Before we get started, I should say that in regards to the proportion thing, it's both important and less important than you might expect. At the end of the day, observing our reference carefully and frequently will help make our drawings more realistic in a lot of ways - proportion only being one of them. It comes down to picking up on some of the more nuanced, subtler elements that play a role in an object, being able to identify the major structural elements, and then the smaller forms that may be attached after that, gradually whittling down from big to small, simple to complex.

Even if we mess up our proportions entirely (while still observing as carefully as we can and nailing the rest), our drawing may not look like our reference, but it will still look solid, tangible and believable - like some weird creature that exists out there, and was captured faithfully, but that is itself completely malformed. That's okay because our goal here isn't to reproduce our reference image perfectly - each drawing is a spatial puzzle, and all we're doing is solving them. The reference image tells us what direction to work towards, and as we build up our construction step by step, we're simply adding more forms, and considering how they relate in 3D space to the existing structure. It's this process - this considering of spatial relationships, and how the things we draw exist in a 3D world - that helps our brain's spatial reasoning skills develop.

Anyway, onto your critique. Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are largely coming along well, with a couple things to keep in mind:

• Make sure you're drawing through those ellipses at the tips two full times before lifting your pen, as is required for all the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.

• Keep an eye on your contour curves' degree - remember that as we slide along the length of the form away from the viewer, they're generally going to get wider (though the actual turn of the sausage impacts this as well). If you're unsure why this is, you can review the lesson 1 ellipses video which explain this concept.

• You're doing a pretty great job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, but continue to be vigilant - sometimes the far end comes out a little smaller than your closer end, and while that makes sense in perspective, it's not something I want you to worry about right now.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there are a lot of areas in which you're showing good progress, along with some spots where I feel some additional advice will help you make more effective use of the exercises we're performing here.

The first, and perhaps most meaningful piece of advice I can offer is about the difference between working in 3D space, and working in 2D space. 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, if you take a look at this one, I've marked out in red where you've cut back into the abdomen's silhouette, as well as in blue where you've extended out that same silhouette along the other side. The issue in red isn't actually one that comes up too often in your work, but there are a lot of places throughout your work where you'll tack on quick, flat shapes, either intending them to stand on their own, or as extensions to existing structures.

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. I also highly recommend that you take a look at the shrimp and lobster demos from the informal demos page. Being the most recent, they do the best job of really showing this strict additive approach in practice - when look at them, focus especially on how every single form is introduced as a complete, solid structure, and that every step taken thereafter gives it that due respect, rather than cutting into them or undermining that solidity. This is all part of accepting that everything we draw is 3D.

Similarly to that previous point is the importance of always ensuring that you start as simply as possible, and avoid attempting to skip steps and just draw complex forms right off the bat. If you look at your hercules beetle for instance, you can see where that horn was drawn with way more complexity than it should have been.

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. 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 - meaning adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages, defining the joint between them with contour lines, and so on.

The last, admittedly minor point I wanted to mention is in regards to how and where you use your areas of filled black. They come up a few spots - sometimes you use them to fill the "inside" of something (like your scorpion claws), and sometimes you use them to capture a local/surface colour (your spider's eyes), and in other spots you've used them to capture form shading (the scorpion's tail). In general, try to reserve your filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only - that means every filled shape you add should itself define the relationship between the specific form casting it, and the surface receiving it, through the design of its own specific shape. Don't worry about capturing any local colour (given the fact that we're working strictly in stark black and white means that it's simply going to be a lost cause and would only make the drawing visually confusing), and remember that as discussed here in Lesson 2, form shading will not be playing a role in our drawings here.

Now, you do have a number of important things to work on, but these are all things you can continue to address as you move into the next lesson. Just remember above all else - the goal is not to reproduce your reference image. Each drawing is just a 3D spatial puzzle, the focus is on the act of mushing these forms together, and defining how they relate to one another in 3D space.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.