Jumping right in with your organic forms with contour curves, these are largely well done. You're making a visible effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, which I'm pleased to see. Keep working on the accuracy of your contour curves (while maintaining the confidence of the execution - continuing to work with the ghosting method here will gradually yield results). Also, be sure to exaggerate the shift in your contour curves' degree more, so that there's a more significant shift from narrow to wide as we move farther away from the viewer. If you're unsure as to why this is necessary, you can refer back to the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, by and large you've done a pretty good job. I can see a lot of attention being paid to how each structure is built up gradually by starting from simple pieces, and working your way up through the addition of yet further simple pieces. This is the bread and butter of construction, and I'm glad to see that you're continuing to apply it effectively.

That said, there is some advice I can share to help you continue to get as much as you can from these exercises. Ultimately, how we ourselves perceive the things we draw (and the space in which they exist, be it as a solid structure in 3D, or as a collection of lines and shapes on a flat page in 2D) influences the results.

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.

We can see this demonstrated in this fire ant drawing, where I've highlighted in red the few places where you cut into your forms' silhouettes, and in blue where you extended them out through the addition of flat shapes.

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 process in a more general sense in the more recent 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. This matters because we are also the viewer, and as we include more marks that remind ourselves that we're working in two dimensions, we're likely to continue adding more, further eroding that illusion. If however we continually reinforce that lie to ourselves, we will continue to reinforce it for others as well.

Continuing on, one quick point I wanted to make is that you have a tendency of overusing contour lines - sometimes a little, and in the case of the dragon fly, sometimes a lot. Every tool you're given throughout this course is just that - a tool. Like a hammer being tucked into your tool belt, having the tool does not mean that one should use it as much as possible. We must always be conscious and aware of exactly what we're using that tool to achieve, and whether it's really suited to the task at hand.

This all falls to the planning phase of the ghosting method (which you're still expected to use for every structural mark in these exercises). The planning phase is where we ask ourselves questions - what is the purpose of this mark I wish to draw, how can I draw it such that it'll do its job as effectively as it can, and do any marks already exist that are already doing this job for me?

While the organic forms with contour lines exercise is a great introduction to the concept of contour lines, it is not an entirely realistic example of their use, for the simple reason that we rarely ever require that many contour lines. The more we add, the less each individual one is actually helping, as they suffer from diminishing returns. Instead, we need to consider whether or not they're actually necessary, before we pile them on. Often times they're not actually necessary at all.

Such a case can be seen with the sausage method that we use for constructing legs for both the insects in this lesson, and the animals in the next. As shown in the sausage method diagram, we add a contour line right at the joint between our sausage segments, and no where else along their length. Reason being, this kind of contour line is special - it's introduced in Lesson 2's form intersections exercise. Because they define the relationship between entirely separate 3D forms, they're extremely effective in making both feel solid and three dimensional, making any other contour lines unnecessary.

Jumping over onto talk about the sausage method and leg construction, again - I'm pleased to see that you're applying the sausage method, although there are certainly aspects of it that you're missing, so be sure to review its specific requirements. From there, once that basic underlying structure is 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. I noticed that there were cases where you did indeed try to build upon them, but this was usually through the addition of flat shapes, whereas these approaches hold more tightly to the principles of additive construction I shared above.

Now, there are certainly things for you to keep in mind here, but as a whole you're progressing in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so be sure to continue addressing the issues into the next one.