Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, I have a couple things to call out:

• For most of these you're doing a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions. You deviate from them a little bit in a few cases (like the top right corner of the first page), but all in all you're doing this well.

• Remember that you should be drawing through all of your freehanded ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, throughout this entire course.

• There are a fair number of cases here where you're keeping your contour curves consistent in their degree. Remember that as discussed here in Lesson 1, the degree of your ellipses, given a straight tube, will gradually shift wider as they move away from the viewer. Now, since the sausages here bend, that does also factor in, but the whole "wider as they move farther away" is a good rule of thumb.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I'm going to focus on the detailed ones, simply because they're the ones you did from your own references rather than following along with the demo. Overall, I can see that you're thinking a fair bit about how your constructions sit in 3D space, and increasingly over the set I can see that you are more and more holding more closely to the idea that every element you add to your construction exists in 3D space. This is most visible in the hylotrupes bajulus drawing, as well as the earwig.

There are however some issues that I do want to call out which will help keep you on the right track as you continue to move through this course.

First and foremost, 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 this issue in this cricket, where you cut into both the head and the abdomen quite a bit. Remember that while we are working from reference, what we're doing here is still just an exercise in 3D spatial reasoning, and so we are not trying to replicate that reference at all costs. If you happen to draw something too big, that's simply what you need to continue working with. Your end result will differ from the reference, but again - each drawing is just a 3D puzzle we're having our brain solve.

So instead of cutting back into those silhouettes (or extending them with flat shapes), 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 also something for which the shrimp and lobster demos are quite notable. Specifically, pay attention to how every form is constructed with a focus on how it individually sits in space, and how it relates to the forms around it, all in three dimensions, never undermining its solidity but rather ensuring that every new mark reinforces the solidity of the forms that were already present.

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.

Continuing on, another concern I had was that when you move into the textural detail phase of a drawing, you're not actually dealing that much with texture - at least, in terms of the specific way it's defined back in Lesson 2. Rather, you tend to focus more on general decoration, effectively attempting to do what you can to make your drawing look more visually pleasing. Decoration is unfortunately a rather vague and unclear goal to strive for - there's no specific point at which we've added enough decoration, after all.

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.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

What you delve into a fair bit - form shading (which as discussed here is not meant to be something we use in our drawings for this course) and a lot of more general, erratic, somewhat scribbly marks (which we're also warned against here) - do not define specific textural forms on an individual basis.

Now of course this means that what we're actually talking about in regards to texture is much more time consuming, simply because it requires us to think about and understand the nature of each textural form, rather than simply trying to create a general "impression" of it. Fortunately, where decoration generally strives to find excuses to put more ink down (so we can have more complex visual information to engage the viewer's eye), texture is the opposite. We try to imply the presence of these specific forms, but by using as little ink as possible (which implicit markmaking allows us to do, as described in Lesson 2).

The last thing I wanted to mention is that while I can see you employing elements of the sausage method to varying degrees. Sometimes you deviate from the characteristics of simple sausages, or from other aspects laid out in the sausage method diagram from the lesson, but for the most part it's coming along well. I can also see you taking various approaches to try to build on top of those structures.

For that, I have some ways this can be done better, which you'll find in the following diagrams:

• https://i.imgur.com/8O2RTcT.png

• https://i.imgur.com/t6oz7Tv.png

You'll also see this in action 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).

So! I have called out a number of things for you to keep in mind and work on, but all in all I do feel you should be in a good position to move onto the next lesson, as that one tackles similar kinds of problems, so you'll have plenty of opportunities to apply what I've explained here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.