Alrighty! Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are mostly well done, but you definitely do have more than a few that stray from the characteristics of simple sausage forms by either having one end larger than the other, or having ends that are more stretched out and not quite circular. Always be sure to review the instructions for an exercise when it is assigned - don't assume you haven't forgotten little bits and pieces.

Moving onto your insect constructions, honestly for the most part your work here is extremely well done. There are a couple hiccups that I'll call out which aren't inherently wrong, just approaches we avoid within this course. Still, you've done a great job throughout this set of demonstrating a strong understanding of how the forms you're drawing exist in 3D space, and how they come together to create solid, believable structures.

Now, as a result of the fact that your work here is very well done, the critique will likely be pretty short (i swear whenever I say this in a critique, it always ends up being over 1000 words - we'll see how we do). So let's get to it.

The first and most notable issue I'm seeing is the fact that you are a little lax when it comes to the idea that ever single mark we draw defines a solid, three dimensional form we're introducing into the world. There are a number of places where you've added a form, but then ultimately either decide it is not present and draw over it, introducing something new (and more complex) within the space it occupies without defining its relationship to that existing form. There are also places where you cut back into the silhouette of one of these existing forms, or otherwise attempt to modify the silhouette of a form that has already been drawn. All of these are big no-nos for the process we're using within this course.

The silhouette of a form is what exists on the page - it's not the form itself, but it is its representation. In a sense we have two entities - a 2D shape on the page, and a 3D form in a 3D world, and they're connected to one another. When we change that 2D shape however, we don't change the 3D form - we instead break the connection between them and leave ourselves with a flat shape, in turn flattening out that aspect of the drawing. So for example, the bottom left on this page started out with a pretty big ball form to define its thorax and abdomen, but in turn you decided to modify that silhouette, pulling it in along the top and bottom to refine that shape.

As explained here, cutting back into a silhouette forces the viewer to understand the pieces that are left as being two dimensional. There is a correct approach to 'subtractive construction' which works fine, focusing on breaking a 3D form into two distinct 3D forms, each able to stand on their own, but this is best reserved for geometric and hard-surface construction. For organic subject matter, it really is best to work purely additively all the way through - meaning that we're just building more forms on top of one another, defining how those forms relate to one another (either having one wrap around the other, or having them intersect with a contour line defining their connection). For this purpose, starting smaller and building up is always better than trying to start bigger, and having no reasonable way to cut back down.

You can see examples of working strictly additively with this ant head and this beetle horn. I also have a newer, fairly thorough demonstration of a lobster.

The other point was that 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, 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.

Now, as I mentioned, overall your work is coming along quite well. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You'll have ample opportunity to work on both points I raised in the next lesson, where both working additively and using the sausage method to construct legs are major components of constructing animals.