Normally, your critique would be handled on Friday, but out of a deep seated anxiety over it being the beginning of the month (which usually means a huge inundation of submissions with all the new credits that went out, usually peaking on the 2nd and 3rd), I'm jumping right in and handling it now. So, let's get to it.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're doing a great job of drawing both the sausage forms themselves (keeping in line with the specific characteristics of simple sausages) as well as the contour curves themselves (keeping them confident/evenly shaped, as well as fairly accurate, and even having them shift from narrow to wide throughout the length of the sausage). There's two things I do want to call out however:

• On your second page, you end up drawing these like you're laying out dead fish at a market - they're totally rigid, aside from the one in the bottom right corner, and while in essence there's nothing against the rules of the exercise to do that, I really don't see this as being nearly as beneficial as having them bend as those on the first page. Normally when I see exercises laid out like this (identical replicas of the same one done over and over without significant variation), it's because the student's kind of going on auto-pilot, and that's not really helpful for them. Definitely avoid approaching it in this manner in the future.

• Your contour curves are great, but your contour ellipses are pretty consistently wrong. In this exercise, we're drawing the visible portion of our contour lines - so where in the contour ellipses exercise we'd draw all the way around for every single one, here we're mostly only drawing partial curves. You are correct however that there are cases where we'd still draw the full contour ellipse, all the way around - specifically at the tips of sausages, but only when the given tip is oriented towards the viewer. In that case, we'd be able to see all the way around the contour line, but similarly, that also means that when the tip is turned away from the viewer, we wouldn't be able to see that contour line at all. What you're doing here is, often, drawing ellipses on both ends, without regard for how they're oriented. I'm also noticing that you're laying out your contour curves in every single one of these such that the tips are always pointing away from the viewer (so those ellipses would not be visible at all). While drawing the ellipses is therefore wrong for all of them, the fact that you're drawing the ends pointed away isn't itself a mistake, but it does beg the question of why. It could simply be a choice you're making, similarly to drawing a bunch of the same sausage over and over, but it could also mean that you're not entirely sure about how the contour lines themselves, and how they're drawn, change the physical nature of the 3D sausage in 3D space. This breakdown of different possible configurations of contour lines may help clarify some of that.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, you've got both areas of strength, where you're developing well, and holding to the core principles of the course, and some where your approach can be adjusted a little to help you get the most out of these exercises.

First off, take a look at the notes I've written onto your hercules beetle drawing. There are a few points here, but the main thing I wanted to suggest for future drawings is that you avoid anything that involves you altering the silhouette of a form that already exists. This is actually something you really don't do all that often - it's a pretty common issue, but its presence in your work is fairly minimal, but one way we can see it here is how you drew an ellipse to capture the basic ball structure of this beetle's abdomen, and then went back in to "pick" which of your (2D) ellipse's lines would constitute the edge of the (3D) ball form's silhouette. By picking the internal line, you left the section I highlighted in red hatching outside of its bounds, leaving it to float out there arbitrarily.

This is very similar to the issue shown in this diagram, where we define a form, and then attempt to cut into it, and as a result we flatten what was a 3D structure into a flat shape on the page. In certain circumstances - like Lesson 3's leaves and flower petals - this is fine, because they're already flat. But when the structure has volume to it, doing so will eliminate that illusion of volume.

This can also occur when one adds flat shapes to an existing form - effectively extending that silhouette. Fortunately I don't really see you doing this - in fact, I can see areas where you've built upon your structures by introducing new, solid, three dimensional structures, and defined the way in which they intersect with the existing structure (like where I pointed it out in green). That "relationship" can be defined in one of two ways, the correct one being dependent on how those forms actually interact in space. In the case of those little spikes you added, you designed their silhouettes such that it showed how they wrap around the existing structure. Alternatively, you if your forms interpenetrate, you can define that intersection with a contour line, similarly to Lesson 2's form intersections.

Circling back to the issue of extending a form's silhouette through the addition of flat shapes, one thing you are doing - and I pointed this out in blue - is jumping into too high of a level of complexity, too soon. Instead of jumping right into the fork at the end of the horn, we instead start with a simple, straight horn, and then we add the prongs to its tip in t he next step.

The last thing I marked out on that page is really just a specific thing about the hairs you added to the top horn. In general I would definitely avoid drawing anything as a single line - instead, always look for opportunities to group those forms together into larger masses. You'll see us doing this sort of thing in the next lesson, when we tackle fur (which is designed as a series of "tufts" rather than individual strokes. As shown here, I'd create a single flat grouping of the hairs, then cut back into it (as if with scissors) to create the separations that conveys the sense of it being a bunch of hairs next.

Now, I really do like to push the focus on "additive" construction here. There are little examples here and there in your work (like the little spikes I marked out in green, as well as the segmentation you added on your giant weta, especially the one coming up to the head) that show that you are grasping it for the most part. I do however have some additional demos you can look at:

• Beetle horn

• Ant head

• Shrimp construction

• Lobster construction

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.

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. Based on how you approached your work, I think the likelihood of you consciously saying "to hell with the sausage method, I'll go my own way!" is pretty low - but there definitely are discrepancies between the specific requirements stated on the sausage method diagram that you're not following, so I think you will want to review it.

This critique has definitely gotten pretty long, but there is one other thing I want to talk about. 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.

When it comes to space, sometimes you handle it really well, and right off the bat, you allow your first drawing to dominate the page. In others, however, it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but 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. 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.

In some ways, "space" also applies to the reference image - always lean on getting reference images that are as big as you can manage (even using the google image search option of "Tools>Size>Large" to force it to give you bigger results). Now, assume the reference you used for the hercules beetle was bigger than what you included in your imgur album (just from the fact that you could see the hairs enough to try to draw them), but it did make me want to call that out.

As to time, just be sure to give each drawing as much time as it requires - not just for drawing, but for observing your reference as well. There are still cases here and there where you oversimplify a little too much in ways that it suggests you could probably benefit from pushing yourself to spend more time looking at your reference (specifically doing so continuously throughout the drawing process, rather than only up-front). The specifics of where those things occur isn't really that important - just something to keep in mind. Sometimes students may feel rushed to complete some drawings faster, simply because they only have a certain amount of time in a given sitting. If you ever feel yourself pressured to work faster than you need, remember that you can always set a drawing down and pick it up another day. No need to call it done the moment you get up.

So! I've outlined a number of things for you to keep in mind, but as a whole I feel you're moving in the right direction, and that you should be able to continue working on these through into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.