Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, I'm glad to see that you're focusing on sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, and at that you're doing a pretty good job. There are however a few other things to keep an eye on:

• The instructions of this exercise require you to draw a central minor axis line down the middle of your sausage form, to help with aligning the contour lines. You're skipping this step - make sure you check the instructions of the exercises periodically to make sure you aren't forgetting anything - especially when they're being assigned as part of a lesson.

• You should be drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen. Sometimes you do so, other times you do it less than two full times, and other times you only draw around the shape once.

• In a number of cases you appear to stick to roughly the same degree for all the contour lines on a given form. Instead, they should be getting wider as you slide away from the viewer. If you're unsure as to why, you can find an explanation in the lesson 1 ellipses video.

Overall, your insect constructions are coming along fairly well, but there are some points of advice I feel I can offer to help keep you on the right track. The main things I look for however - specifically ensuring that students are building up their constructions from simple to complex, and considering how each new addition to the construction exists as its own solid, three dimensional form - are all things you appear to be doing fairly well, so as a whole you're doing a good job.

Here are some things I want you to keep in mind, however:

• When it comes down to how one uses a page, having just one drawing on a page is fine, but what matters most is that the space of the page is being used well. Your first priority is to ensure that you're giving each drawing as much room as it requires. Drawing things smaller can have two main negative impacts - it can impede your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, especially as a beginner, making it harder to think in 3D space as you draw. It will also make it harder for you to engage your whole arm while drawing, making you more likely to slip back to drawing from your elbow. Both of these things can result in sloppier linework. Now, I'm not really seeing sloppy linework from you, so it kind of comes back around the other side - if your drawings, at whatever size, are coming along fine, then there's no good reason not to include several more drawings in a page like this one, where there is ample space for them. Once you've finished a drawing, consider whether there is enough room to include another drawing, then try to do so. If there isn't, that's fine - but it is in your best interest to ensure that you are using every opportunity for practice, within the bounds of the assigned number of pages.

• In terms of the use of line weight, there are a couple things I want you to adhere to. Firstly, remember that line weight itself is a tool with a specific purpose. It is most useful in clarifying how specific forms in a given drawing overlap one another in specific, localized areas - that is, rather than going back over the entirety of a form's silhouette. So for example, you can see how line weight is used in these two leaves, focusing only where the edges overlap to help clarify which form is on top. Generally speaking, line weight should also be kept fairly subtle - like a whisper to the viewer's subconscious, rather than being applied too heavily to create overly thick areas. When things get too thick, they can start to flatten the form down into a graphic shape. Lastly, line weight should be applied with confidence, ensuring that it maintains the smooth fluidity of whatever lines it's being added to. When we try to apply line weight to too much of a form's silhouette, we can end up hesitating and tracing slowly out of fear of missing the mark, and as a result we make the original linework wobbly and stiff. In this spider drawing I did feel that you went too heavy on the line weight, applying it too liberally. You didn't really get hesitant/wobbly, which is good, but there was some sketchiness along those lines where you built the line weight up that you should be mindful of.

• I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - 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). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

• When it comes down to adding detail - specifically with that bee drawing - I found that you were probably not really sure about what you were meant to achieve, what your goal should have been. It's common for students to treat the detail phase of a drawing as though it is meant to "decorate" their drawing - basically the addition of superficial marks to make the drawing look more impressive to the viewer, or to one's self. This unfortunately has the downside that decoration doesn't have any clear point at which the goal has been achieved. It's more of a direction than an actual concrete goal. 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.

• With your last two drawings, while the overall process was fine, I did feel tht the linework was a little more loose - suggesting that you didn't necessarily put as much time into the use of the ghosting method for each individual mark as you could have. I recommend you take a look at the shrimp and lobster demos at the top of the informal demos page. Pay special attention to how each and every mark I've put down is specific, and planned out. It's not loose, or approximate - I'm thinking about how every single form I add to the structure is its own complete, cohesive structure. Separate, but with a clear relationship being defined between it and the existing structure, either in the form of a contour line to define an intersection, or through the specific design of its silhouette to demonstrate how it wraps around that structure (as shown here). You can also see similar intent behind this ant head demo. Try to push yourself to work on the drawings for this course in this kind of intentional manner, going down to the nature of each and every mark you draw. It does take time, but at the end of the day you are not required to complete a drawing in a particular space of time. Whether it takes one sitting, a whole day, or multiple days, your only responsibility here is to execute each drawing, and each component of each drawing, to the absolute best of your current ability.

Now, I have pointed out a number of things for you to keep in mind, but as a whole I think you're moving in the right direction. As such, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.