So to answer your initial question, we do indeed tackle line weight on a curved line the same way we do on a straight line. Of course, as discussed back in lesson 2, line weight should always be limited to a limited section where you want to clarify a particular overlap between forms, and should be drawn confidently so as to taper on either end, so it blends smoothly into the underlying mark (as shown here). Some things are just hard, and require more practice, of course.

So, starting with your organic forms with contour lines, there are a couple things I want you to continue to focus on:

• First and foremost, always stick to the characteristics of simple sausages as explained in the instructions. This is especially important when we use those sausages as base elements of our constructions, because it's that simplicity that makes them feel solid and three dimensional. You do a better job of this on the second page compared to the first.

• You appear to be varying the degree of your contour curves, which is good, but try and push that a little harder, exaggerating the shift.

Moving onto your insect constructions, there are definitely areas that are going well, although there are some things I want to draw your attention to. I'm pleased to see that you are in many ways thinking heavily about how the forms you're using to construct exist in 3D space in relation to one another, which is at the core of construction as a technique and exercise. That said, one thing I want you to be very careful of (and in the context of organic construction, avoid) is cutting back into your forms.

It's not that "subtractive construction" is wrong, but rather that as explained here it is most often done wrong. Students tend to think more about cutting back into the silhouettes of their forms (the 2D shape that represents the form on the page), instead of actually interacting with the form in three dimensions, in a way that reinforces the idea that the form is 3D. As a result, in doing so, they end up flattening out their forms.

An object's silhouette is like the footprint of an animal. In finding a footprint, you may be able to identify all kinds of things about that animal without ever having seen the animal itself - how big it is, what kind of animal it might be, etc. But the footprint itself is not the animal, and if you change that footprint, you're not changing the animal that left it. You're just making the footprint a lot less useful.

The more we employ additive construction (where we put down a solid, 3D form in the world, and then build on top of it by wrapping additional forms over it or connecting other forms to it while defining their intersection/relationship with contour lines, the more we develop our own belief in the idea that the things we're drawing are 3D. That belief in turn makes it much harder to actually interact on the 2D silhouette level, because once our brain fully believes that we're dealing with actual 3D forms, it resists attempts to make marks that don't conform with that delusion.

Continuing on, another thing I want you to be careful with are contour lines - both in their individual execution, and in deciding where they ought to actually be used. You demonstrate yourself to be entirely capable of drawing them well, but there are definitely places where you don't take the time to draw them all to the best of your ability. For example, when defining the joints between the scorpion's sausage-leg structures, you draw those contour curves to be quite shallow, which flattens out the structure instead of reinforcing it. Secondly, in your house fly's eyes, you appear to have tried to make those forms appear more round by drawing a lot of contour lines on them (creating a sort of wireframe), but without actually putting much effort into each individual contour line. In a situation like this, a single contour ellipse would be preferable, as shown here.

Another example where you added way too many contour lines is on the spikes along the weevil's back. This is actually a good example of both good technique, and bad technique. Contour lines themselves come in different forms - you've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (like the contour curves along the length of each cone-spike), and you've got the ones that define the connection/relationship between existing forms (like the contour ellipse at the base of each spike, and also like the ones we use in the sausage method). This second type is VASTLY more effective and impactful, because of how it defines a relationship between 3D forms. The first kind merely try and describe how an individual form is 3D in isolation. By creating a link between different forms, the illusion ends up being much stronger, as it grounds that form as being part of something larger. While contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form can certainly be useful, in most cases they're actually not necessary.

Moving on, I noticed that in your ant drawing, you placed a lot of individual contour lines along the ends of the legs and on the antennae. Now I understand why you did so - you were trying to capture the fact that those sections have segmentation on them, but doing so just using contour lines would be incorrect. Looking at your reference you'll notice that these are actual individual forms layered on top of the base structure of the leg sausage.

This is actually something I noticed a lot - you don't go beyond the basic sausage structure. Your reference image no doubt captures a lot of information, but you don't always go beyond a relatively simple depiction of it, throwing away a good deal of more nuanced information. In effect, you stop early, laying down a decent structure but never going deeper. You can see in this demo that an ant's leg has a lot more going on. When using the sausage method, the sausage chain itself is really just meant to be a base structure or armature. Once in place, you can then build up additional forms by wrapping them around that structure, as shown here, here, and even here on a dog's leg, as the same technique is used heavily in the next lesson.

This is how we achieve more complex forms - where in the weevil drawing at the end you made parts of the legs vastly more complex, way too early, you should have built it up in stages.

With those points made, I'd like you to try a few more insect drawings to show that you understand what I've mentioned here. You'll find them listed below.