Jumping right in with your organic forms with contour curves, I can definitely see that you're making an effort to keep things simple, and on the first page you were sticking quite closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, but onto the second page, you appear to have deviated quite a bit more. Remember that we're aiming for ends that are equal in size and circular in shape, and a midsection that maintains a consistent width, not getting wider or narrower.

There are a few other things to keep in mind for this exercise as well:

• The assignment was actually to do 2 pages of contour curves, you appear to have done one of ellipses and one of curves. This is not a huge deal, but it is important to read the instructions carefully.

• To that same point (about reading the instructions), it's easy to think that we remember everything an exercise asks of us, but then to miss an important step - for example, the step where we draw the minor axis line so that each contour curve/ellipse can be aligned to it.

• Be sure to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen - this goes for all of the ellipses you freehand throughout this course, as discussed back in Lesson 1. I also noticed that you tended to neglect this in your insect constructions.

• And lastly, remember that as we slide along the length of a cylindrical structure, moving away from the viewer, the degree of those contour ellipses or contour curves should be getting wider, as discussed back in Lesson 1's ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, by and large you're doing fairly well. There are some points I want to draw to your attention to. The first of these is kind of something you did pretty well overall, but also could be more mindful of at the same time - it comes down to familiarizing yourself with the distinction between actions we take in 2D space, making marks only considering how they exist on the flat page itself, and actions we take in 3D space where we're constructing complete 3D structures, and thinking about how the ones that are already there actually exist in three dimensions, not just as shapes 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.

We can see these kinds of issues in really small places scattered across your work - that's actually a good thing, because I do see plenty of areas where you are thinking about how the forms you're drawing exist in 3D space, how they connect together, etc. but as shown here there are definitely places where you'll cut back into the silhouette of a form you'd put down previously, probably to correct a mistake or refine a shape (in red), as well as places where you add small details that don't quite seem worth all the trouble of a whole form of their own, using flat shapes extended off an existing form's silhouette (in blue).

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.

The other point I wanted to call out is 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, 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.

Also, keep in mind that even when you may be fully intending to follow the sausage method, you may be accidentally working with ellipses instead of sausages (like here on your hercules/rhinoceros beetle).

Now, both of these things can continue to be addressed as you move forwards, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Just be sure to apply these concepts to your future drawings fairly strictly, especially when tackling your animal constructions.

Edit: I meant to address what you mentioned in your submission comment, but ended up forgetting to.

Getting the first shape correct was crucial, and I had to toss a handful of pages out where I wasn't able to get it right without making a mess.

For what we're doing here, that is very much not the case. The drawings we do here are just exercises. You start with simple pieces, and build up constructions by adding new forms to it, figuring out how those forms relate to one another, and so on. At its core, it's a puzzle that we're forcing your brain to solve over and over. It is not about creating a nice drawing at the end, or even faithfully capturing your reference image with high accuracy.

Following these exercises as intended can certainly result in you accidentally putting a mark down wrong, and drawing, say, a head that's too big, or an arm that sticks out too much. That's fine, because the reference image is just a source of information as we build up this puzzle. You should absolutely not be starting over, or doing more drawings than were requested. To that end, you may want to give this video a watch. It's part of the Lesson 0 overhaul - information was mostly present before, but perhaps not shared as clearly and concisely as it is now.