Jumping in with your organic forms with contour curves, you've done a pretty great job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. There are still some little deviations - an end being bigger than the other, or being more stretched out rather than circular in shape (especially on the second page) - but all in all you're quite close and it shows a clear intent behind your choices. One thing you will want to keep an eye on however is the fact that right now you're using contour curves of the same degree throughout the form. As discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, these circular cross-sections would be getting wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the sausage form.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I can see that you're putting a lot of thought into working from simple to complex, and building up to your desired structure in stages. That said, I do have some advice to offer that will help you continue to make the most out of these exercises. The big thing comes from understanding the distinction between the actions we can take that occur in 2D space - where we're just drawing lines and shapes on a flat page - and the actions we can take that effectively occur in three dimensions, where we're thinking about how everything we draw is a complete form, drawing in such a way that every new addition respects and reinforces the 3D nature of the existing structure.

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 we take a look at this ant, I've marked out where you've attempted to add complexity by cutting into the silhouettes of your forms - effectively taking them from 3D masses to flat, 2D shapes in the process.

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.

Continuing on, I did notice 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 - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

The last thing I wanted to call out is a reminder that once we're done our construction and we move onto the detail phase of things, we're still adhering to a specific process/approach. It's easy to hit this point and decide to switch gears towards "decoration" - that is, doing what we can to take our drawing and make it more visually pleasing, which is very much what we see in your butterfly where you've leveraged that solid black to capture what appears to be the local colouring of its wings - but unfortunately that's not what we're after here. Decoration itself is kind of an unclear goal to pursue, since there's no specific point at which one has added enough decoration.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that.

So! I've laid out a number of things for you to keep in mind, but all in all these are all things you can continue to address into the next lesson. Just be sure to actively apply these points. This critique, though it tackles only three main points, is still quite dense, so it's not out of the question that you might forget things. So, revisit it frequently as you move forwards.

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