To answer your questions first:

• It is normal to struggle with thinner sausages - generally as we get more used to drawing thicker/larger ones, the thinner ones gradually become easier. As such, it's always helpful to draw big, making full use of the space available on the page. We'll talk a bit more about this further into the critique. As to whether sausages should be executed in a single mark, there is no strict rule saying that they do (where ellipses benefit greatly from being drawn in one continuous stroke, and from going around the shape two full times before lifting the pen, sausages do not - this is something that specifically helps shapes become more elliptical, which is not what we're after here). That said, the more we break up our shapes into separate lines, especially without sharp corners to rely upon, the more we risk gaps between the lines that undermine the solidity of the resulting form. Generally I do draw my sausages in one go, but I'll slow down my execution - making it no less confident (I still invest the bulk of my time in the planning and preparation phases) but trying to slow down as much as I can without having my brain try to steer my hand as I draw. This can help regain some control.

• The filled area of solid black on your christmas beetle reads to me as a cast shadow rather than form shading, so don't worry about that.

• As you mentioned, we get into fur a lot more in Lesson 5 (and there are notes about it there) so I'll leave that out from the critique of this lesson's work.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, your sausages are moving in the right direction. There are still some deviations from the characteristics of simple sausages (generally you have one end get smaller and a little more stretched out, so keep an eye on that) but overall I can see progress being made. When it comes to the contour lines themselves however, there are a couple things to keep in mind:

• The assignment asked for two pages of organic forms with contour curves, but you went with ellipses for both pages instead - read the assignments more carefully in the future.

• Your choice for each contour ellipse's degree appears to be somewhat arbitrary - sometimes you've got them changing, sometimes they remain the same. Remember that as discussed in Lesson 1's ellipses video, they should be naturally getting wider as they slide along the length of the sausage, moving away from the viewer. You are doing this in some cases, but it's inconsistent enough that I figured I'd call it out.

• This is generally more something that comes up when working with contour curves rather than ellipses, but it helps to put smaller contour ellipses right at the tip of the sausage that faces the viewer, as shown here in this variety of sausage orientations.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, as a whole you're moving in the right direction and are clearly making an effort to consider how each complex structure can be built up through the addition of individual, simpler forms, but there are areas where your approach can certainly be adjusted to yield better results and to ultimately help you get more out of each exercise.

Firstly, there are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. There are some students who like to think ahead to how many drawings they'd like to fit on a given page - which certainly is admirable, as they clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space we give a given drawing, we limit our brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage our whole arm while drawing.

In your case, you drew the ones that followed along with my demonstrations fairly large, but in your own constructions you were much more conservative in how much space you were willing to give them.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

Secondly, it's worthwhile to distinguish between two different ways in one might operate upon something they're drawing. We can do so in the three dimensions in which the object is meant to exist - ensuring that every mark we draw moves in 3D, wrapping around the surfaces of the forms that are already present. Or we can engage with a drawing as just that - a two dimensional collection of lines and shapes on a flat piece of paper. Each approach involves putting our marks down differently, and actually thinking about what we're doing differently. The latter is generally a lot easier to do, and a lot more natural, but it also puts down visual cues that remind the viewer that what they're looking at is flat, rather than 3D. As the person doing the drawing, we are also subject to those same cues - we are a viewer as well - and if the drawing tells us that it's flat and 2D, then the marks we put down to follow will continue to reinforce that impression.

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. 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.

You mentioned that you struggled with the ant construction, so I went in and highlighted areas where you were cutting into the silhouettes of the forms you'd already constructed (in red), and also areas where you extended or altered the silhouette of an existing form through the addition of flat shapes (in blue).

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. Note in particular that you do not need to start big, and get your construction resembling your reference as quickly as possible. This is something you can build up to, by starting with smaller forms (like the recommended ball mass for the head, even if the head itself seems wider and flatter) instead of opting for an entirely different approach with a box.

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. I would also recommend that you take a closer look at the shrimp and lobster demonstrations from the informal demos page - being that they're the most recent demonstrations I have, they show how we need to take care with how we make our marks in order to prioritize establishing and reinforcing forms such that that feel solid and three dimensional.

Another point worth noting in the shrimp/lobster demos is how each and every mark is put down - purposefully, after adequate planning and preparation. Right now, in your drawings you do appear to be a little eager to put ink down on the page, and so you might find yourself drawing without entirely thinking through the purpose behind the action, and what you're trying to achieve with it. That's why the ghosting method is so important - the planning phase gives us ample time to reflect upon what exactly we're doing, so we can take the steps we need to execute them to the best of our current ability. I'm noticing a lot more arbitrary marks being laid down to follow or support an initial stroke - normally signs that the first mark wasn't entirely thought out, and now you're scrambling to have the structure make sense. Taking more time from the beginning - both to plan out your strokes and even to observe your reference to find what that next simple form you need to be adding will be, is really where we should be investing.

Lastly, 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. 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 - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

Now as a whole, you do have a lot to work on here, but these are all things you can continue to explore into the next lesson. I feel you are demonstrating enough of a grasp of space and form, and enough patience with your observation to be able to move on, but do be sure to give my feedback here ample time to sink in. Both the lesson material and the critiques can be quite dense, so they often require students to revisit them periodically as they try to apply the suggestions.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, and leave you to it.