Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, I can see that you are making noted effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. Your linework is also generally pretty confident and even. I have just one quick recommendation - while this isn't always the case, it does seem that most of the time you're drawing your contour curves and ellipses with roughly the same degree - remember that as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the general rule of thumb for cylindrical structures is that the cross-sectional slices we represent with these contour lines will get wider as they move farther away from the viewer. The turning of the form also does factor into this, but farther = wider is a solid starting point.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I think by and large you're doing a great job. I can see a lot of attention being paid to how each of these are built up from simple to complex, and how you're thinking through the way in which you can move in the direction of your reference at each stage. That said, I think the biggest piece of advice I can offer is about understanding when the actions we take occur either in 3D space, engaging with what we're creating like a solid, three dimensional structure, and when our actions occur only in two dimensions, engaging with it as though it's just a drawing or a collection of marks on a page.

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.

I've marked out on a few of your drawings here, in red where you cut into the silhouette of an existing form, and in blue where you appeared to take the existing silhouette and extend it out, or where you simply took a flat shape and attached it to the structure, but without any clear information on how it's meant to represent something in 3D space with the rest of what's there. There are definitely other instances of this, I just marked out the ones that jumped out at me.

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 whole premise is something I've been pushing more recently - so while it isn't as clearly represented in the lesson material yet (something I'm gradually updating, one step at a time), but you'll also find that the shrimp and lobster demos on the informal demos page demonstrate this as well. Note in particular how every stage focuses on establishing the forms as solid and three dimensional before moving onto the next. 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.

Continuing on, 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.

Now the last thing I wanted to mention was just a reminder - it looks right now as though when you get into the "detail" phase of your drawings, you're focusing more on a general goal of decoration. In other words, putting your efforts towards making the drawings look more visually pleasing. This sends you down a path of finding reasons to add more marks - rendering/form shading, putting down more random hatching and such, though back in Lesson 2 we did mention that form shading would not play a role in the drawings we do here.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

So! While I've called out a number of things here, I think these all can be addressed into the next lesson, where they continue to be relevant. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.