Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, for the most part these are done well. Just a few things to keep in mind:

• You're pretty close to adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, though there are a few places where you drift a little. There's one with particularly stretched ends, and a couple where the ends are of different sizes, or the midsection gets a little narrower. Nothing huge, just something to keep an eye on.

• Remember that as you slide along the length of a given form, away from the viewer, your circular cross-sections (whether they're represented as ellipses or curves) will get wider.

Moving onto your insect constructions, as a whole you're doing a pretty good job, but there is a pretty important issue that I want to call out.

When working through your constructions, you appear to work in two entirely distinct processes. One involves putting down really faint, exploratory marks to put down the initial masses discussed in the lesson. The way you're drawing these makes it pretty clear that they are not intended to be a part of the final construction, and instead are designed to be ignored by the viewer. Once you get past that step, you do a great job of showing a lot of respect for how your constructions exist in 3D space, how things wrap around one another. The problem is, of course, that you still have these other marks that suggest that entirely different forms occupy that space. Forms that you're telling us to ignore.

Unfortunately, you can't tell the viewer to ignore things you've drawn. Every mark you put down defines something, and once it's present, the viewer has to be told how to understand it in relation to the rest of your drawing.

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.

So for example, in this drawing you're definitely cutting back into the initial abdominal mass.

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, but in truth once you get beyond those initial masses, you do a perfectly fine job of adhering to these principles. It's that initial part where you treat this process as a sketch, as an exploration, rather than as a solid, three dimensional construction.

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.

The only other thing I wanted to call out was that your adherence to the sausage method is at times somewhat inconsistent. Sometimes you'll reserve contour lines for defining the relationship between segments as shown in the sausage method diagram, sometimes you'll use them more loosely placing them in those segments' midsections (as the diagram specifically says not to). Sometimes you'll stick fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages for your segments, other times you'll allow yourself to draw forms that have one end larger than the other.

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.

Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Overall I think you're doing just fine, but I do want to see you resolve those two issues in the next lesson.