Before I get started, I did want to mention that crustaceans basically work the same as the rest - it's basically the same deal, just exoskeletal creatures with segmentation and lots of big bulbous forms. If anything, I'd say crustaceans tend to have larger chunkier forms, like the serrations on this crab's claw. I'm planning on redoing a lot of the videos in the near future, and when I get to lesson 4 I'm interested in doing some actual crustacean demos instead of focusing so heavily on the bugs and spiders.

So, getting started on your organic forms with contour lines, while these are generally well done they have one key issue - watch the ends of your sausages. They tend to get more stretched out rather than remaining entirely circular, which throws off their adherence to the characteristics of simple sausages.

Moving onto the actual insect constructions, for the most part you've done a very good job - your constructions are quite solid and demonstrate an excellent grasp of form and construction, and just about everyone creeps me out on an individual basis, which is one of the highest criteria for success. There are however a few issues that I want to address that fall more into the category of "doing things the Drawabox way" - that is, with the focus being on each drawing as an exercise in spatial reasoning, not with the goal of drawing something that looks impressive in the end.

First off, all filled black areas in your drawings must be reserved only for cast shadows. That is, cast shadows in terms of texture itself (where one textural form is implied through the shadows it casts on its surroundings) or cast shadows where one large form casts a shadow on another, and you decide to draw that shadow in order to help clarify how different forms overlap one another.

There are two situations that I want you to ignore:

• Form shading - this was explained back in lesson 2, that we don't really get into form shading in this course, and choose to ignore it in favour of a stronger focus on constructional techniques.

• Local colour/patterns - like on this spider's abdomen. Basically anything where the surface of an object barring all lighting information is a particular colour should be ignored, treating everything like it's covered in the same flat white or grey.

Now, you've done a pretty great job especially in using the form shading across your drawings to make your drawings really pop - but that's outside of the scope of what we're looking for here, and I really don't want students to get distracted by that sort of thing. It's not been an issue here, as your construction has been quite solid, but it helps keep our focus on the intended areas.

Another issue 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, 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.

Now, all that said, I really do think your drawings are fantastic. Sausage method aside, the drawings on this page - especially the praying mantis in c3 - show an incredibly well developed grasp of how these forms exist in space, and how to both combine them and wrap them around one another to create believable, complex structures.

So! I'll go ahead and happily mark this lesson as complete.