Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, there are two things to keep in mind:

• Remember that you want the ends of your sausages to be circular in nature, and roughly the same size. You tend to have the far end get a bit bigger in some of these, and also appear a little stubbier.

• As the contour curves get farther away from the viewer, they should also generally tend to get wider, rather than remaining the same degree throughout.

Other than that, they're coming along well, and are moving in the right direction.

Moving onto your insect constructions, there are a number of things I'd like to point out.

First and foremost, something that doesn't relate to the constructions themselves, but rather the paper on which you're drawing. I could be wrong, but the paper you're using appears to have a fair bit of texture/weight to it. I just want to make sure that you know that heavier and rougher paper tends to be much more absorbant, and will drain your pens more quickly than standard printer paper, as I explain back in lesson 0.

Now, moving onto your insect constructions, as a whole you've got a good start, but to be completely fair you're not entirely taking these drawings to a sort of completion. Focusing on the basic construction is certainly important, but there is something to be said when students avoid pushing themselves farther. Sometimes it's to save time (you do appear to be trying pretty hard to squeeze two submissions in this month, and if you're allowing a specific timeline impact the amount of time you actually invest in each drawing, then you're going to be losing out in the end), and sometimes it's out of fear of pushing outside of one's zone of comfort.

For example if we look at this praying mantis (or at least that's what I assume it to be), there are plenty of smaller, more nuanced forms that can be built upon this structure to push it further. While students sometimes mistake "construction" as focusing only on the most basic elements of a drawing, it really has to do with all the wealth of information that can be conveyed through the addition and combination of solid, 3D forms, and the establishing of how those forms intersect with one another. One good example of this is looking at this demo. Everything up to and including step 4 is construction - and yet we're getting into the serrations on the claws themselves. In a sense you're stopping somewhere between step 2 and 3.

Another issue I'm noticing is that in many areas, you appear to be avoiding the opportunities to actually define the intersections between your forms. Now, this is a core aspect of the sausage method (and you applied it in some cases, though not all), but it applies across the board as well. Defining the intersections/joints between forms is an excellent way to take those otherwise flat shapes and make them feel solid and three dimensional.

Looking at this earwig drawing, while I'm actually fairly fond of this one, there is one key issue that I want to address regarding how its abdomen has been drawn. If you look closely, you'll see that you laid in a ball form for the abdomen, then followed it up with some segmentation. The issue that arises is that the segmentation you drew actually cuts back into the silhouette of that ball form, rather than actually building on top of it. This is a common mistake students make, when they're thinking of the marks they're drawing more as a series of lines or shapes on a flat page, rather than actually thinking in terms of the ball form being something solid and real in a 3D world. After all, if that ball form is solid, then you couldn't ostensibly cut back into it so easily, and therefore that segmentation would have to wrap all the way around it.

As explained here, it's important that you're very careful in how you interact with the forms you incorporate into your constructions. You have to make sure that every mark is always reinforcing the illusion that these are solid forms, not just lines on a page.

The last thing I wanted to mention comes down to how you can go about building up more of the complexity in an insect's body. This greater complexity can be achieved by adding more separate, solid, 3D forms on top of your existing structure, and defining how they wrap around the underlying structure. You can see this demonstrated here, here, and even here in the context of a dog's leg. The key is that each form you add is itself a complete, solid, 3D form, and that the way in which it either intersects or wraps around the existing structure in 3D space has to be at the forefront of your mind as you draw it.

This is something that we'll delve into even more in the next lesson, but before I mark this lesson as complete I'd like to give you the opportunity to explore your insect constructions a little further using the points I've raised here. You'll find a few additional pages assigned below.