I received the email you sent - please refrain from sending any reminders unless you've been waiting more than 4 days. I do my critiques/revisions twice a week (usually on Mondays and Thursdays), so there's nothing out of the ordinary about having to wait up to 4 days.

Looking at your work, the snail has a lot of issues, but the ant is considerably better. Most notably on the snail, you're drawing your additional masses as arbitrary blobs, so they appear flat. In your ant, you're drawing those on the thorax and abdomen with much more purposeful design, thinking about how they're wrapping around the existing structure, so that's definitely an improvement. I can also see you trying to do the same for the additional masses on the legs, but there is still lots of room for improvement here. Remember that you want inward curves on the sides of the silhouette that make contact with the existing structure, as shown here.

There are two other things I want to point out for the ant:

• Your use of the sausage method is coming along pretty well, though keep an eye on instances where you end up drawing stretched ellipses instead of sausage forms. For example, this one. It widens slightly through its midsection, and its ends are more stretched out, creating an overall ellipse rather than a sausage.

• In previous feedback, I shared this ant head construction demo. Here I show how we can start with a regular sphere, and build up individual components gradually to achieve a more complex, but more solid result. Your approach here didn't seem to incorporate much of that. You did consider how the mandibles would connect to the initial ball, but beyond that you didn't really explore that construction very much.

Overall, you've shown improvement, but you need to keep applying this stuff intentionally and mindfully. You'll have ample opportunity to do so as you move into the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.

As to your other question about your sketchbook, all I can really do is reiterate for you what the 50% rule is about. You mentioned this:

i don't know how to start a drawing or what to draw should i draw something from my mind which i tried and turned out really badBecause I don't have a clear vision of what I am drawing

You tried drawing something, and didn't know where to start, so it turned out really badly. That's pretty much you following the 50% rule correctly. The reason you feel you did something incorrectly is that it didn't come out well.

The 50% rule is there to force you to draw, regardless of how it turns out. To just jump into drawing without holding yourself back because you're afraid of looking stupid. Because at the end of the day, having a drawing turn out poorly isn't going to kill you. If you only drew when you had a guarantee that it was going to turn out well, you'd basically end up paralyzed, because such a guarantee cannot be given.

That's why the 50% rule exists. To force people to make a lot of garbage, to get used to drawing all kinds of trash, so that they can develop within themselves the confidence that will be required to progress and learn and evolve.

I talk about this stuff in this video. If you haven't watched it, I recommend that you do.

For your other questions,

or should draw from reference photos

Copying a reference image directly is known as a "study". It's a type of exercise that is geared towards learning and improving, and therefore falls within the same 50% as the work you do for Drawabox. You're welcome to do it, but it does not qualify for the 50% of just drawing for the sake of drawing.

You can use reference during that chunk as well, but not to copy the reference directly. You need to be deciding for yourself what it is you're going to draw, and you can use reference images to help inform how you approach doing that. Generally speaking I recommend students trying to do this work with many different reference images, to help them keep from sticking too much to one, and allowing that one to make all the decisions that the student needs to be doing for themselves.

That said, I'd recommend that to people who are more comfortable already with just drawing on their own, so you should probably just start with trying to draw things entirely from your imagination, so you can better understand what it means to make those decisions for yourself (even if those decisions result in your drawing turning out badly - which again, is totally okay).

should i use ink or should i use graphite should the drawings be sketchy or refined and beautiful

For the 50% rule, when drawing for the sake of drawing, you are welcome to draw with whatever medium you like. You are not restricted to just working in ink, just working in graphite, or anything else. None of the rules from Drawabox apply either - you don't NEED to use the ghosting method, you don't NEED to think through your marks. Draw however feels most comfortable to you, and focus just on getting things on the page.

You're putting up a lot of barriers, and frankly none of them really matter. Open your sketchbook, and just put marks down. Push past the fear of drawing something that looks crappy, and just draw.