Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, I should first note that you actually misread the assignment here - it was to do two pages of contour curves, not one page of ellipses and one of curves. Not a huge issue, just be sure to read the instructions more carefully in the future.

As a whole you're doing decently well, but there are a couple things to keep an eye out on:

• Remember that the characteristics of simple sausages that we're looking to match require both ends to be equal in size, and circular in shape. I did notice a couple spots where they deviated from this requirement more noticeably - although the rest stick fairly well to the characteristics we're after.

• I only saw this once, but it's important enough to stand out. On this one you placed an ellipse on the end that, according to all of the other contour curves, is pointed away from the viewer. When we add a full ellipse on the end of a sausage, it's no different from any other contour line except for the fact that because the surface is facing us more directly, we're able to see the whole way around the contour line, rather than just a partial curve. This of course requires that end to be facing us, so you need to keep track of what all your other contour lines are asserting. In this case, the ellipse should have been on the other end. In case you're unsure of what I mean, you can take a look at this diagram which features the same sausage with different contour lines describing it in different ways. The key point however is that on each individual incarnation of this sausage, the contour lines always give a consistent impression of how it's oriented in space, and do not contradict one another.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, as a whole you've done very well. The first thing I want to talk about is actually a mistake you only make early on, and effectively stop altogether as you progress through the set, suggesting that it's a non-issue. It is however an important concept, and one that I'm really just looking for a reason to explain, so that as you progress onto the next lesson you'll be well armed for the later challenges you'll face.

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.

As I mentioned, you only really do this on one place, at least in any notable fashion. It's this ant. In red, I've highlighted places where you appeared to cut back into some forms, and in blue I identified some places where you extended out existing forms through the addition of flat shapes that only provide us with enough information to understand how they exist in two dimensions. This latter issue (the one marked in blue) is definitely more common and comes up in small places elsewhere, but even here as far as the red goes, the biggest case was at the tip of the abdomen where your ellipse ended up looser than you intended, and you had a stray little stroke extending out. Thing is, that stray line pushes the silhouette of the form further out. When we end up with looser ellipses than we intend, we pretty much have to treat its outermost edge as the perimeter of the resulting form's silhouette - that way any other stray marks will exist within that silhouette, rather than outside of it where it can give the impression of a self-contradictory construction.

Getting back to the advice - instead of cutting into silhouettes, or attaching flat shapes to our constructions, 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.

Continuing on, I am quite pleased to see that you were employing the sausage method a fair bit throughout your insects' legs, and that you made a point of sticking closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, while also being sure to define the joints between them with contour lines. I do however have some advice on how we can then go on to build upon these sausage structures, whose purpose is not so much to capture the entirety of a given leg structure, but to lay 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).

Now, before I finish up this critique, I wanted to address your question - although the answer is more of an explanation as to why your concern isn't really a problem. The thing to keep in mind is that what we're doing throughout this course is not drawing a bunch of pretty, well-rendered drawings. Rather, each drawing is itself an exercise - a 3D spatial puzzle that allows us to train our brain to think about the relationships between the different forms we're encountering. Every new construction further rewires the way in which our brains perceive the space in which those objects exist.

Even texture, as we explore it in this course, works towards the same goal because it's not about conveying an arbitrary sort of "decoration" where we do whatever we can to make our drawings appear more detailed and visually pleasing, once the construction is finished. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

When the surface of your lobster's chitin is shiny, however, that comes from the smoothness of its surface - the absence of little protruding forms and irregularities. And so, it's simply something we do not capture here as we work through each of these exercises.

As to the other question, no - you should absolutely not be using any tools that have not been explicitly permitted. You are right however - providing a shadow on the floor allows our constructions to feel more grounded. But what we can do for this instead is to draw an outline of this ground shadow. You can see an example of this here in the house fly demo.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work.