Alrighty! So all in all, you've done a pretty great job. I see you have some questions, but I'll address them after I've gone through an overview of your work.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you've done a good job of sticking to simple sausage forms. I did notice however that the execution of your marks was a little hesitant, both on the sausages and the contour lines. This resulted in them coming out a little bit stiff. For the sausages, it was quite subtle, but the very slight wavering along some of your sausages' silhouettes does slightly undermine the solidity of those forms, For the contour lines themselves - especially the contour ellipses - the wobbling and stiffness was much more pronounced, and resulted in those ellipses coming out somewhat uneven. There are two likely contributing factors to this. First off, drawing too slowly can give you more opportunity to hesitate, and secondly, drawing ellipses more from the wrist rather than the shoulder will definitely cause this kind of wobbling due to the kind of irregularity in the motion. Also, I noticed that you were often drawing through your ellipses several times - remember that we want to draw through them 2-3 times, with 2 being ideal. Any more than that and we start losing sense of the specific ellipse we're trying to draw.

Now, while there are some underlying issues with that exercise, your work through your various insect constructions is largely quite well done. I do think there is still some stiffness to your linework (perhaps you're a little too focused on being accurate instead of ensuring that you apply the ghosting method fully, including a confident execution of each mark), but all in all you're still demonstrating a very strong understanding of how construction itself works. You're building up your constructions starting with simple forms and considering the relationships between the underlying structure and whatever forms you add to them afterwards. This helps emphasize the fact that the object is in fact three dimensional and real, and not just a series of shapes on the page.

I did notice a few issues where we'll be able to see some continued growth:

• Sometimes when applying the sausage method, you didn't quite allow the sausage segments to overlap/intersect enough to create a proper joint that could be reinforced with a contour line as shown here (in the middle of the diagram). The legs on this insect are a good example of this issue - sometimes the sausage segments are barely touching, so they don't really establish a strong relationship with one another.

• The back legs on this beetle are jumping too far ahead in terms of complexity, and so they don't hold up as solid 3D forms. Basically you should have started with a simple sausage chain, and then built up those little segments on top of it, rather than jumping straight into the little segments. By having a base structure that is made up of more complex forms, it becomes considerably more difficult for it to maintain the illusion of solidity.

• There were a few places where I saw some looseness in terms of placing down initial forms, and then drawing later lines that would cut across them in 2D space. For example, this scorpion's claws started with ball forms, but then you try to refine it more in a way that leaves some of the original ball form outside of the resulting shape. This reminds us that what we're looking at are 2D shapes, not 3D forms. This also goes back to why drawing through our ellipses 2 times really is ideal, because it allows us to maintain a tighter ellipse without pieces unintentionally flying outside.

• You strayed from the sausage method quite a bit with this spider, and ended up not drawing through the individual segment-forms of its legs. Drawing through our forms is important because it establishes how each individual component exists in 3D space. Those forms don't stop existing where they are overlapped or intersected with another - so being able to draw each one in its entirety, then figuring out where they intersect, will help you to sell the illusion that we're dealing with 3D forms.

Circling back, I was really happy with how your fly drawing came out, especially with its main body. The relationship between the forms are very clear, and you do a great job here of establishing how we're looking at a 3D object in space, not just a bunch of shapes and lines.

Now, to answer your questions:

In the scorpion tutorial you cut in half a part of the scorpion. Can we work like that ? I feel as it is like substraction and not addition. I feel you use substraction too for the balloons of the loose ?

You're right, what I did there is a subtraction. Subtractive construction is a legitimate approach, but it's important to understand just what it means. What I explained above where your scorpion claw cut back across the initial ball form was not subtractive construction because it dealt with the components as flat, two dimensional elements. The way I cut along the body of the scorpion however involved drawing a contour line along the surface of the 3D form, which divided that form into two pieces. In doing so, we can then designate one section as being positive space, and the other as negative space.

It's similar to how when using the sausage method, we reinforce the joint between forms with a contour line, and in doing so we establish the clear relationship between them. The difference here is that we are taking a single continuous form and then creating a relationship between its two cohesive parts. From one piece, we're making two that fit perfectly together. You can see another example of this here.

