For the sake of full transparency, my teaching assistants and I generally try to ignore self-critique from students, for two reasons:

• Firstly, the drawings in your homework provide us with all the information we need to identify what you understand, what you may have forgotten, or what you may not fully grasp just yet.

• The information gleaned from the drawings can sometimes conflict with what the student themselves asserts or believes, and so we want to avoid any situation where we may be influenced by a student's own observations/thoughts.

So, in the future, feel free to voice any questions you have, but do not invest time in providing your own analysis - if only to ensure that I don't miss questions because I'm trying to avoid contamination (and to that point, I apologize in advance if you have any questions in there, because I will not have seen them).

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, one thing that stands out considerably is that you're not adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages as outlined in the instructions for this exercise. In the future, be sure to go back and reread the instructions for the exercises periodically. Of course, you're expected to be practicing the previous exercises as part of your regular warmup routine, but we can sometimes forget elements of how those exercises are meant to be performed, so periodically reviewing those instructions will help us avoid practicing the wrong things.

The contour lines themselves are drawn fairly well - a bit more room for improvement on getting them to fit snugly within the bounds of the sausages, but you are drawing them with confidence and maintaining smooth, even curvature. Just watch the degree of your contour lines - right now they're mostly drawn with roughly the same degree. The degree should instead be shifting wider as we slide away from the viewer, along the length of the sausage. While this is addressed in a few places throughout the course, I most recently added a fairly thorough explanation as to why this is into the newly updated ellipses video for lesson 1.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, in a lot of these I can see key signs that you are progressing in the development of your understanding of 3D space. There are however several cases - some more overt, others more general and minor - in which you actually end up undermining the illusion that what we're looking at is a three dimensional object, rather than a drawing on a flat 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 can see you doing this in quite a few places throughout your drawings. There are some specific cases, like the leg segments on this fly. Here you started out with the segment you drew more faintly, but then when you decided to "commit" to your lines, you redrew it, altering the shape, and functionally producing two 3D forms occupying the same space, but attempting to ignore one another. We can see a similar situation (actually much more notable - I should have picked this one before zeroing in on the fly, but oh well) with this caterpillar's head.

This also occurs in your general use of line weight. Remember that line weight is a tool, intended to help clarify specific overlaps between forms in localized areas. When we attempt to trace back over the entire silhouette of a form, we pretty much guarantee that we're going to end up altering the silhouette. Instead, keep your line weight limited in scope, and blend it back into the original linework by drawing your marks confidently, so they taper as shown here.

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.

Moving on, I can definitely see ample cases where you're trying to use the sausage method, and you employ it pretty well, sticking to a lot of the core principles of the technique. Just keep working on maintaining the characteristics of simple sausages, as it can be quite difficult, but it is important. Simplicity of a form makes it easier to have that form read as 3D, with as little additional intervention as possible.

That said, the use of the sausage method doesn't really stop there. I noticed that you capture a lot of your insects' legs as a basic sausage chain, and then leave it as-is. 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).

So, be sure to look closer at your reference images (using high resolution images helps a lot with this), and identify the smaller forms that you can then build onto the structure, adhering to those principles of additive construction. When you do so, make sure that you break those forms into smaller pieces, so that instead of just enveloping one old form in a new one, you allow those forms to make as much direct contact as possible. It's that contact between the silhouette of your new form, and the original structure, that allows us to create a believable relationship between them in 3D space.

So! You are moving in the right direction, but there is some more room for improvement here. I'm going to assign a few pages of revision below.