Jumping in with your organic forms with contour curves, you're generally doing a pretty great job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. Your contour curves are nice and snug within the forms' silhouettes as well. I do have two quick reminders though:

• Your contour curves should be getting wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the form.

• Don't forget to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, overall you're doing really well here, although I do have some important points to call out that should help you continue to make the most out of these exercises. The first of these relates to the distinction between the choices we make in 2D space (where we're really just thinking about putting lines down on a flat page), and the actions we take in 3D space where we're actually thinking about how we're building on top of a three dimensional structure, respecting its 3D nature and even reinforcing it with everything we add.

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.

So for example, take a look at this page. I've marked out in red where you cut into your forms' silhouettes, and in blue where you either extended off existing structures with partial shapes, or where you effectively did the same by bridging from one form to another with a single stroke. These are effectively shortcuts that don't provide us with enough information to understand how those changes exist in 3D space, and how they relate to the rest of the structure.

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), 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. 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.

Now I did want to mention that in the page I used as an example, the wasp(?) in the bottom right did a great job of reinforcing the solidity of the thorax and abdomen in how it wrapped around the surface of the form, helping us to understand how they exist in 3D space.

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, your biggest deviation was on the back legs of the grasshopper, although you did frequently also forget to define the joints between your sausage forms with contour lines. 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.

And that about covers it! All in all, very much moving in the right direction, but there are some points for you to work on as you move forwards. These things can certainly be addressed into the next lesson - just be sure to keep them in mind, and revisit this critique now and then to make sure you are tackling them. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.