Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing a pretty great job here. You're definitely making a concerted effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, and the contour lines themselves are drawn well for the most part. There is still room for improvement in terms of achieving smoother, more evenly shaped curves (mostly a matter of executing those marks from your shoulder and, well, practice) but these are definitely headed in the right direction. The only other thing I'd call out is that while you are shifting the degree of your contour curves as you slide along the length of your sausages, it's not always in the correct manner. The thing to keep in mind is that generally as we move away from the viewer, the contour curves are going to get wider - right now you've got them getting narrower in that circumstance. You can see a better demonstration of how this works back in Lesson 1's ellipses video.

Oh, one last thing - be sure to draw through all of the ellipses you draw two full times before lifting your pen. You appear to be executing the ellipses on the tips in a single go. As discussed back in Lesson 1, we should be drawing through all the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, for the most part here you're doing quite well. There are a few things I'll call out below to help better direct you as you move forwards, but as a whole you're definitely progressing nicely, and I can see improvement in how you think through the way in which your drawings exist as solid, three dimensional structures throughout this set.

The first thing that caught my eye was that in your wasp drawings, I noticed that there seemed to be some 2D shapes that stuck out from the body of your insects that didn't seem to be part of the structure you were actually depicting, as shown here. Based on the drawings, they seem to be existing outside of the bounds of the actual drawings themselves.

It's fairly common for me to catch students interacting with their constructions both in 3D (building up forms that actually exist in three dimensional space), and in 2D (thinking more in terms of attaching individual lines or partial shapes to their drawing on the page, without considering how it's meant to represent something 3D, and how it relates to the other 3D elements already present).

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.

One thing students will often do, is to put down their early masses properly, then to feel that "oh maybe that abdomen was too big" and alter its silhouette after the fact. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form - as you can see there, the silhouette we're altering is just something that represents a 3D structure, but the shape itself still exists in two dimensions. As soon as we change it, we break the connection with the 3D form, and are left with nothing but a flat shape.

While I didn't really see you cutting into your forms' silhouettes at all here, I did see you altering their silhouettes both in the abdominal areas of your wasps that I had highlighted, as well as the pointy ends on these beetles.

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. The fact that you aren't actually cutting into your silhouettes is definitely a good thing - just push yourself to always think about how every mark you add helps to define something three dimensional in specific terms. It is up to you to decide how they exist in 3D space, and how they relate to the forms around them. When we just add partial shapes and individual strokes to the drawing itself (rather than 3D structures to the construction), we're secretly trying to avoid having to sort out those spatial relationships.

Continuing on, I can see that you were in many ways employing the sausage method when constructing your insects' legs, but you weren't applying all of its strict requirements - specifically, you appear to have neglected to define the joint between sausage segments with a contour line, as shown in the sausage method diagram here.

Once you've got that sausage structure in place, that's really just the first step - 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).

You'll note that these diagrams line up nicely with the concept of "additive construction" I shared previously, where each new addition is its own complete form, and how we're focusing on the way in which they wrap around the existing structure.

The last thing I wanted to call out is a fairly minor concern - I noticed that you were kind of jumping back and forth between using filled areas of solid black for cast shadows (which is correct), and using it to capture form shading instead (which as discussed in Lesson 2 here should be left out of our drawings for this course). Always make sure that whenever you put down a solid black shape, that you think specifically about the nature of the form casting it. It's not enough to just see a shadow in your reference image and to try to capture it - you have to understand the form causing it to appear.

This goes back to the principles of implicit markmaking from Lesson 2's texture section, where every textural mark we draw is itself meant to be a cast shadow, and therefore should also be designed in such a way that it conveys the presence of a specific textural form. Right now you have more of a tendency to put down textural marks based on what you see in your reference, so they themselves don't imply textural forms in as specific a manner as they could. One thing that can help with this is to approach making all of your textural marks using a two step process - first laying down the outline of your intended shadow shape, designing it while considering the form that is casting it, then filling it in as shown here and here.

Now, the points I've raised here are certainly things to keep in mind, but I feel they can all be addressed as you move forwards into the next lesson. So, I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.