Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, I'm definitely pleased to see the enthusiasm with which you've drawn so many on both pages, but there are two key issues here that you need to keep in mind:

• You need to be aiming for the specific characteristics of simple sausages as explained in the instructions. We want our sausages to have two circular ends of equal size, and to be connected by a tube of a consistent width. Based on the inconsistency you've got on this front, I suspect you weren't really consciously aiming for these particular properties, and may not have read through the instructions as carefully as you should have.

• The degree of your contour lines (that is, their width if they were drawn all the way around as a full ellipse) represents the orientation of that particular cross-sectional slice, in space, relative to the viewer. It tends to get narrower as you get closer to the viewer, and wider as you slide along the sausage away from the viewer. You have a tendency of making them way wider than they should be, suggesting that you're not really thinking about the relationship between the degree of the curves and what they represent about that slice in space. I recommend you give the ellipses video from lesson 1 a watch. It was updated some months ago, and includes a pretty thorough explanation of how this all works.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, your results are at times a bit varied, but overall you are definitely moving very much in the right direction. I'm especially pleased with the cases where you focus heavily on the idea of building up your constructions through the addition of new, complete, enclosed, solid forms, one at a time, working from simple to complex.

There are however some important points I want to share with you that should help adjust your approach to yield better results, and more meaningful practice from the exercises themselves.

First and foremost, I can see from your drawings that you tend to work more loosely towards the beginning, and then gradually tighten up as you go. That also means that the forms you construct at the beginning - those initial masses that are meant to define the foundation of your construction - are often more loose and don't carry the kind of solidity that they should. You don't necessarily treat those forms with the kind of respect they require either - you're more willing to cut across their silhouettes freely, like here on this wolf spider where you drew the thorax/head mass quite a bit larger, but then cut back into it as it suited you. We can also see that the abdomen of that spider wasn't drawn as a complete form - you cut it off where it was overlapped by the thorax, so as you work through the construction, you're more likely to understand it as a flat shape rather than a full, 3D form.

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.

Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, 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.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo.

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.

Another point worth calling out is that you have a habit of severely overusing contour lines, in a way that suggests that you're adding them out of habit, rather than actually for a specific purpose. With every mark you draw, you should be employing the ghosting method - that means investing a good deal of time in the planning phase, where we assess what kind of mark we're going to draw, what its purpose is meant to be, and how it can best fulfill that role. When we slap on a lot of contour lines without thinking about it, it's because we're not taking those things into consideration.

Contour lines themselves - specifically those that sit along the surface of a single form - can very quickly run into diminishing returns, where the first one may be more impactful, the second less so, and the third even less. So when you're piling them on, they're not necessarily going to make your construction feel that much more solid. There are however different kinds of contour lines - those introduced in lesson 2's form intersections, for example, which define the relationship between different forms as they exist together in 3D space, and in doing so they're very effective at making things feel solid and three dimensional. They're also impossible to overuse, since there's only one intersection that can be defined between a set of forms.

Lastly, 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.

While you're moving in the right direction in some ways, I am going to be assigning some additional pages of revision for you to apply what I've called out here. You'll find them assigned below.