Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, overall you're doing quite well. There are some discrepancies at times in sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages at times - most of the time you adhere to them quite well, though there are definitely some where it seems that you weren't intentionally trying to follow them, so just be sure to always mind the instructions so you don't miss anything. But that aside, you've done quite well - your contour lines are confidently executed to achieve a smooth, consistent curvature, and you've maintained a great deal of control with them as well. The only other thing I'd advise you to keep in mind is that as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the degree of your contour curves here should be shifting wider as we slide farther away from the viewer.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, overall you've done very well, but there are a few points I want to draw to your attention. Some of them are points from the lesson you may have forgotten, or aspects of techniques you may have neglected to apply, although the biggest point is additional information that'll continue to help you make the most out of these exercises as you continue forwards - rather than an actual mistake or thing you did incorrectly given the information you had.

Starting with this main point, it's all about understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 2D space, where we're focusing on the flat shapes and lines on the page, and the actions we take that occur in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about the forms as we combine them in three dimensions, and how they relate to one another. In the latter, we're actively considering how the way in which we draw the later forms respect and even reinforce the illusion that the existing structure is 3D.

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.

You actually rarely cut into the silhouettes of your forms, so that's great to see. It contributes as a whole to what is a well developing understanding of 3D space. There is however a tendency to alter the silhouettes of existing forms by extending them out or redrawing them however, that you will want to work at. I've highlighted some such situations here in blue - the main thing to keep in mind is that these additions exist only in 2D space - there's no clear 3D relationship being defined between what you're adding, and what it's being added to.

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 (one of which I'm pleased to see that you included in your homework - you followed along with it quite well). 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 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. There are plenty of cases where you applied the sausage method in part, but did not apply it in its entirety - sometimes using ellipses instead of sausages, and fairly often using additional contour lines in the manner specifically mentioned there in the diagram as something to avoid. 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.

Now there's just two more things I wanted to call out:

• Line weight should not be used as broadly and generally as you have here. Rather than using it to arbitrarily reinforce the silhouettes of your forms, it should be employed in a more limited fashion, as described here, focusing primarily on clarifying the overlaps between different forms, in the areas where those overlaps occur.

• Remember that when adding detail, our goal is not to arbitrarily decorate our drawings. Rather, remember that texture as discussed back in Lesson 2 is about understanding the specific nature of the textural forms that are present, so we can draw the shadows they cast. You can review these concepts in these notes.

Now, I am certainly going to be marking this lesson as complete. While I had a number of points to draw to your attention, you're still doing quite well - just be sure to keep these points in mind, review this feedback periodically to ensure that you do not forget, and keep working on them as you move into the next lesson.