Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're generally handling these well, and I can see that you're putting a fair bit of consideration into sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. One thing to keep in mind though is that as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the degree of your contour curves should be shifting wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the form.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, your results are somewhat mixed between the principles of the lesson and the course as a whole - that is, focusing on building things up one step at a time, avoiding jumps in complexity that cannot be supported by the existing structure, and generally pushing ourselves to think in 3D space, as though everything we draw represents a three dimensional form that both respects and reinforces the 3D nature of that which already has been drawn - and what you described as effectively trying to copy your reference onto the structure you'd drawn, once that basic structure was laid down.

Now, fortunately even as you try to transfer your reference more directly in this manner (which on its face would be incorrect, as it would be more a matter of drawing purely from observation, transferring what you see, but without considering how that structure is made up of three dimensional forms), you ended up somewhere in between drawing purely in 2D (where we're just thinking about how to represent what we see in our reference with lines and flat shapes on the flat page), and leaning into a lot of the habits and ways of thinking this course drills. So, while there are definitely issues we can address and call out, you didn't just work in 2D space. There's a fair bit of 3D here as well.

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.

Taking a look at this dragonfly, I've marked out in red where you cut into the silhouette of an existing form, and in blue where you either extended off existing silhouettes or otherwise added one-off lines without really considering how they were meant to define complete forms that attach to the existing structure.

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.

So, above all else, remember - your goal here is not to simply copy the reference image, and it is actually pretty normal for students to end up deviating from the reference image to a point (not intentionally, and not due to a lack of time invested in the observational stage - but because we're not perfect robots, and all of our marks don't come out precisely as we intend, with some things coming out bigger, smaller, etc). The reference image is a source of information that helps you choose which new forms to add to your construction at each step.

Furthermore, the way in which you're leveraging line weight and filled areas of solid black similarly lines up with a focus being more on reproducing your reference image, rather than using the drawings as an exercise. Each one is indeed an exercise, in how they force us to consider the way in which the different forms connect to one another. Each time we try to consider how our forms are meant to exist together in 3D space, we're rewiring our brain more and more to consider the page as a window into a larger three dimensional world.

To that end, be sure to adhere to the points about line weight here and here (keeping line weight subtle and light, and focusing its use to clarify how different forms overlap one another in the localized areas where those overlaps occur), and when working with bolder filled areas of solid black, be sure to reserve them only for defining cast shadow shapes as discussed here, and avoid using it for form shading as mentioned here.

The last thing I wanted to discuss regarding leg construction. 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. In your case you certainly do deviate from it a little, but mostly I think it comes down to the specific requirements shown in the sausage method diagram. You're attempting to apply it, but you sometimes forget to define the joints between the sausage forms with contour lines, and also use them elsewhere along their lengths (both points mentioned in the diagram). When it comes to the sausage shapes themselves, you do generally stick to the characteristics of simple sausages quite well (despite your comment about trying to apply foreshortening to them - which given the small scale of insects shouldn't really be a concern, so you don't need to worry about applying foreshortening to them).

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. You generally do, but I'm saying this for the few cases where you forget.

Now, I've pointed out a number of things that you'll definitely want to work at, but each of these can continue to be addressed into the next lesson. As such, I will be marking this one as complete. Just be sure not to merely read through this feedback once - revisit it periodically, and even consider taking notes so you can have a summarized form of what you need to focus on for when you're actually going through the next round of drawing exercises.