Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, I think you may not have been practicing this as part of your warmups up until this point, and there are a few issues that stand out to me:
You're not quite adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages as explained in the instructions although you aren't too far off. You just need to watch the ends of your sausages, keeping them circular instead of letting them get pointy, and to make sure that the width of your sausage remains consistent from end to end.
You're maintaining roughly the same degree through all of your contour lines. I mentioned this when critiquing your last revision for lesson 2. Each contour line defines a cross-sectional slice of the sausage form, and that contour line's degree describes how that slice is oriented in space relative to the viewer. As we get farther from the viewer, the contour line's degree will naturally get wider and wider.
Moving onto your insect constructions, while there are mixed results, overall you've actually moving in the right direction. There are however some issues to be addressed.
Looking at your first 4 constructions (the non-detailed ones), I'm actually pretty happy with how you approached them. You didn't fall into the trap a lot of people do where they assume construction-only means really really simplistic. You delved into a lot of the more nuanced form construction and you captured a lot of complexity whilst focusing only on forms.
I did notice that your use of the sausage method for your legs wasn't always entirely consistent - in many cases you totally forgot to define the intersection between the segments with contour lines as explained in the middle of the sausage method diagram. You did this correctly [in your wasp]() drawing, but you didn't stick to simple sausages as consistently as you should have.
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, 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, continuing onto your detailed drawings, this is where you kind of went way off track. I'm very happy to see that despite the fact that these drawings were to be detailed, you didn't change how you approached them in the first place, still minding the underlying construction as you had before. That's really good, and shows that you have your priorities in the right order. That said, for the most part you totally missed what was being asked for when we talk about getting into texture - instead you just treated it like "decoration", and ran straight for shading/rendering, which as mentioned in lesson 2 is something we don't tackle within this course, or include in our drawings here at all.
The thing about our exercises here is that they focus on a single thing - conveying 3D information to the viewer. Through construction we give the viewer everything they need to understand how they might manipulate this object in their hands. Through texture, we convey to them what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. So while construction focuses on the big forms, texture is all about implying to the viewer the smaller textural forms that are present. None of this is about decoration or creating a pretty picture - it's all about getting information to the viewer.
Now, I highly recommend that you review the texture section notes from lesson 2. Then I'd like you to do a few additional pages in revision. Overall you're moving in the right direction, but this should help situate you more favourably once you move onto the next lesson.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
2 pages of organic forms with contour lines. Please review the instructions for this exercise before doing them.
2 pages of detailed (textured) insect constructions.
Hello, thanks for the kind critique!
I admit that I don't do sausages exercise that much, though I always do lesson 1 exercises whenever I can. I will include sausage exercises in my daily warmups.
Also, as you said, I've tried to apply texture lessons on my insect drawings.
Here's the link to revision album.
Your praying mantis is definitely looking much better, and I'm confident that you're demonstrating a much more solid grasp of the material. I do have some notes about your slug here though. It's mainly two separate points:
When you've got two forms intersecting/connecting with one another, define that relationship with a contour line. It makes both forms feel solid and defines that relationship in three dimensions, reinforcing the illusion quite strongly.
When drawing texture, it is always best to work in shapes rather than line. To ensure that you do this (because it's very easy to just end up making an arbitrary strokes, but individual lines don't tend to have the same dynamism as shapes). Secondly, when drawing lines it can also become very easy to slip into a pattern of just drawing what you see, rather than actually identifying and understanding the textural forms that are present and considering what kinds of shadow shapes they would cast.
Anyway, these are things to keep in mind as you move forwards. As it stands, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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