Starting with your organic forms with, you're doing a good job of drawing confident, smooth, evenly shaped contour curves, and fitting them snugly within the silhouette of your forms. There are a couple things to keep an eye on however:

• While I can clearly see that you're trying to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, you do have a tendency with some of them to draw shapes more similar to ellipses rather than sausages.

• Also, keep in mind that the contour lines should not maintain a consistent degree. Instead, as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, they should be getting wider as we slide along the length of a given cylindrical structure, like a sausage.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I can definitely see that you're putting a lot of effort into approaching your constructionis by starting simple and gradually building up complexity as you go. There are still a number of areas where you tend to jump in with some shapes that are quite complex from the start (causing them to feel flat), like this form towards the end of your grasshopper's leg. There are also other similar cases where you'll start out with a really complex shape, then try to "fix" it by adding contour lines (like along the top of this drawing) - but unfortunately contour lines will only reinforce solidity that is already present, rather than adding it where it has been lost. Still, by and large you are starting most of your structures out simple.

That said, there are ways in which your approach can still be improved, and that comes down to understanding the difference between actions we take in 3D space, and those we take in 2D space.

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.

I've identified quite a few places on this ant where you've cut into silhouettes of your forms in red, and where you've added onto them with flat shapes in blue - although I mainly focused on the big examples.

Instead, 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. You can also see this demonstrated more fully in the shrimp and lobster demos at the top of the informal demos page. While I am hard at work at updating the lessons to incorporate these newer ways of explaining and demonstrating concepts, my overhaul is still way back at Lessons 0 and 1 - and so for now, I add what I can to the informal demos page, and in the critiques I do for those submitting for official feedback, giving them a sort of preview to what the course material eventually will become.

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.

Continuing on, 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.

The last thing I wanted to call out is that when you get into more detail with your constructions, you have a tendency to focus on decoration - that is, doing what you can to make your drawings look more visually pleasing. In that sense, it's like the construction is where we do the learning, and then the decoration is where we can let loose and just make our drawings look nice and gratifying. Unfortunately, that is not so.

Decoration itself as a goal is a very vague one, without clear definition. After all, there's no specific point at which one has added "enough". 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.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that.

I'm going to assign some additional revisions below for you to put the points I've raised above into practice.