Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, by and large y ou're progressing well, although there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Remember that one of the aspects of this exercise is to try to follow the characteristics of simple sausages - meaning, two ends of equal size, circular in shape, and connected by a tube of a consistent width. While you're generally keeping things simple, you do have a tendency for the width to get wider or skinnier through the midsection, and you have quite a few cases where the ends are either of different sizes, or where one gets more stretched out or pointier, rather than remaining circular.

• Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines should not be remaining consistent throughout the length of the sausage. Instead, as explained back in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the degree should be shifting wider as we move farther away from the viewer.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I'm pleased to see that you're doing a good job of focusing on building up your constructions from simple to complex, working your way up to the visual complexity of your reference image without skipping major steps. There are however ways in which I can offer some advice to help you push this farther, and get more out of these drawing exercises. The first of these is recognizing the distinction between actions we take that occur in two dimensions (putting lines down on a page), and actions we take that occur in the three dimensions in which our object is meant to exist.

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 can see this demonstrated here on one of your beetles, where I've identified areas where you've cut back into the silhouettes of your constructed forms in order to refine or alter their silhouettes. There are also a lot of places where you've built things up with partial shapes (like along the legs), rather than drawing each segment in its entirety. We'll talk about how we should be approaching the legs in a moment.

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 next thing I wanted to talk about is that 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. 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.

The last point I wanted to discuss is about how you approach the detail phase of your drawing, once the whole construction is complete. Right now it appears very much that once you've completed the construction phase, that you're looking for reasons to add more ink to the page - more marks, so you can add more detail, and generally make the image more visually pleasing. We can think of this as "decoration" - but decoration is something of a loose, ill-defined goal to pursue, as it's never really clear when you've added enough decoration.

We can however look for a more concrete goal to pursue by looking back at the concepts from Lesson 2's texture section.

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. 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.

And that about covers it! As a whole, I do think that each of the issues I've addressed here can continue to be worked upon as you move into the next lesson - from ensuring that you're always building up additively through the introduction of new, complete, fully self-enclosed forms at every step, ensuring that you're employing the sausage method for the construction of all of your legs, and focusing more on the specific idea of conveying texture to the viewer, rather than a more general pursuit of decoration when adding detail - as you work on your animal constructions. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - though I do recommend that you review this feedback periodically as you move forwards, as it's quite dense and it may be easy to miss things or forget important points, and we wouldn't want to hit Lesson 5's critique with the issues present in the same way.