Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing a good job of sticking relatively close to the characteristics of simple sausages. There are two key issues to remember however:

• Remember that the instructions state that you should be drawing a minor axis line through the middle of the sausage forms. This line will help you align your ellipses/curves.

• Additionally, remember that you are supposed to be drawing through your ellipses, two full times before lifting your pen, throughout this course.

Moving onto your insect constructions, as a whole you are doing a pretty good job. There are a few key issues that come up here and there that are important, and that I will address, but as a whole you're moving in the right direction.

The first thing I wanted to call out is simply the fact that you have a lot of room on those pages. For some of them, you make pretty good use of that space, but for just a couple of them - like the orchid mantis, the jumping spider, and the cricket - you would have benefited from drawing larger, taking up more of the page. Reason being, working smaller can have two negative effects. It hinders our brain's ability to think through spatial problems, and it also makes it much harder for us to engage our whole arm while drawing. Both of these factors can contribute to clumsier linework.

Moving onto how you actually approach the constructional process, there are a lot of things you're doing correctly - but there are some key areas where you take some shortcuts that undermine the solidity of the object you're capturing on the page. 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.

In all fairness to you, this isn't something you've done a whole lot - in fact, you do it a lot less than most other students. One example that stands out is your orchid mantis construction. Here we can see where you've blocked in the initial masses for the head, and various parts of the thorax. You then ended up refining the silhouettes of those masses to try and capture greater complexity. Doing so involved cutting back into those shapes, and as described above, flattened them out.

Similar things can happen when we attempt to extend that silhouette as well - basically any kind of interaction with the construction that involves adding 2D shapes to what is supposed to be a 3D structure. For example, on your dragonfly's tail you've added some flat shapes to quickly change a bit of the silhouette around there, making a more gradual transition from the bulbous end to the length of the tail.

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. You may also want to compare that ant head demo to how you approached constructing your own ant's heads. Right now I think you may not be paying close enough attention to what is present in your reference images - although if you're working from lower resolution references, that may also be the cause. Always aim to work from higher resolution images whenever possible.

Anyway, back to what I was saying - 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. Across a lot of your work, I can see that you are primarily working additively, but what you need to push into further is thinking more about how the pieces you're adding exist in 3D space, and how they actually wrap around the structures to which they're being attached.

The last thing I wanted to call out was just for you to be a little more mindful of the specific elements of [the sausage method technique]() when constructing your legs. Overall I can see that you are indeed attempting to apply it, but there is definitely some deviation. For example, with your cricket's front legs, you deviated from the sausage method and chose to mix in some cylinders. In other cases, you don't allow the sausage segments to overlap/intersect enough to be able to define the joint with a contour line. And in some other cases, you place contour lines along the length of the segments, rather than concentrating them at the joint as mentioned on the sausage method diagram.

Taking it further, 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.

Anyway, so there are a number of things for you to work on, but all in all you are still very much headed in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you can work on applying these principles on the material for the next one.