Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, I can see that you're definitely making an effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. There is still room for improvement on this front (you have a tendency to have one end smaller than the other, or have one end be more stretched out like an ellipse (instead of being circular), and the other getting somewhat more smushed, but you're moving in the right direction. Just keep reviewing what those characteristics](https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/simplesausage) are, so it's always fresh in your mind.

There are however a few other things that did stand out in regards to this exercise, which I wanted to call out:

• Keep an eye on the degree of your contour lines. At times I could see you shifting the degree wider as you away from the viewer along the length of the sausage, which is correct, but in other cases (like the rightmost sausage on this page), you'd maintain a consistent degree. If you're unsure as to why they should be getting wider as they move away from the viewer, this is discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

• A problem that mostly appears on this page is that the little contour ellipses you're placing on some of the tips (which is something we usually do when a given tip is facing the viewer) are, for every sausage on this page, contradicting the contour curves which instead suggest that both ends of each sausage are turned away from the viewer. This breakdown of different configurations of the same sausage "shape" into different potential orientations in space may help - note how the contour lines all have to be consistent with what they're telling us about the orientation of the form. If the contour curves tell us that both ends are facing away, but you stamp contour ellipses on them anyway, that'll only serve to confuse things. This issue is also present in the two middle sausages on the other page.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, you've got a mixture of results. Some of these drawings - for example, much of the ant construction from this page have been drawn in a way that shows a clear thought process occurring mostly in three dimensions, with 3D structures being built on top of one another. Others, however - like your ladybugs, along with some others - tend to jump back and forth between working in 3D space and working in 2D space, which creates some visual confusion for the viewer (and in turn, also can cause you to flatten out your drawing unintentionally). Then there are cases where in deciding ahead of time that you're going to delve into more visual detail/decoration for your drawings, some of the strengths of your construction-only drawings tend to diminish, as you invest less time on those earlier (and yet more critical) stages, in favour of spending more time on detail. I'll address each of these issues in turn.

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.

This is most prominent in your ladybugs (you tend to draw the abdomen/thorax with more spherical ball forms - I'd recommend starting with something more smushed on the vertical axis, and perhaps starting with a smaller base form and building up to the structure you desire - but it comes up in smaller ways in other constructions. For example, I've marked out areas on this page - in red where you cut into your existing silhouettes, and in blue where you extend or redefine those silhouettes. So even the ant - which has many clear points of strengths in how it was built up through the introduction of new, simple components, bit by bit - does run into these problems in some small ways.

Instead of altering the silhouettes of these structures - an action that occurs strictly in the 2D space of the page - 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.

I'd also recommend taking a look at the shrimp and lobster demos from the informal demos page - these show quite clearly how every single form that is added to the structure is strictly respected as existing in three dimensional space. This is kind of a trick we have to play on our own brains - if we ourselves are constantly trying to convince ourselves of the fact that these forms are solid, we'll be less likely to make little mistakes that undermine that illusion for others.

Continuing on, I mentioned previously that there are some issues that arise when you start getting more into detail - for example, in the case of this weevil. Based on what I'm seeing - though it's hard to point to specific visible cases of this, it's more of a general impression I get from these drawings in comparison to those without detail - it seems that you may invest less time into the construction when you know that you're going to delve into more detail afterwards.

There are a couple of ways this can occur:

• Some students, knowing that they're going to be jumping into detail soon, simply become impatient (what with detail being a lot more fun to explore). They think ahead to how they're going to make their drawing look really impressive, and so while they should be thinking about how the forms they're building up now exist in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within that 3D space, they're instead thinking about how they're going to tackle the smaller details that exist in their reference. To put it simply - they end up distracted.

• In other cases, it could simply be a matter of time - given that detail is inevitably going to take time, some students may feel a compulsion to get their drawings finished in the time they have left in that specific sitting, causing them to compress their timeline and - well, to put it simply - rush. Sometimes that rushing occurs only in certain sections - for example, I think you're generally doing a good job of actually executing your marks with confidence, but there are definitely cases where your observation of your reference may be lacking. This dragonfly for instance, looks quite dramatically off, though I can't really be sure without seeing the reference. It does at least follow the trend I've been talking about however, where it seems like the earlier phases where the big decisions were being made were given less time than they needed. Of course in truth there's no actual time limit for any of these drawings. Our only responsibility as students is to give ourselves as much time as we require to complete the drawings to the best of our current ability - not just the drawing as a whole, but going down into every individual mark and form. In order to do this, sometimes we simply need to break a single drawing across multiple sittings and days.

There is something else to be said about this point however, and that comes down to exactly what detail is meant to be, in the context of this course. Sometimes students get more preoccupied with the idea of "decoration" - that they've reached the point where they can just focus on making their drawing as impressive and visually appealing as they can manage. Unfortunately this isn't really a solid, concrete goal that we can meaningfully strive for, simply because there's no clear point when one has 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.

That circles back to what was discussed in Lesson 2 - the idea of texture being made up strictly of cast shadow shapes, each one defining the specific relation between the particular textural form casting it, and the surface receiving it. It's not about trying to capture a more general "impression", but rather establishing and implying the presence of specific forms. This is very time consuming, so many students will opt to focus just on drawing what they see in their reference, rather than first understanding the forms they can identify through observation, and implying each one on an individual basis. That, of course, isn't what we're after, however.

Also, focusing more on decoration can also lead students to try to capture things like form shading (which as explained here is not something we'll be including in our drawings for this course). Also, this focus on our filled areas of solid black representing cast shadows (which in turn imply the presence of textural forms) leaves little room for capturing local and surface colour of our objects, so that is best left out entirely, treating everything like it's covered in the same solid white.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that I'm largely seeing you attempting to make good use of the sausage method when constructing your insects' legs. There are some spots where you don't quote hold to all of its tenets - for example here where many of the segments are more complex than the simple sausage characteristics we discussed before - but overall in other constructions you're employing that technique pretty well.

I'm also pleased to see that you're trying to build on top of those structures after the fact to build up greater complexity as needed. In terms of what we've already discussed, in terms of building up additively, and thinking about how those new forms relate to the existing structure in 3D space, I do have a few diagrams that can help with how you build on top of the sausage structure:

• This one and this one demonstrate various ways in which additional masses can be wrapped around such sausage structures - note how they're broken up into separate pieces so each new mass can make as much direct contact with the existing structure as possible. Also, note how we're twisting them around - this helps to achieve a more natural, organic impression, and it really helps when dealing with animals' legs too (where it allows us to reproduce the way muscles twist around our limbs/bones. One thing to avoid is the sort of "hotdog in a bun" appearance we end up with in cases like this, where there's a mass on either side, and they run roughly parallel to one another, almost making a straight line down the length of the sausage with no twisting.

• This ant leg demo and this dog leg demo may also help demonstrate just how far this approach can be pushed when constructing our insects and animals' legs.

Now, I've pointed out a number of things here, and I am going to assign some revisions below for you to demonstrate your understanding.