Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are coming along okay, although there are three issues to keep an eye on:

• Firstly, you are mostly sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, although there are some cases where your ends get a little more stretched out (instead of remaining circular).

• Your contour curves often appear to stiffen up and get pretty uneven, which suggests to me that you're drawing them from your wrist more than your shoulder. I recommend that you give the new ellipses video a watch. It was recently updated, and explains how one should continue to draw ellipses (and of course curves) from your shoulder, and how to employ the ghosting method even at slower speeds to maintain a more confident, smoother execution.

• Sometimes you appear to shift the degree of your contour curves correctly, but in other cases you don't. The new ellipses video also addresses this.

Looking at your insect constructions, I can definitely see that there are a lot of areas where you're focusing on building up your constructions through the combination of 3D forms, building up to achieve more complexity, and that is definitely a big move in the right direction.

that said, there are definitely a few issues that I want to address. The first and most notable of these is that there are definitely areas where you allow yourself to jump back and forth between treating the elements you add to your drawings as being solid, 3D forms, and treating them as lines on a page. The key here is that because we're drawing, we have a lot of freedom to put down whatever marks we wish - despite the fact that the majority of the marks we make will actually contradict the illusion we're trying to create, rather than reinforce it. To put it simply: the majority of the marks we can make will make our drawing feel flat.

In order to avoid this and ensure that we only draw marks that reinforce the illusion, making the drawing feel 3D to the viewer and to ourselves, we can impose rules on ourselves. One helpful rule is to ensure that we respect every form we draw as being solid and 3D, and avoid redrawing or altering their silhouettes once they've been established in the scene. For example, here in this ant construction I've pointed out a few places where you've either cut back into the silhouette of a form, or attempted to extend it after the fact. The silhouette of a form is itself just a 2D shape that represents something three dimensional. Trying to alter or adjust it after the fact won't change the 3D form it represents, it'll merely break the connection between them.

Here's an explanation of how this occurs. Instead, the solution is to work by only making changes through the addition of new complete, fully enclosed 3D forms, and establishing how they relate to the existing structure either by defining a contour line to show how they intersect with one another (like lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by drawing the silhouette of the new form specifically such that it wraps around the existing structure as shown here.

I can see in certain places - like on the ant's head - that you try to use additional masses, but instead of shaping the silhouette of those masses so they wrap around the ball of the ant's head, you just draw them on as blobs and try to make them feel 3D by adding contour lines. The thing about contour lines is that while they can make your forms feel 3D, they'll do so in isolation - they won't help define their relationship with the structures around them.

You can see this additive approach to construction in action in this beetle horn demo and in this ant head demo.

As I move through the homework submission, I definitely feel that your overall grasp of how to build up your construction does improve quite a bit, and I can see clear areas where you're taking certain forms and really wrapping them around the underlying structure - like in this one's body. You are however still pretty loose with certain parts (like the looseness of that one's head ellipse) which can cause some issues. Definitely put more time into executing your ellipses confidently from your shoulder and keeping them tight.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that 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 - or in your case, you just aren't following the sausage method principles completely, even though you're kind of applying parts of them. You're definitely overusing contour lines (note that in the sausage method diagram, it says not to add contour lines along the length of the segments, and only to use them at the joints), and aren't sticking to simple sausage forms.

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, 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 I definitely want you to get your looseness under control, and make put a bit more time/preparation behind every mark. That said, I think you are progressing in the right direction, and can continue to work on these principles into the next lesson. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.