I SAID NO SELF CRITIQUE! WHY DOESN'T ANYONE EVER LISTEN TO ME.

Alrighty! So jumping right into your organic forms with contour lines, your work here is pretty good, but there are two things to keep an eye on:

• This happens semi-often so I'm sure it's something you're working on, but try to avoid having the contour lines floating around the sausage, as though it's hovering above the surface, rather than on it. Of course this means getting them to fit snugly within the silhouette of the sausage, which takes practice, but keep working at it.

• Also, the specific degree of each contour line looks like it's somewhat intentional, but it's kind of mixed. You've got cases like this one where they're quite inconsistent, jumping around from cross-section to cross-section, and cases like this where despite reversing them in the middle (which is a good touch), they're mostly still roughly the same degree except the one on the far left. There are many others like this as well, which suggests that the far left may have been an outlier. Remember that as explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the contour lines should be getting wider as they move farther away from the viewer.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there's a lot here that you're doing well - you're holding fairly well to the principles of construction (in that you're building up from simple to complex), and you're demonstrating good observational skills when it comes to identifying your major forms and such. Addditionally, I felt this triolobite beetle showed an especially solid collection of constructed forms, with each one feeling especially three dimensional, especially because of how the segmentation wraps around the abdominal section.

Weirdly enough though, this is also going to be the example I use for something I explain to most students at this stage which... relates to why our constructions can come out less solid than we intend - and so this might be a bit confusing, so bear with me.

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.

So, as promised - here's my confusing example. On the beetle, I've marked out in red where you cut into that initial abdominal form, and in blue where you added open-ended shapes for all the legs, to kind of extend off the existing structure but without clearly defining what the relationship between them and the rest of the structure is meant to be in 3D space. There are definitely other drawings where your constructions feel more flat than this, but the issue there is more related to being kind of loose and haphazard with some of your linework - something I'll talk about a little further down.

But getting back on track - instead of just laying down individual lines and partial shapes, 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.

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.

Stepping back to what I mentioned about some of your linework being a little haphazard, it's more that your mind is uncertain of what to focus on at any given time. This can definitely happen if we're looking at a complex reference image and trying to figure out which mark to put down next. But what helps is this focus on forms - of establishing individual forms one at a time. You can see this demonstrated more clearly in the shrimp and lobster demos at the top of the informal demos page - they go hard into building up structures one form at a time, so try and replicate that approach, and that focus on everything we've built up at any point in the process always being solid before we move onto the next.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is your use of the sausage method. Here I can clearly see that you're making an effort to employ it, but how successfully you do so is a bit of a mix, because I think as you progress through the lesson it falls further into the back of your mind, rather than a specific approach that should be employed in a specific way each time. As shown here, the sausage method has a number of specific requirements:

• Stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. You definitely do this a lot, but there are cases where you'll slip back into using stretched ellipses instead.

• Ensure that the sausage forms are overlapping their ends properly - generally you're pretty good with this.

• Define the joint between the sausage segments with a contour line - you are putting a contour line down, but if you look at cases like this mantis, the contour curves you're drawing are not going in the right direction to define their joint. Here's what I mean.

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).

So! I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but there's three main things for you to focus on most of all as you move forwards into the next one:

• Try not to let yourself get overwhelmed by your reference - or if you do, take a step back instead of putting marks down on the page. Focus on finding a specific 3D form to place in the world of your drawing, rather than a single stroke.

• Always respect the fact that what you're building up is real, solid, and 3D. The page is just a window looking out onto your creation.

• Refine your use of the sausage method, and try to build on top of it by wrapping new masses around them as needed.