Jumping right in with your organic forms with contour curves, by and large you're doing a great job. You're generally sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as per the instructions (with just a few minor discrepancies, mainly slight pinching through one or two midsections, and ends that are at times more stretched, becoming elipsoid instead of circular). You're drawing your contour curves well too, fitting them snugly within the boundaries of each sausage's silhouette, although do remember that you want their degree to shift wider as we slide further along the length of the form.

The only other issue that I did notice was that you appear to be set on placing ellipses on both ends of your sausages in all cases, which suggests to me that you don't understand what those ellipses signify. In essence, they're contour lines like any other - but in the cases where a tip of the sausage is facing towards the viewer, we can see the whole way around - a full ellipse instead of just a partial curve. You however are placing them in cases like this where the preceding contour curves make it clear that this end of the sausage is facing away from the viewer. You can see the distinction by looking at this diagram - note where we place the contour ellipse, and where we don't. Also, of course, be sure to draw through each ellipse you freehand throughout this course two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there's a lot you're doing quite well here, along with some points I do want to draw to your attention in order to help you get the most out of these exercises. Overall, I can see that you're investing a great deal of time into observing your references, and as a result you're picking up on a lot of different elements of complexity that could otherwise be lost if we started oversimplifying. You're also demonstrating a good focus on the idea of building up complexity in stages, pushing from simple to complex.

Now, the first point I want to discuss is the distinction between actions we take in 2D space - where we're only really considering how the lines we're drawing represent two dimensional information on the flat page - and actions we take in 3D space, where we're considering how those lines on the page actually represent three dimensional structures, while respecting and reinforcing the 3D nature of the structures that already exist in the scene.

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, for example, we can see some pretty apparent cases of this here on this weevil. In red you've got areas where you're cutting into silhouettes, and in blue where you're extending off them in 2D space.

Instead, 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 noticed 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. In your case, I can clearly see that in most cases (except for the grasshopper) you did generally try to apply the sausage method, although you didn't always do so in its entirety - often leaving out the contour lines that define the joints between the sausages, and sometimes deviating from the specific characteristics of simple sausages shown in that 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.

So - I've outlined some things to keep in mind, but these are all things that can continue to be addressed into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete, just be sure to actively tackle these points as you handle your animals. It's not uncommon for students to acknowledge these points here, but forget about them once they move on, resulting in me having to repeat it in the next critique (which we certainly want to avoid).