You have may have trouble with them, but I do feel your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well. You're staying fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages - deviating a little here and there, with some ends coming out a little more stretched out, but for the most part it's clear that you're striving to stick to those characteristics. I did however notice that your accuracy definitely has room for improvement when drawing those contour lines - always remember to employ the ghosting method, investing time into your planning and preparation phases as needed before executing with a confident stroke.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I feel that overall you're showing strong moves in the right direction - but I am also noticing the same kind of issue, that your contour lines in some cases come out a little sloppy and haphazard - like in these flies, especially the big one. It's important to always remember that every single mark you draw needs to be given as much time as it requires to be executed to the best of your ability. It's easy to feel that contour lines are just after-thoughts, but if we're not going to put the time in to execute them as well as we can, it really might be better not to include them at all.

To that point, these kinds of contour lines do commonly suffer from diminishing returns - where adding one might have a lot of impact, but that impact decreases with every next one you add. That may be why you didn't put as much time into executing those marks. Instead of drawing a handful of sloppy, quick contour lines, try and drop in only one (if it's actually needed), and focus on drawing it as well as you can.

Continuing on, I feel that there are a number of examples in your work that do show that you're thinking a fair bit about how the things you're drawing exist in 3D space. For example, the ant on the top left of this page is arranged quite nicely as a series of forms very much in 3D space, rather than just a drawing on a flat page. That said, there are key issues with how you're approaching your drawings that do undermine this sense of solidity, and we'll talk about that next.

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.

This comes up quite a bit in several pages of your work - I've marked out a number of examples here. While your end results do often overcome aspects of how these issues undermine the solidity of your drawing (so you still end up with drawings that feel relatively 3D in some cases), remember that this course isn't about the end result. Rather, every drawing is an exercise, a little 3D spatial puzzle to solve to help rewire how our brain perceives the things we draw.

Instead of approaching our drawings in a two dimensional fashion (treating it like a flat drawing), 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.

You can also see this in action in the shrimp and the lobster demos on the informal demo page, which do a particularly good job of showing how everything we draw establishes a new, complete, solid form which cannot simply be cut across freely without considering how it all exists in 3D space. You'll also notice that I do not approach these drawings with a sort of lighter sketch - I noticed you doing this on some pages like this one where you started with a fainter underdrawing, then traced back over the things you wanted to keep with a darker line. Be sure to draw all of your phases of construction with roughly the same line thickness. When you're done the construction, you can add line weight in key, specific localized areas where overlaps occur - but don't trace back over long stretches of line.

It is also worth discussing how you approached the detail phase of your drawings. It seems that you did continue to focus very much on the end result, on what would create as visually pleasing a drawing as possible. In doing this, you aimed to 'decorate' your drawings - but decoration as a goal is not a particularly clear one to pursue, because it's not really clear when we've added enough decoration.

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.

Remember that as discussed back in Lesson 2, texture focuses on cast shadow shapes - on using them to imply the presence of specific textural forms (rather than creating a general impression. Furthermore, we also mentioned that form shading would not play a role in the drawings we do here. In general, try to reserve the areas of filled, solid black for cast shadow shapes only - whether they're cast by larger constructed forms, or smaller textural forms, each filled black shape should directly relate to some form present in the object you're building up.

Continuing forward, 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.

In your case I think you were trying to keep the sausage method in mind, but weren't always remembering the specific rules and requirements laid out in the diagram I linked above.

Beyond adhering to those points (sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages to the best of your ability, ensuring they intersect and defining that intersection/relationship with a contour line), 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).

Lastly, a simple recommendation - try to avoid drawing really small - it limits the brain's capacity for spatial reasoning and also results in clumsier linework by making it harder to engage your whole shoulder when drawing your strokes. These grasshoppers are an example of drawings that were made artificially small. Instead of deciding ahead of time how many drawings will fit in a page, focus first on giving the initial drawing as much room as it requires. After you're done, if you have more room left over to squeeze in another, you should ceratinly do so. If not, then you can leave it to just the one drawing on the page. Just make sure that the space on the pages is put to good use.

I do think that overall you're moving in the right direction, but I'd like to see you take a shot at applying the various points I've explained here. This critique certainly is a long one, so I strongly recommend that you read through it a few times, giving yourself a chance to absorb everything I've pointed out. Read through it once, then take a break, come back and read through it again, try to complete some of the revisions, then read through it one more time before completing the rest. Or something like that, anyway. You'll find the revisions assigned below.