Whew! By normal standards your submission would have come in about an hour and ten minutes after my cut-off (meaning you'd get your critique on Friday rather than today, which is Wednesday), but it's the beginning of the month and I am terrified of the oncoming horde of submissions, so I figured I'd get yours done a little early instead.

So, let's get right into it. Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are really well done - you're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, and your contour curves are drawn both with confidence and accuracy in equal measure. There are however three small issues to call out:

• Most notably, you don't appear to be drawing through all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as you should be for all your freehanded ellipses throughout this course. I think you're aware of this as a rule for the course, but without realizing it you're kind of stopping at 1.5 rounds of the elliptical shape.

• I noticed a few places where you placed ellipses at a tip of a sausage form that, if you look at the contour curves preceding it, appears to be pointing away from the viewer. Those contour ellipses are the same as any of the other contour curves, in that they're the visible portion of a larger contour ellipse. When a tip faces us, then we're able to see all the way around that last contour line, but when the tip faces away, we shouldn't be able to see any of it. Here's a quick chart of different orientations of sausages to help convey what I mean.

• I also noticed that, while this isn't consistently a problem, you do have a number of cases where your contour curves seem to maintain roughly the same degree throughout the length of a given sausage. Be sure to review the Lesson 1 ellipses video where we discuss how, given a simple, straight cylinder, the cross-sectional discs will be visible with a wider degree the further away from the viewer we slide along the form. Meaning, as they get farther away, they should get wider. The turns/bending of the sausages does also influence this, but as a baseline, always remember that farther away = wider degree.

Moving onto your insect constructions, there's a lot you're doing well here, along with some mistakes that I feel, once pointed out, will ultimately result in a significant improvement to how effectively you can make use of these exercises. That is an important emphasis to make - the fact that every one of these drawings really are just exercises, meaning that the specific way in which we approach them can make them less, or more, effective. The end results themselves, however, are of little consequence.

There are definitely areas where you get a little preoccupied with the end result, in ways that shift your focus more to a general desire to "decorate" your drawings. While this is something I see from students on occasion, in your case it's not something that comes up as often, and mainly is focused on the areas where you end up delving into things like form shading (like in this spider), which as explained here back in Lesson 2, will not be playing a role in our drawings for this course. Rather, when it comes to detail, everything always comes back to the core focuses of the course.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. 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. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

With that minor point out of the way, let's look at how your approach to the constructions themselves can be improved. 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.

This is something that does come up a fair bit in your work, as I've marked out on this page. In red I've highlighted areas where you cut into the silhouettes of your earlier structures, and in a couple of blue areas I've marked out where you add a flat/partial shape, effectively extending that silhouette out.

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. 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.

The red/blue notes on your page is a sort of analysis I do fairly often for students at this stage, as it's a common mistake - but in your case, I added one more part, in green. That's because I wanted to specifically call out where you've actually done well, applying those principles of "additive" construction correctly by drawing complete forms and considering the way in which they relate to one another in 3D space. This shows me that while you may not be entirely conscious of the specifics as to why you approached it that way in those particular cases, that your instincts are in fact being developed in the correct direction, which is entirely the intent of this course. So I'm very pleased to see it.

Aside from that, the only other concern is just the somewhat inconsistency in the approaches you use on your insects' legs. I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for this. 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 you do deviate at times, but more often you appear to be trying to use the sausage method, but without necessarily holding to all of its elements consistently. For example, you have a tendency to add contour lines along the length of your sausage segments instead of only at the joints between the forms, which is something the sausage method diagram I linked earlier addresses specifically as a mistake.

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).

All that said, I think you're moving in the right direction. I do want you to take a look at the shrimp and lobster demos on the informal demos page, specifically to note the particular way in which every mark is drawn in a very intentional, planned manner, and how every structure that is built up is treated as being solid and three dimensional, never cutting back across them or attempting to ignore them in any fashion. You may also want to try drawing along with these on your own, to cement those principles.

All the same, I see no reason not to mark this lesson as complete. All the issues I've called out here are fairly common, and can certainly continue to be worked on throughout the next one.