Alrighty! Starting right in with your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing pretty well here, buut there are a couple things to keep an eye on:

• Be sure to always strive for the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned here - right now it seems that while you're not too far off, there's enough deviation from it (that is, cases where your sausages pinch through the midsection or have one end smaller than the other) with enough consistency to suggest that you may have forgotten about this.

• Remember that the degree of your contour curves should be shifting wider as you move further away from the viewer along the sausage's length, as discussed back in Lesson 1's ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I can definitely see that you're building your constructions up with a fair bit of attention being paid to the principles of construction. You're definitely striving to work from simple to complex, and are mindful of avoiding jumping into too much complexity, too soon. That said, there are some ways in which your approach can be altered in order to help you get the most out of these exercises.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is just that - the fact that these drawings are, all of them, exercises. It's not really about going to whatever lengths to replicate our reference image, but rather to use the reference image as a source of information, and a general direction in which to aim, as we perform the same exercise over and over. That is, the exercise of building up solid, three dimensional structures, one piece at a time. With every move, we introduce something three dimensional to the construction, gradually trying to pick the right forms (and understand how those forms sit in space, and how they relate to the existing structure) to move in the right direction.

It's inevitably that we'll make mistakes - maybe draw a mass too big, and so on - but the most important thing always comes back to the fact that we're always operating in 3D space. There are many temptations to jump back to engaging with our constructions as they exist as drawings on the page - where we add one-off lines, or partial shapes. These temptations must be avoided.

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.

On this page of your work, for instance, I've marked out a few places where you've definitely started out with larger masses, and then decided to try to refine and adjust the resulting silhouette, in precisely the manner that would flatten out your resulting structure. Sometimes this is intentional, but there are other cases where you'll block in a ball mass with an ellipse, but since we're required to draw "through" every ellipse we freehand in this course two full times before lifting the pen, this can result in a few different lines to choose from. In such cases, always treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the silhouette of the form it establishes. That way you don't leave any stray lines outside.

Instead of developing our constructions by altering the 2D silhouettes, 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. 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 also see this approach demonstrated best in the shrimp and the lobster demos. These are the most recent demos I've done thus far, and so they best demonstrate the strictness of this idea of "always work in 3D". Note how each mass is introduced and then respected, and everything that follows is either introduced as its own separate, fully enclosed form, either intersecting with the existing structure or somehow wrapping around it in three dimensions.

Continuing on, another point I did want to remark upon is the fact that your linework is often times kind of scratchy and sketchy. It varies, and I think this depends primarily on how much time you invest in a given drawing (relative to its own complexity), but sometimes your marks are much more haphazard like the queen termite on this page. The centipede, for comparison's sake, is generally more intentional, with each stroke given a bit more time.

Remember that the ghosting method introduced in Lesson 1 is an introduction to the idea that every mark we draw must go through these distinct steps - first planning, to identify the specific nature of the mark we want to draw and to determine what its purpose is to be, then preparation to gradually get more comfortable with the motion required, and finally a singular, confident execution. When linework suffers and devolves into more scratchy/sketching, this usually suggests that not enough time is being invested in the planning and preparation phases.

So the last thing I wanted to talk about was the use of the sausage method. I can definitely see you attempting to employ it in a lot of places, but you aren't necessarily holding to all of its elements (which you'll find laid out here. Most notably:

• Make sure you're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, and nothing else - no stretched ellipses, no weird wacky shapes, etc.

• Make sure you're having the segments interpenetrate enough to be able to define that joint/intersection between them with a contour line.

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).

Oh! Actually, I lied. There's one more last thing I want to call out, and it has to do with how you're approaching your "detailed" drawings. Right now, it seems largely that when you go in to add detail to your constructions, you're doing so with a focus on general "decoration" - that is, doing whatever you can to make your drawing more visually appealing. Decoration, unfortunately, isn't a particularly well defined goal to aim for, simply because it's unclear when we've 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.

Alrighty, now I'm done. All in all these are all things you can continue to work on as you move into the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Just be sure to keep these points in mind, and I expect you'll do just fine.