Before I get started, I wanted to make a quick point about the comment you made about rushing. In the wise words of yoda, do or do not - there is no try. Of course, it's not as simple as that, but it also isn't that much more complex. Control is something we have to keep reminding ourselves to exert - to make active, conscious choices as we draw, to regain control of our actions rather than allowing us to rely on our whims and instincts.

The main reason I'm mentioning this is because of the way you wrote that seemingly innocuous sentence. Describing rushing as a problem (though you did say it's "in me") separates it from ourselves, and in our minds, it makes it seem more like an external problem that is impacting us. Acknowledging, even in the way we talk about it and the tense we use in our language, that rushing is a choice we make (that is, the choice of not taking each step one by one, and continuously exerting that control throughout), will help you regain that control.

Of course, I may be pushing too far here - I of course don't know whether english is your first language or not, so nitpicking on language may not be the best course of action here. Still, I do find that the way in which we describe our situation influences how we ourselves look at it.

Jumping into the critique with your organic forms with contour curves, I should quickly mention that what was assigned was two pages of organic forms with contour curves - you appear to have done one of contour ellipses and one of curves. This isn't a huge issue, but it does suggest that more care should be taken in looking at the assigned homework, to ensure that you're doing what was asked.

As for the exercise itself, it's done pretty well - just be sure to draw through your ellipses two full times (you tend to stop somewhere between 1 and 1.5 turns of the ellipse), and remember that the degree of your contour curves should get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the sausage, as explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing on, I can see that you are certainly thinking a fair bit about how to build up these structures from simple to complex, but I do get the feeling that overall, you would benefit from giving each of these constructions more time. That of course comes back to that whole tendency towards rushing, but it's not just a matter of spending lots of time, but rather ensuring that it's being used where it's needed.

Observation is a very common area that people tend to neglect, especially when they start focusing more and more on construction, they can easily end up doing so by taking time away from observing. If we look at this construction of yours and compare it to its reference, I can see a number of signs that suggest that you may not have looked back at this reference all that often. The positioning of the legs is quite different - in your drawing it's almost symmetrical, but in the reference, the front-right leg is reaching farther forward, and the back-right leg is reaching farther back. This is more than just trying to draw something and the mark coming out wrong - it's pretty clear that you were not observing your reference nearly enough. You may have looked at it towards the beginning, but then relied on memory, which as explained here in Lesson 2 is going to inevitably result in oversimplification because our brains aren't designed to retain that much visual information for long.

Moving onto the actual constructional aspect of your drawings here, I do have some advice I can offer to help you make the most out of these kinds of exercises. It comes down to understanding when the actions we're taking occur in 2D space - where we're just drawing lines and shapes on a flat page - and the actions we take in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the object we're constructing as though it exists in a 3D world, made up of 3D forms, and reinforcing the 3D nature of that structure with every subsequent form we add.

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.

The same example I used for the point about observation happens to be a really good example for these kinds of issues as well. I've marked out here in red where you've cut into the silhouettes of existing forms, and in blue where you've added to them with partial 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 - 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.

Now, I do suspect that your shift in approach - towards more gestural drawing, as you described it - does contribute to this issue. While gestural drawing in general is totally fine, it is something you should avoid in this course, because our focus here is on actually ensuring that we are exerting full control and consideration before each mark we put down, to think about how what we're drawing relates to the structure we're trying to construct. Gestural sketching takes us away from this kind of approach, and can make us more prone to sketching loosely. Which again, is fine in general, but works against us in terms of the goals of this course.

Continuing on, I can see that you're putting some effort into the application of the sausage method when building up your insects' legs, but that you have a tendency to deviate from its specifics a fair bit. 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 think it's more that you tend to forget that the joint between the sausage segments should be defined with a contour line, and you tend to frequently draw ellipses or other shapes that don't quite stick to the specific characteristics of simple sausages we're going after here.

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, I am going to assign some revisions below, so you can address the points I've raised here.