When going through this course and submitting for official critique, there are certain rules you are expected to follow - one of those being, you may not move forwards onto the next lesson until the previous one has been marked as complete. You are not to tackle this course ahead of time, and then submit your work in bulk - doing so risks wasting both your time and mine, and given the low cost of the feedback, we want to ensure that our efforts are put to the best use they can.

You can read more about these specific restrictions - which you should already have been aware of - here in Lesson 0, but this is the specific part pertaining to the issue at hand.

Now, I will continue critiquing your work even though you broke that rule, but I'm not going to take into consideration the fact that this work was completed prior to my earlier feedback. If there are issues that require revisions, then those revisions will be assigned.

Alrighty. So, starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally looking pretty good. You're clearly making an attempt to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, and you're doing a pretty good job of it. Your contour lines are also confidently drawn, and are fitting snugly within the silhouette of the sausage form. There's only one problem - the assignment asked for two pages of organic forms with contour curves. You've done contour ellipses.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, your work is fairly well done, but there are two main problems that stand out, and they more or less go hand in hand.

So the first issue is that you are very clearly separating your drawings into two phases. Perhaps I called this out in my previous critique, but regardless, I'll call it out again. You're drawing your initial construction more faintly, and then go back over the existing linework with a darker line. This is not the approach you should be using in this course, because it treats the earlier linework as though it doesn't exist - like it's not solid, tangible, and real.

Instead, every single mark you draw should be roughly the same thickness. Only towards the end of the process, should you go in and apply a pass for line weight, and that should be made up of small, localized strokes that clarify specific overlaps. That means you're not going back over all your lines, just the specific parts where forms overlap, as shown here.

This kind of approach you've used also encourages the second problem. 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.

For example, if you look at your ladybug drawing, you drew much larger ellipses/ball forms for the abdomen and thorax, and then ended up cutting into them. As you progress through the set, however, I see you employing this approach less and less, but it's still present in small ways. I can see it in the grasshopper's head as well, for instance, and the beetle on this page has a lot of 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, 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 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.

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. 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.

Overall, your work is still well done, and these issues can be addressed throughout the next lesson. So, despite you breaking the rules, you will have this lesson marked as complete. If however you have moved forward on Lesson 5 at all, put those pages aside and start over, keeping this feedback in mind.