Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are generally coming along well, but there are a couple things I want you to keep an eye on:

• You tend to have the ends of your sausages come out a little more stretched out and pointed - remember to strive to maintain circular ends of equal size, as explained here. I should mention however that your second page definitely improves on this front, compared to the first, so you're already headed in the right direction here.

• The degree of your contour lines should shift wider as we slide farther away from the viewer along the length of the form, as explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, overall there's a lot you're doing quite well here. I'm especially pleased to see how much you're focusing on building things up one step at a time, and working from simple to complex, without jumping out too far ahead, without the appropriate structure to support the next bit of complexity you wish to add. I do have some advice on how we can push this even further however, and how you can continue to get the most out of these constructional drawing exericses.

This ultimately comes down to considering the distinction between the choices we make that occur in 2D space - where we're taking full license to put whatever marks down on the flat page - and the choices we make in 3D space, where we're drawing actual solid forms, considering both how they themselves exist in three dimensions, while also reinforcing the 3D nature of the structure that is already present.

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 examples of this in this beetle where I've marked out in red where you've cut into the silhouettes of the forms you'd already established, and in blue where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I should mention though that this jumping spider's head was handled correctly - you cut the ball structure in two using an ellipse, rather than just a line. While that's great, I'd still avoid this for organic subject matter, because it's very easy to simply not do it correctly without realizing.

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. Working in this manner for our organic structures will actually reinforce our spatial reasoning skills, whereas the possibility of trying to cut back into forms and doing so wrong can push us in the opposite direction - again, without us necessarily being aware. As our spatial reasoning skill increases, we become less prone to this, but it's one of those situations where rather than practicing the thing we're bad at directly, we're better off approaching it in this alternative manner, in order to train the underlying skills themselves.

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.

Going forward, the other point I wanted to mention is that while you are definitely making an effort to apply the sausage method in your constructions, you don't actually apply it in its entirety every time. There are times where you drift away a little from the characteristics of simple sausages (especially when they get skinny, which is actually fairly normal because it's simply much more difficult in that case), but more importantly, you don't always remember to define the joint between the sausage segments with a contour line, as stressed in the sausage method diagram. You are also at times prone to adding contour lines elsewhere, which is also mentioned as something to avoid.

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.

Now, the points I've raised here can all continue to be addressed into the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Just be sure to keep them in mind - while I don't expect it to be handled perfectly, I do want to see signs that you're actively tackling these points.