If I'm being completely honest, I'm fairly displeased with the fact that you've drawn the same insect over and over, in the exact same manner. There are a few ways I can interpret this - ranging from the harmless (perhaps you were just trying to simplify the lesson for yourself, unaware of the fact that it would render the lesson far less effective and also give me very little of use to actually critique), to the entirely childish (some kind of passive-aggressive statement against having been assigned a full redo).

Regardless of the reasoning, it shows a deep disregard for my time, and a disrespect for this resource as a whole - where the feedback students receive here is funded and subsidized by the students who allow their credits to expire. Students are able to get access to extremely cheap feedback, but that does not mean there is not a cost - that cost is shouldered by the community and by me, in order to ensure that students can get feedback at an affordable price point, while the teaching assistants are still compensated fairly for their work. I believe I mentioned this in my last round of feedback.

As explained back in Lesson 0, in return for access to this resource, students are responsible for investing as much time and effort as they require to follow the instructions, apply the feedback they receive, and ultimately execute each and every mark to the best of their current ability. So, whatever your reasoning here, you are not upholding your end of the deal.

Despite this, I am going to complete the critique, but understand that going forward, you will not be given any additional leeway or benefit of the doubt.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves:

• You appear to have done one page of contour ellipses and one page of contour curves - not a huge issue but not what was assigned.

• I should note that there is stiffness to some of your ellipses, which suggests that for some of these you may not be executing them from your shoulder, using your whole arm. Be sure to use the ghosting method as well.

• Seems you're still struggling with adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages - you've got some that come out better, although more often you make one end larger and the other end smaller, instead of keeping them the same size.

• The degree of your contour lines still maintain a consistent degree, rather than shifting wider as we slide further away from the viewer. I called this out in your previous attempt at Lesson 4 as well.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, these are certainly better than your last submission, and in many ways more in line with what was asked. That said, I think there's benefit to talking about the distinction between the kinds of actions we can take that occur in 2D space (as lines on the flat page, where we're literally just drawing), and the kind we can take in 3D space - where we're actually thinking about how the forms we construct exist in three dimensions, and how they respect and reinforce the 3D nature of the forms they're being attached to.

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 here where in red I've shown where you cut into your silhouettes, and in blue where you extended off the existing structures to add to them without defining how these new additions exist in 3D space. The tendency towards rather loose ellipses also adds to this issue - but this can be avoided by treating the outermost perimeter of those ellipses as being the silhouette's edge, so that the rest of the stray lines remain contained within it.

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 - so something like this would help a great deal in making your constructions feel more solid), 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 - in my previous round of feedback I did strongly encourage you to draw along with these demos, and since you didn't include them in your work here, I'm really not sure if you did so. Regardless, 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.

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. In your case, I think you were trying to apply the general premise of the sausage method, but perhaps didn't remember all of its specifics, so you'd use ellipses instead of sausages, and forget to define the joint between them.

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've got some revisions for you, so you'll find them assigned below.