Before we get started, remember - regardless of how you feel about your work, do not include any self-critique or self-deprecation, as explained here in this Lesson 0 video. It's a habit that can really impede our growth, and get us trapped in the wrong overall mindset.

Jumping right in with your organic forms with contour curves, the first point I want to call out is that the assignment was to do two pages of contour curves. You ended up doing one of curves, one of ellipses - not a huge issue, but definitely a sign that we need to take more care in identifying what the assignment/instructions are going forward.

Overall your work here is otherwise pretty good - you're doing a good job of sticking pretty closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, you're shifting the degree of those contour lines, and so on - just be sure to draw through the ellipses at the tip facing the viewer two full times before lifting your pen, as is required for all the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, your work here is by and large quite well done. There are a couple things I want to call out in order to help you continue to get the most out of these exercises, but as a whole I'm pleased to see that you're paying a lot of attention to the idea of building things up from simple to complex. The main piece of advice I can offer pertains to identifying the distinction between the actions we can take that occur in 2D space, putting marks down on a flat page, and the actions we can take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually establishing solid, 3D structures, and building upon them with yet more 3D structures that acknowledge and reinforce the solidity of what's already present.

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 this regard you actually do handle this quite well in a lot of areas, but I do see some cases where some of your actions shift more towards working in 2D, adjusting those silhouettes rather than considering every new addition as its own complete, solid form. For example, here on this ant's head, you started with a very faint ellipse, then every mark that followed was considerably darker - as though your goal was to replace that fainter structure entirely, rather than building upon it. Each mark was a separate stroke, altering that initial ball mass's silhouette, but only altering it in two dimensions. There's not enough information here to understand how each addition actually interacts with the ball form in 3D space, resulting in the drawing becoming flat.

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. I also talk about this in regards to Lesson 3 here in these notes from the informal demos page, specifically touching upon how we can alter the silhouette of a leaf because the leaf is already flat, but not something that has more volume to it.

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 can see that you're making some effort to apply the sausage method in the construction of your insects' legs, although there are some ways in which you deviate from it. Mainly small things, like drawing ellipses instead of sausages - you can refer back to the sausage method diagram to review the specific elements that are required for this approach.

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, where you can certainly try to apply this yourself).

The last point I wanted to mention is about how you make use of the space available to you on each page. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. In artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. Right now you're not doing badly on this front, but I did notice that there are definitely pages with a lot of excess room left over, as we see here and here.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

That about covers it. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.