Hello Ben, thank you for providing a link to your revisions.

Starting with your organic forms You're doing a good job of varying the degree of your contour curves here, well done.

Unfortunately the forms themselves have taken a step backwards. As I mentioned in my initial critique, it is important to review the exercise instructions before completing your homework exercises, even if it is an exercise you have done before. Your memory for what you think the exercise instructions are is not sufficient, make sure you are making the most of the information that is available to you. These critiques are to help explain things a student may have misunderstood, not a replacement for a student's own efforts in going through the lesson material.

So, at the top and left of your page you did pretty well at sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms but towards the right there are examples of bloating, pinching and uneven ends, as noted on your work. Looking at your previous page I think you are capable of keeping your sausage forms simple, but may have forgotten what properties we're aiming for with this exercise.

Continuing on, it looks like you've started drawing around your sausage forms twice. We ask students to draw around their ellipses 2 full times before lifting the pen off the paper, as this makes use of the arm's natural tendency to make elliptical motions. These sausage forms require a different series of motions from your arm, so drawing around them twice isn't actually very helpful, it just makes your work messier. This also applies to all the sausage forms required for leg constructions. So, to be clear- twice around ellipses, and once around sausage forms from now on.

On last point, I noticed that on one of your forms at the bottom of your page you placed and ellipse on an end that was facing away from the viewer. These ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. If the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is largely very well done. You've avoided cutting inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn and I can see a stronger understanding of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together.

Something that will help you get more out of these exercises in the future is to draw through all your forms. By this I mean you should draw each form in its entirety, even if part of it is obscured in your reference. We want you to understand the 3D structure of what you're drawing, and for this you want to figure out how to draw the whole form, like you have X-ray vision. Just because a form gets overlapped by something else doesn’t mean it ceases to exist within the 3D space we're creating in these exercises. This is something you're doing most of the time, but I noticed pieces of the shell/wing casing being cut off behind the legs of this construction as marked in red. In green I also completed the forms of the leg on the far side, rather than leaving them as partial shapes.

Your leg constructions are moving in the right direction, you're drawing complete forms, though as I noted earlier on your organic forms exercise you only need to draw around your sausage forms one time. Again, you want to be sticking to simple sausage forms for your leg armature, on this image I noted in green some forms that are well done, and in red some forms that are deviating from the characteristics of simple sausages.

You're making good progress with adding to your leg constructions with complete 3D forms. There are some approaches to building up structure on top of those base sausage armatures that work better than others. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

Alright. while your organic forms took a bit of a turn for the worse, I think this was a lapse in memory, rather than any lack of ability, so I'll leave you to apply this feedback independently in your warmups. Be sure to refer back to the information in your critiques as frequently as necessary in order to retain this information and apply it to your animal constructions in the next lesson. If anything said to you here or previously is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.