Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, I can see that you are largely making an effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, although this is something that you can continue to work on, as there are some that have ends with different sizes, or ends that get a little more stretched out instead of maintaining a circular shape. Additionally, I can see that when drawing the contour lines right at the tip of your sausages, you had a tendency to still draw little curves, although in such circumstances where the tip is facing the viewer, we'd actually be able to see the whole ellipse, so it'd look more like this. Additionally, keep an eye on both the degree and alignment of your contour curves. There are definitely times where the alignment is off, as well as cases where the degree does not quite follow the rule of thumb that as we slide further away from the viewer, the contour curves should be getting wider.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there's a lot here that you're doing well, but also a number of ways in which your approach can be adjusted to help you get more out of these constructional drawing puzzles. The first of these things to discuss is distinguishing actions that occur in three dimensions from those that occur in just the two dimensions of the page itself.

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.

While you do cut into your silhouettes in this manner a little, it's not quite as much as most students at this stage - though you definitely have a greater tendency to extend off existing silhouettes and adding flat shapes to your construction without necessarily figuring out how they're meant to connect to the existing structure. I've identified a few such areas here, with red signifying areas you appear to cut into those silhouettes, and blue where you extend out from them.

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. You can also see this in action in the shrimp and lobster demonstrations on the informal demos page. These, being newer, are more in line with this concept which we're trying to push more and more as time goes by. This will eventually be integrated into the lesson material more fully when my overhaul of the course material reaches this lesson (we're still working on refining Lessons 0 and 1) - but until then, it's mainly those receiving official critiques who get a sort of earlier preview of these more effective approaches to handling these kinds of constructional drawing exercises.

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. Focus especially on how, in the shrimp and lobster demos, at every stage we focus on ensuring that each new form that's been added feels solid and three dimensional, before moving forward. If at any stage that solidity is lost, we won't really be able to get it back - and furthermore, the more we undermine that sense of solidity, the more likely we are to then make yet more marks that undermine it. Conversely, the more we maintain and reinforce the solidity, the more likely we are to continue engaging with the drawing in ways that further establish it as solid and 3D.

Continuing on, 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 see a number of cases where you apply some of the elements of the sausage method, but deviate by either drawing ellipses rather than sausages, add contour lines in places other than right at the joints between the segments, and so on. So you're definitely aware of the sausage method, you just need to follow it a little more strictly.

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, all that said, I think you are progressing pretty well, and even over this set you do have some remarkably successful constructions, like your praying mantis and your dragonfly, in terms of coming off as solid and well constructed despite the points I raised above. There's just one last thing I want to stress - don't forget, for every ellipse we freehand throughout this course, you are to draw through them two full times around the elliptical shape before lifting your pen. This of course does not apply to anything that isn't an ellipse (like sausages).

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You can continue to address the issues I've called out here into the next lesson.