Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, there are three main points I want you to keep an eye on:

• Firstly, while I think overall you're making good headway in sticking to the specific characteristics of simple sausages, but keep working at it - there are definitely cases where you end up working with more of an elliptical shape (like the top left two on the first page), and this one on the second page where the ends were more tapered/pointy, rather than circular in shape (resulting in the midsection getting much wider).

• Be sure to draw through all of the ellipses you freehand two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1.

• You're somewhat inconsistent in how you handle your contour lines' degrees. In some cases, like here you do a pretty good job of shifting the degree wider as we move farther away from the viewer along the length of the sausage (aside from the very tip on the right side where it starts to get wider again). In other cases however, like this one, you're more prone to sticking to closely to the same degree. If you're unsure of why the degree gets wider as we move farther away, you can review the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, overall you've done a great job, especially in working from simple to complex and building your constructions up in stages, but there are a couple recommendations I can offer that should help you get even more out of these drawing exercises. The main point I want to talk about is distinguishing between the actions we take in 2D space - like drawing an individual mark on a flat page - and the actions we take in 3D space, like defining a form that exists in the three dimensional world of the object itself.

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.

If we look at your earwig, we can see some examples of this. The biggest one is in the thorax, where you started with a larger ellipse form (which should establish a nice, solid ball form in 3D space), then drew on top of it and cutting into it, effectively treating it like that solid structure is no longer present. This introduces some pretty major contradictions in what the viewer is being shown - is there a form there, or is there not? Along with the areas where you cut into your silhouettes in red, I also identified spots in blue where you extended those existing silhouettes, or built off them with elements that existed only in 2D space, without defining how they're meant to relate to the existing structure in 3D space. While this isn't a mistake (given that the current material doesn't touch too much upon this - I've been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet, which 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). It is however something we can approach differently.

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.

It is worth mentioning that there is an aspect of how you're approaching these drawings that does predispose you more to this kind of issue. It comes down to the fact that you tend to start out your constructions by drawing the early masses more faintly, then you effectively redraw everything (sometimes tracing back over existing edges, sometimes introducing entirely new components) with a much darker, heavier stroke, creating two distinct drawings that exist together - an underdrawing/sketch, and a "clean-up pass". This is an entirely valid approach in general, but one that as explained here I want students to avoid when working through this course. Instead, allow each form you establish to stand on its own - if something needs to change, build it up, but do not trace back over your existing marks.

At most, you may want to add another pass towards the end to add some line weight - but only do this in a limited, targeted fashion, focusing on clarifying how different forms overlap one another, and limiting its use only to the specific areas where those overlaps occur (as shown here with these two overlapping leaves).

Anyway, continuing on, I did notice that you made somewhat varied use of the sausage method when constructing your insects' legs. This approach has some very specific requirements to it, which are all listed here on this diagram from the lesson. Most notably:

• Each and every segment sticks to the characteristics of simple sausages. You did this to varying degrees, and no doubt had some cases where the very small or narrow sausages were difficult to nail correctly in this manner (like the top-left leg of your earwig, where it has a sausage that gets narrower through its midsection). That's not an issue, but I do want that those simple sausages to be what you're aiming to draw.

• Where the sausage segments meet, they should overlap enough to provide a healthy intersection between them.

• And that intersection should be defined with a single contour line right at the joint between them, and nowhere else - meaning, you should not be putting additional contour lines elsewhere along their lengths, something you do a fair bit.

Try your best to stick to these specific elements, and keep in mind that the key 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).

And that about covers it! Everything I've mentioned here can continue to be worked on as you move forwards, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. just be sure to read through the feedback you've received here periodically, as it is easy to miss things or forget important points, and we certainly do want to see signs that each of these points have been worked upon in your next lesson's work.