BTS ain't shit.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are largely looking pretty good. You're doing a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages (although you do have a bit of a tendency to have one end come out a little stubbier, but that's not too bad), and you're demonstrating an appropriate shift in the degree of the contour curves as we slide along the length of the form.

Moving onto your insect constructions, overall you're doing well, but there are a few things to focus on that should help you continue to improve.

First and foremost, it really comes down to observing your reference more carefully, and more frequently. When starting out a drawing, it's definitely a challenging point - you're putting down those initial masses, and they make a lot of major decisions that'll determine how a number of important things turn out. For example, your proportions - in this praying mantis you definitely ended up starting out with the proportions off in terms of how the head and abdomen were drawn in relation to one another, and as a result, the head ended up coming out huge.

Now, it's true - spending more time observing your reference would have helped, and I can see a number of things across your homework that suggest that you probably could be looking back at it more frequently. But what I think is particularly important is the fact that even though your proportions ended up being off, you stuck to them. You didn't try to tweak things after the fact or correct your mistake. You'd made a decision, you'd committed to it on the page, and you held to it through the entire process. That is a very important element to construction, and you definitely get points for doing that.

Continuing on the vein of observation, there are definitely areas where things got vastly oversimplified - like the caterpillar's head. There are a few potential reasons for this. The obvious one is basically what I've already mentioned, not looking closely enough at your reference, looking away too long, and ending up relying on memory. That's a pretty normal thing. But there's another thing to consider - working with high resolution reference images is very helpful, because it ensures that you're going to have plenty of visual information to work from in your reference.

As a beginner, the disadvantages of working from a lower resolution reference image aren't really as obvious as it should be - because our brains can look at such an image and understand it just fine, it feels like we should be able to draw from it just as effectively too. But then we end up having these big holes to fill in, and no real understanding of what to fill it with. As you get more experienced, you'll have a more developed visual library to help fill in the gaps, and even to identify what is being depicted in a handful of pixels, but right now it can definitely be a serious handicap.

Admittedly I am a little curious about why you have the caterpillars' legs coming out of some kind of weird hole in its body - that's definitely not how their legs attach to their bodies. But all that aside, the rest of the construction is really good - the forms along the body, the segmentation, all of it feels very solid and volumionous. The only other thing I'd change is that I'd still be using sausages for the legs, rather than cylinders. Cylinders are just too stiff and geometric.

Continuing on, another issue I noticed is that you do have a bit of a tendency to jump into complex structures a bit too quickly at times. For example, the abdomen of this beetle, with its tapering midsection and all definitely comes off more complex than how we'd usually start our structures. Similarly, this crab's... middle... part. You definitely seem to be leaning more towards working geometrically when you can, and while it's not by any means wrong to do so, I don't think it is necessarily optimal.

Another point that is worth mentioning - though it's not something I see often in your work - is just a reminder to draw big. Or rather, give each drawing as much room as it really needs on the page, and try to avoid making things artificially small and cramped. The only one that really stood out in this regard was this hermit crab - there's loads of room around it, so you definitely could have drawn it bigger. Doing so tends to help our brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also helping us engage our whole arm while drawing. That definitely would have helped with drawing your sausages, drawing your ellipses more confidently (don't forget to draw through them 2 full times as well), etc.

Now, the last thing I wanted to draw your attention to is a pretty common mistake I see students making, but one that only shows up in your work a little. All the same, it's still worth addressing. Take a look at what I've drawn over your dragonfly. I've marked out a few spots where some of your initial masses were cut through by things you built on top of it later on. This seems like a really minor issue, but it's actually quite important.

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.

In your work, along with the dragonfly, things like this are also present in how you added little triangular spikes to your praying mantis, as well as the little "bridges" you added where the stick bug's legs connect to its torso. These are all 2D shapes that serve as extensions of the silhouettes already present in your drawing.

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 also circles back to your tendency to start out with forms that are overly complex - working additively in this fashion will help you start simple, maintaining the solidity that comes with that simplicity, and then work on top of it step by step to achieve the complexity you're after.

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.

So! All in all, you do have some things to work on, but I do think you are still good to move on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.