When do you use strectched sphere instead of sausages ?

You don't. The reason we build our legs with sausage segments is not because every leg looks like a chain of sausages. It's because we are trying to build an underlying base structure or armature that can serve as a support for our construction. We want to ensure this structure can both feel solid and three dimensional, and convey the sense of gestural flow that we need from these limbs. Most techniques you may employ will do a good job of one or the other, but not both. The sausage method is unique in that it allows us to make things appear 3D, while also maintaining a sense of flow and fluidity. Using a stretched sphere instead only focuses on making things appear solid, but actually comes out very stiff due to how it continues to widen up until its midpoint, and doesn't allow for any bending.

Once you've established that underlying structure, you can then attach additional masses to it in order to bulk it up, as shown here. This technique doesn't just apply to insects - it'll also be used throughout the next lesson as we get into drawing animals.

For the hatch of the spider tutorial you do not wrap around the leg of the spider. Can we do that for pieces in the back or is it a not up to date process ?

Using straight lines as hatching to fill a rounded form will flatten it out. In this case, I purposely did that because I wanted to make the back legs to appear less important than the rest of the drawing, in order to help clarify the drawing as a whole. This is a valid technique, but it's not one I use very much in my demonstrations currently, primarily because in the context of texture/detail, I try to steer students away from using hatching - so that can definitely get a little confusing if you see me using it for other purposes.

I think about the texture challenge, texture are challenging for me. I have a question : Now you ask to begin the texture from the center, but do we scale it like in the previous explanations ?

So in earlier versions of that lesson, I talked about using the scale of your textural elements to change the density of your texture. As I continued to critique students' submissions for Lesson 2 over the year or so between the major updates to the lessons, I more and more felt that this approach was not correct, because it meant you were changing the nature of the texture you were trying to communicate to the viewer. We were changing what was actually on the surface, rather than just how we were drawing it.

Now, we talk instead about capturing texture as shadow shapes because this is something we can change and control without actually changing the size of the textural elements. We can draw fewer marks to capture scales, for example, without making the scales themselves bigger.

That doesn't mean you can't draw bigger scales in certain parts of your texture, but that it should reflect what is present on whatever it is you're drawing. You shouldn't just be doing that because you want to draw fewer marks in a particular place on your drawing, because there are ways to achieve that without changing reality.

Another question for the texture. How can I manage glossy texture whith your process ? I feel like if it is just glossy I cannot draw the shadows. I wish use this kind of texture on those drawings.

This is a bit of an advanced topic, not so much because it's actually difficult to understand, but because it relates specifically to the behaviour of light. Shiny surfaces appear that way because they are extremely smooth. Even on a microscopic level, they have very even surfaces, so when light rays hit them, they bounce off cleanly. The majority of surfaces are not shiny in this manner because they are covered in microscopic bumps. Even if it may seem relatively smooth to the touch, it may still have a matte quality to it because it's got all these tiny little bumps. When light rays hit this surface, they'll tend to scatter more.

If light bounces off cleanly, it maintains the sharpness of its reflection. If light gets scattered, it becomes more diffuse, softer and less crisp. So, by virtue of a surface being so smooth that it is shiny and reflective, it doesn't have anything to cast those little shadows (as you said).

So, the way I usually communicate the fact that they're shiny is that instead of capturing the shadows they cast, I'll draw really simple "reflections". Given the limitations we have while working with solid black link, this usually means simple black shapes set along the object's surface. I've demonstrated this a little for you here. I also pointed out something else that is useful called the "fresnel effect" which is where a surface will reflect light more strongly the more it is oriented away from the viewer. Combined with more reflective materials, we get a more pronounced ring of white along the silhouette of the form when drawing things with solid black/white as we are here.

All that said, the thing about glossy/reflective textures is that for the kinds of constructions you run into in this course, it's best that you don't do it too much. It's very easy to get distracted from the underlying construction when doing so, and even contradicting it by adding marks that don't follow how the forms exist in 3D. At the end of the day, texture is very much a secondary or tertiary priority whereas the solidity of the forms and construction comes first.

So! With that, I think you do have some things to work on but that you should be ready to move on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.