Alrighty! Jumping in with the organic forms with contour curves (note that the homework did assign 2 pages of contour curves, it seems you did one of ellipses and one of curves), I'm seeing progress in terms of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, although there are certainly still ones that end up kind of misshapen on occasion, but that's something that I expect will go away gradually as your muscle memory and general dexterity here improves.

When it comes to the contour lines themselves, you're generally handling them well and I can see the awareness of how the degree ought to be shifting being applied here. At times you do have them jump around a little dramatically (like here - I'd probably avoid having such dramatic changes in degree from one to the next, and if it's strictly necessary like in cases where the sausage would be turning quite a bit over its length, adding some intermediate steps like this can help). With one of the ones that was particularly misshapen, I did catch that you had some contour curve weirdness as well right at its "neck" as shown here. Definitely should have been narrower as I drew it in, as this would continue the pattern set out by the other contour curves to its left.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I think that while there are definitely things we can work on and improve upon, your primary issue really comes down to the sausage forms - that is, keeping them simple, and avoiding making them get way bigger than they should. What I think is the case here is that right now, you're finding drawing the sausages very difficult when they get smaller (which is totally normal - anything that really benefits from us using our shoulder becomes more difficult when they get smaller, and so we struggle to keep using our shoulders, and it just gets.. well, hard, but it does get easier with practice).

But as a result, when you're drawing the segments of your legs, sometimes they'll have weird shapes, and other times you'll accidentally end up drawing them bigger than you intend. That is your biggest issue right now, and while it's one that is going to get better with practice, it is also something I know you have been working hard at, and you are finding progress on that front to be very slow going. I believe our next steps are going to involve targeting this specifically, but let's continue looking at the rest of your work first.

Actually, before we move on from the sausages, I wanted to call out one other issue. There are a few cases where you end up kind of drawing "through" your sausages in the way that we draw through our ellipses - that is, going around the shape a few times. We can see you doing this here for instance. While the top of those two sausages is actually quite well done, this is still kind of risky, and something to avoid. The main reason is that drawing through a shape like this takes advantage of the fact that our arm wants to draw elliptical shapes - and so, if we do it when drawing an ellipse, it results in more confident ellipses. When we do it for anything else - like a sausage shape - however, we end up taking that sausage shape and potentially making it more ellipse-like instead. So, avoid drawing around your sausage shape more than 1 full time before lifting your pen.

We can see similar issues here on your ladybug although here your linework does seem kind of haphazard.

Now, moving on from the sausages, I wanted to take a moment to point out that despite the linework being at times haphazard and rough, you are actually at times doing a pretty solid job of still capturing a sense of how these insects exist as three dimensional structures. For example, this wasp still feels pretty solid, and I get a clear sense of how the head is right at the front, closest to the viewer, and then its thorax is behind it in space, and the abdomen is behind that. Generally messy linework does a lot to undermine the solidity, but you've still managed to maintain it pretty well here despite that.

That said, I do think there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to observation, however. The drawings we do in this course aren't really focused on replicating the reference perfectly - we'll inevitably make little mistakes here and there, where a form will be drawn too big, too small, or otherwise taking us on a somewhat different path than the direction defined by our reference. But still - we do have to keep working at spending as much time as we can observing our reference carefully and constantly, ensuring that every new form we add to our construction is informed by what is in our reference.

In some places, you deviate from your reference in small ways here and there, and we can identify these by looking at the "negative" shapes in our reference image, and compare them to those in our drawing. Negative shapes are basically the spaces between the forms in our object/construction, as shown here. I normally avoid sharing this with students unless they're having more trouble with observation, simply because it has us focusing on 2D shapes, and as you well know Drawabox is all about 3D 3D 3D 3D. But there are other things out there, and in this case, negative shapes can help us take what are photographs that are super densely packed with visual information, and better understand what to focus on.

So, to kind of reiterate:

• We can look at the negative shapes in our references - identifying the actual shapes that occur between different structures, like the limbs and the body.

• We can then either keep these shapes in mind when we build out those structures in our own construction, OR we can use it to analyze our results after we've finished, to see just how far off we were from matching it. If you have access to digital drawing tools, you can basically do the kind of analysis I did on your wasp.

I also wanted to point out that while in that diagram I showed how far off the shape between the front "arms" were, the shape towards the back between the leg and the abdomen isn't actually too bad. If you look at each straight edge on the shape one by one, you'll find that most of the issue comes from a couple forms being longer than they should, but the rest follows roughly the same pattern.

Now, there are other constructions where right from the beginning you ended up going in a pretty different direction. For example, your lobster. To start, where your reference is angled down and to the right, your drawing is coming from a different angle, with the lobster kind of oriented upwards to the right as shown here. Again - while it's not the end of the world (after all, we could be working with different pieces of reference to figure out what it'd look like when turned in space, but I DEFINITELY wouldn't recommend that right now for you, as you'd simply be biting off more than you can chew), but you are making it way more difficult for yourself. The angle you chose to draw it at requires way more information on that tail, and puts the legs in totally different angles, and now you're giving yourself a shit ton more work to do when you're already having plenty of difficulty as it is.

So, to put it simply: the more time you invest in observing your reference, the more you can eliminate unnecessary difficulties along the way.

Now, while in the past I've hit you with really long critiques, and there are more things I want to call out, I don't think it's beneficial to needlessly overwhelm you with a ton of things to work on. Instead, we're going to focus on hitting the points I've raised above, plus one more thing - follow the specific points mentioned on the sausage method diagram, as shown here. I'm noticing a lot of places where you're not defining the joint between the sausages with a contour line (as shown in the center of the sausage method diagram), and I can also see you using contour lines elsewhere on those sausages, though you're told not in the same area of the diagram.

So here's what we're going to work on:

• Getting better control of those sausages. While I don't think this is something we can totally fix quickly, I do want to have you do some limited grinding on this front.

• Make sure that you're using the ghosting method for every single mark you put down. What that really means is going through all three steps: planning (identify the nature of the mark you want to make, ask yourself what its job is, how it can be drawn to best achieve that task, and what angle you need to rotate the page to in order to achieve it). This goes for all your marks, nothing should be drawn by reflex, not even (and especially not) to correct a mistake.

• Keep pushing yourself to invest more time on observing your references - you're still deviating from them quite a bit, but hopefully paying attention to those negative shapes will help.

• Adhere more closely to the sausage method diagram, specifically when it comes to how and where contour lines should be used.

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