Before I get into your questions, let's look at the organic forms with contour curves first:

• Overall you've done a pretty good job in sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, for the most part.

• Do not skip the step of drawing a central minor axis line through your sausages - be sure to follow every step from the instructions consistently.

• Also, as discussed back in Lesson 1, you are required to draw through each ellipse two full times before lifting your pen, whenever freehanding an ellipse.

• Keep an eye on the degree of your contour curves - as explained here back in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, as we slide along the length of a given cylindrical/tube-like structure, moving away from the viewer, the degree of its cross-sectional slices will get wider and wider, rather than remaining the same.

• Lastly, it looks like you jumped back and forth between contour ellipses and contour curves - keep in mind that the assignment was specifically to do contour curves.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I guess I'll address your questions first:

• This is actually addressing what came before your questions, the whole "do not be kind" thing. I hear it from students on occasion, but ultimately it's a misguided sentiment. It focuses on the idea that the only way to learn is for someone to tear you down, and that we can only learn from someone being mean - or at least, very direct and strict - with us, and that if we don't feel bad in the end, then someone's been "too gentle". The thing to keep in mind is that while I do weigh the "feelings" of my students to a point, it is only towards one purpose - to ensure that the feedback I have to offer is absorbed without defensiveness. After all, if you just dump a list of mistakes on a person who isn't expecting it, they may be prone to locking down, rather than being open to the feedback. That is not a question of what feedback one is given, but rather how it is delivered. You can provide the same feedback in either fashion, but one is more likely to be put to good use. They're still equal in content value. Long story short - you don't need to ask for beatings. Any issues that are relevant to this stage in the course will be called out, and any issues that may actually end up being distracting (that's right - sometimes it's unhelpful to focus on certain issues) will be left alone for now.

• So to your first question, I can see a few drawings where your lines get a little too thick relative to the overall drawing (like in this one, but for the most part your use of line weight is coming along decently, to the point where I don't think there's too much to be concerned with here. Just continue making a point of using light pressure from your pen. Also, another thing that will definitely make a difference is simply making a point of drawing larger. If the drawing itself is making better use of the space available to you on the page (the cricket I linked to could definitely stand to be a fair bit bigger based on the space available on the page), then relatively speaking, your lines will not appear as thick or clumsy.

• Unfortunately I'm not really sure what you're specifically referring to. You'll need to point to a specific instance of concern regarding your contour lines. I can say this however - remember the relationship between the degree of your contour ellipse/curve, and what that says about its orientation in space. If the contour ellipse is very wide, it tells us that the cross-section is facing the viewer head-on (like looking at the face of a coin), whereas if it's narrow, it tells us the cross-section is facing to the side, like when we look at the edge of a coin. If you look at this construction, you used a lot of relatively wide contour ellipses, even though the insect's body was flowing from left to right (so its cross-sections would be facing to the side, so similar to looking at the edge of a coin rather than at its face). As such, those contour ellipses should have been much narrower.

• To your third question, ultimately the only way we get better at something is by making attempts at it - so I am glad that despite your uncertainty, you have been trying some texture, although the only way you're going to make notable improvements on that front is by making many attempts at it. The big thing to keep in mind with texture is that it is not about just drawing what you see in your reference image. Many students make that mistake, thinking that they should just be aiming to "decorate" their drawings. Decoration is not the goal - decoration itself is vague and hard to pin down, since we can't really know when we've added "enough" decoration. 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. Circling back to what I was saying before, texture is not just about drawing what you see in your reference. Texture, as we've mentioned here focuses on the actual textural forms - specific things that exist along the surface of the object. In order to capture texture properly, we have to understand the nature of each individual textural form - then, one by one, we draw the shadows they'd cast on their surroundings. Often these shadows are the same ones you'll see in your reference, but rather than simply trying to draw them as you see them, the step many students skip is to really grasp how they exist in 3D space. So - one thing that can help (though it's by no means easy) is to think of the cast shadows that end up on your drawing to be something you invent yourself, rather than copying them over. Focus above all else on first trying to understand how they sit in space, because that's the information you'll use to come up with the shadows you use to imply their presence in your drawing.

• Honestly this isn't something I can really help you out with - I myself learned this stuff first by taking some in-person courses, then through practice and exploration of my own. I don't have that much experience with other kinds of resources (books, videos, etc.) beyond what you'll find on the recommendations page.

Now this "critique" has already hit over 1200 words, so I'm going to have to talk about your actual insect constructions themselves somewhat briefly. Fortunately, you've done a pretty solid job, but there are a few suggestions I have to offer.

What stands out most is the fact that through most of these constructions, you're building things up steadily, starting with simple forms and gradually adding more simple forms on top to increase the complexity of the overall construction. There are some little tweaks to how you approach it that can be improved however.

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 actually doesn't come up in your work that often, but there are some examples - for example, here you were largely approaching things correctly (wrapping forms around one another), but along the thorax, where you could have wrapped the segmentation around the surface of the earlier mass (which would have reinforced its solidity), you ended up cutting into it, which somewhat undermined the solidity of that structure.

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. It can also be observed in the more general full demonstrations of the shrimp and lobster at the top of the informal demos page - specifically in how each form we add is itself treated as something solid and three dimensional. That said, you do adhere to this in many ways throughout your work, so you can take this more as me pointing out something you do on occasion, perhaps when you get tired or otherwise distracted.

Still, this concept is important, and it 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.

On a related note, for this cricket I definitely would have drawn each of those pieces of segmentation as complete, enclosed forms (or at least enclosing them along their bottom edges), rather than drawing them mostly as individual strokes that did not clearly define a solid, three dimensional form of their own.

The last thing I wanted to call out is that 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.

Pay close attention to the specific elements of the sausage method (working with the characteristics of simple sausages, and reinforcing the joints with contour lines but not adding any others along the length of the sausage segments), and also once that structure is down, look at other opportunities you might have to build upon that structure (based on going back to your reference).

So! As a whole, you are pushing in the right direction. Everything I've called out here can certainly be explored further as you move onto the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.