individual lines to either extend/modify existing forms' silhouettes. For example, if you take a look at this ant, you'll see something that appears to connect the thorax to the abdomen. While you've done a good job of defining how it intersects with the abdomen in 3D space, there's no real information to tell us how it relates to the thorax, and instead ends up existing in a more vague 2D sense. Similar things can be seen when you add the little spikes on the praying mantis' arms and thorax.

Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, 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.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see this in action in the shrimp and lobster demos on the informal demos page.

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.

It is worth noting that I'm definitely seeing improvement towards the end of your set, even in this regard, with your constructions coming together more additively, with more regard for how every little thing exists in 3D space than the earlier ones.

The last thing I wanted to call out is that while you're definitely doing a decent job of applying the sausage method for your leg construction, there's two main things that can help you continue pushing this in the right direction:

• Firstly, always strive for the characteristics of simple sausages - sometimes you end up with shapes that are more akin to stretched ellipses. That sort of thing sometimes happens, but it's always important to be cognizant of the specific requirements of this technique.

• The sausage method is initially 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. You've generally done a good job of that. Once in place, however, 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). Right now, you're largely sticking to that simple structure and calling it done, but looking more closely at your reference images you'll find that there's definitely a lot more that can be built up.

So! As a whole you do have some things to work on, but you're moving in the right direction and are showing a good deal of progress. Each of the points I've raised here can certainly continue to be worked on in the next lesson, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.