Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, it's best to break this exercise down into three components, and to look at them individually:

• Your contour lines themselves are looking pretty good. Those that are a little further from the viewer should be getting wider, but overall they're drawn smoothly and confidently, fit snugly within the silhouette of the sausage form, and wrap convincingly around the surface of the sausage. Good work there.

• Your sausage forms aren't entirely adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages, but they are close. Remember that our sausage forms must have ends that are circular and equal in size, and that the midsection must remain consistent in width. Your ends are reasonably circular, and not too far off from equal in size, but you do tend to have the forms pinch through their midsection, so keep an eye on that.

• The last part is the contour ellipse you've been drawing at one end of your sausage forms. This technically should be lumped in with the contour lines, because that's precisely what it is - just another contour line - but I wanted to address them separately because the way you're using these suggests that you don't entirely understand what they convey to the viewer. The contour ellipse at the end(s) of a sausage form tell us that this end is facing towards the viewer. That's why we can see the contour line all the way around, showing us a full ellipse. Based on your other contour lines however, you're placing most of these ellipses on ends that are facing away from the viewer, where the ellipse would not be visible. Here are examples of different sausages, one with both ends pointing towards the viewer, one with only one end pointing towards the viewer, and one with both ends pointing away from the viewer. Oh, also - draw through all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as explained back in Lesson 1.

Moving onto your insect constructions, there is one drawing that came out quite well overall, so I want to discuss that one first. This mosquito is far and away your best drawing of the set, for a few reasons:

• You mostly applied the sausage method when constructing the legs, only forgetting to reinforce the joints between the sausages with a contour line as explained in the middle of the diagram.

• For the abdomen, you laid down a simple form and then attempted to wrap your segmentation around it, building upon that structure in a way that reinforced its illusion of being three dimensional.

• You focused primarily on construction, not burying your drawing in unnecessary detail.

• You demonstrated a fair bit of care in observing your reference, and don't appear to be oversimplifying or working from memory

That leads us into some of the issues that are present in your other drawings. The biggest of these is the fact that you definitely invested a lot of time in decorating your drawings, focusing on making them look heavily detailed, ultimately not adhering to any of the concepts covered back in Lesson 2's texture section (specifically the idea that all textural marks should be drawn as cast shadow shapes only, something I raised in regards to your Lesson 3 work). You also show that your focus is indeed on decorating your drawing, which is incorrect.

I mentioned this to you in one of my critiques of your Lesson 3 work, but you appear to have forgotten:

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.

As a side note, when it comes to texture, remember that you should ignore any kind of local colour or patterning. That includes things like spots on a ladybug's shell. Treat everything like it's covered in the same white colour, and focus only on actual forms. Our drawings should only convey the kind of information that we can feel with our hands, rather than see with our eyes.

I don't want to bury you in things to worry about, so I'm going to only mention one other thing. When working on a construction, focus on every new addition to a drawing being its own complete, solid, three dimensional form, and on establishing how that newly added form relates to the existing structure. We can establish this relationship either by demonstrating how the form intersects with a structure, using a contour line to define that intersection (like in lesson 2's form intersections), or we can specifically shape the silhouette of the form so it captures how it wraps around that existing structure. For example, this demonstration shows how to approach wrapping one form around another. This can be used when adding bulk to the sausage structure of an insect's leg. In this drawing you employed the approach shown with an X in the linked demonstration. It's not entirely wrong, but the issue with it is that it results in a looser relationship between the existing structure, and the form you're adding onto it. It ends up having the sausage feel like it's "floating" inside of the bigger form, which doesn't feel entirely solid. Instead, we can build up that bulk by wrapping several forms around the sausage, ensuring that there's a more direct contact between them, giving us a clearer sense of how those forms relate to one another in space.

You can also see other representations of this "wrapping" impression here.

When it comes to construction, breaking things down into smaller components and building them up bit by bit is very useful. For example, here's how I'd approach building up an ant's head. Instead of treating the ball we start with as being the majority of the final construction as you tend to in your drawings, I treat it more like the starting point. Then I'm happy to build on top of it as much as is needed to find the specific structure I see in my reference image - because I'm always studying that reference image closely.

So, I certainly want you to work on some revisions, so here's what I want you to do:

• First, I want you to draw along with this lobster construction demonstration. I want you to go through each step separately. What I mean by this is that I don't want you to sit down and do step 1, then 2, then 3, then 4- instead I want you to do step 1, then get up, take a picture of your page, go do something else, then come back and do step 2, take a picture of your page, go do something else, etc. Do this for the whole thing. This is so you can focus entirely on the specific step you're on at any given moment, doing your best execute each step to the absolute best of your ability. It's okay for this process to take multiple days if you need it, and that goes for all your drawings. You are at no point in this course expected to complete any one thing in a single sitting.

• Once you're done with that, I'd like you to do 4 additional insect constructions, with no texture or detail whatsoever. Focus only on construction, and on taking that construction as far as you reasonably can. For context, that lobster demo is basically all construction, I don't actually get into texture with it at all.

Because I know you have a habit of rushing through your work and submitting quickly, I'm preemptively going to tell you that you will not be allowed to submit your work for a minimum of 7 days. Take your time, and focus on applying what I've explained in this critique and in the lesson, and hell - in previous critiques - to the best of your ability.