Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're generally making good headway in sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as noted in the instructions - although keep working on getting the ends of your sausages to consistently come out circular in shape. They frequently do, but there are still quite a few that come out a bit more stretched out, a bit deformed, or a bit more ellipsoid in shape instead. Additionally, keep in mind that the degree of your contour curves should be getting wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the form, as noted in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I do have a number of points of advice to offer to help you continue to make the most out of these exercises.

The first point is one that doesn't apply across all of your work, but rather comes up on occasion in pages like here, and here. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

Continuing on, one of the bigger points I wanted to raise is about understanding the distinction between the kinds of actions we can take when engaging with our constructions. We can take actions that occur in 3D space, where we're actually considering the manner in which the things we've already drawn exist in three dimensions, and how the next masses we add to build upon them both respect and reinforce the illusion that it's all 3D. Or, we can take actions that focus on the fact that we're just drawing lines and shapes on a flat page, with all the freedom that entails - while also allowing ourselves to contradict and undermine that illusion of solidity.

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.

As shown here, I've highlighted areas in red where you cut into the silhouettes of your existing forms, and in blue where you've extended off them.

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.

Continuing on, I did notice that while you appear to be applying elements of the sausage method to your insects' legs, you do not apply it consistently or completely. As noted in the sausage method diagram, there are many specific requirements for this technique - that we use forms that adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages, that they overlap enough to establish an intersection in 3D space, and that this intersection is defined by a contour line at each joint, and nowhere else along the length of the forms.

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.

Now, I will be marking this lesson as complete, as I feel each of these points I've raised can continue to be addressed into the next lesson's homework. Just be sure to do what you need to avoid forgetting what I've mentioned here, as we wouldn't want the same issues to arise in the same manner in your next critique.