Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, there are a few points I want to draw attention to here.

• Firstly, I can see that you're generally striving to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages as noted in the instructions, although there are definitely places where you deviate from this to varying degrees. Some pinching or widening through the midsections (where they ought to remain more consistent), some cases where the ends are more stretched out, becoming ellipsoid rather than circular, and so on.

• You're drawing your contour lines confidently, which helps to maintain a smooth, even shape to them. There is more room for improvement on their control/accuracy, keeping them snug within the silhouettes of the sausage forms, but as a whole you're doing well in this regard and that accuracy will improve with more practice in using the ghosting method in this case.

• I do however want to remind you that those contour curves should be shifting wider as we slide along the length of the form, moving farther away from the viewer. This is explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, so I recommend you review it if you're unsure as to the reasoning why.

• Also, I'm noticing that you're placing ellipses on both ends of each of your sausages - which suggests that you're doing this without necessarily understand what those ellipses are for. The ellipses are contour lines like any other - the only difference being that on the tips of the sausages that face towards the viewer, we can see the full way around, instead of just a partial curve. This also means that you should not be placing such ellipses on the ends that face away from the viewer. You can see what I mean by looking at the different configurations shown here. Note where we use ellipses and where we don't.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, one thing that stands out very much to me here is that your focus appears to be heavily weighted towards the end result, on making drawings that appear visually interesting. As a result, there's a lot of attention being paid to decoration (basically doing what you can to make the result more visually pleasing, which we'll talk about more in a bit), as well as very heavy and somewhat arbitrary use of line weight and other filled areas of solid black. I can see the traces of the constructions underlying these final drawings, but you appear to engage with them more as a loose

The thing is that every drawing we do in this course is specifically an exercise. That means that the approach we use, how we think about the marks we're putting down and what it is we're drawing throughout the constructional process is of critical importance, and how the drawing ends up looking afterwards is far less significant. While we do get into texture, while we do employ line weight and cast shadows and so on, we do so in more limited, specific ways.

As far as line weight goes, it should be kept very subtle, and focused not on arbitrarily reinforcing the lines you want to "keep" (as opposed to the constructional lines that you leave more faint), but rather on clarifying how different forms overlap. As explained here, we limit its use to the localized areas where those overlaps occur.

For filled areas of solid black, those should be reserved only for capturing cast shadows - no form shading (as discussed here, no filling in existing shapes. Each filled area of solid black needs to be designed to convey the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it. It is the manner in which that shadow shape is designed that captures this important three dimensional information.

And lastly, as far as decoration goes, it simply doesn't give us a clear enough goal to pursue as we add texture to our constructions. 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.

Now, we're already at 1000 words but I have two main points to address. The first is defining the distinction between the actions we take that occur in 2D space (where we're really just thinking about putting lines down on a flat page), and the actions we take that occur in 3D space (where we're actively thinking about how everything we're drawing exists in three dimensions, and how the next mark we make is meant to respect and reinforce that illusion, being careful of actions that will undermine it.

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, take a look at this ant. I've marked out in red where you've cut into the silhouettes of forms you put into the scene, and in blue where you extended off existing silhouettes with partial/flat shapes.

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.

The other point I wanted to call out is that 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. 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).

Now, I suggest you take a good bit of time to go through everything I've shared with you here - all of the points I've raised, and all of the diagrams I've provided. It will take multiple read throughs at different times to really absorb it all, so don't expect to jump right into your revisions right away. That said, once you've had plenty of time to absorb my feedback, you'll find your revisions assigned below.