Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, while you're definitely trying to maintain the characteristics of simple sausages, although you do have a bit of an issue with some of the ends getting a little pointy. Remember that we want the ends to be equal in size, and circular in shape.

As a whole, there are a lot of ways in which your insect constructions are moving very much in the right direction. You're thinking about the forms you're drawing as 3D forms, about how to combine them in 3D space, etc. Specifically looking at your lobster's tail, I think you really did a great job there of capturing the structure in three dimensions. The segmentation and how it wraps around the underlying structure reads very strongly as 3D, and the additional details you added continue to wrap around it in a believable manner.

There are, however, certain ways in which you approach particular things that aren't ideal.

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.

If you take a look at your ant drawing, there are a number of places where you cut back into the forms you'd already drawn, or simply jumped in and added little flat shapes to extend those silhouettes. If youo take a look at the stag beetle, the way you started with boxes and built the head and thorax inside those boxes falls into this category as well.

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 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.

Keep in mind that you can end up redefining the silhouette of a form by accident, too. Adding line weight to the silhouette of a form can often result in the the kind of overly careful, hesitant tracing that alters the shape, adding wobbling and complexity, and flattening it out. For this reason, it's best to stick to using line weight only to clarify specific overlaps between forms, in localized and limited areas. This simply means don't overdo it - keep it in small areas, and blend it back into the existing linework with smooth, confident strokes.

Moving on, when you start getting into detail and texture, right now it appears that your main goal becomes to "decorate" your drawing. Decoration itself is kind of a vague, unclear aspiration - it doesn't really give us a clear sense of what in particular we're working for, or when we've achieved it.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

So, focus primarily on capturing the things you'd be able to feel with your hands, rather than what you can see with your eyes. That means form shading should be ignored (as discussed back in Lesson 2), and rather than bothering to capture patterning or other local colour information (since we're already limited with our use of stark black and white), treat the object like it's covered in the same flat white. With all this out of the way, we're left only with physical textural forms present on the surface of the object, and the shadows they cast on their surroundings.

The last thing I wanted to share is just a few examples on how to approach building upon the basic sausage structure. As it stands, you're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the technique, but the key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is just the first step. 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).

Now, you're not far off, but I am going to ask for a couple additional pages just to show that you understand how to approach construction in an additive manner, working through the addition of solid, 3D forms at every stage, and without altering the silhouettes of existing forms.