Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, by and large you're doing very well here. You're sticking closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, and you're clearly shifting the degree of your contour curves wider as you slide farther away from the viewer in most of these (mostly in the first page, a little less in the second). Watch out for cases like this however - always keep in mind that the degree tells us how that cross-sectional slice is oriented in space. Here they seem to be way too wide, especially towards the left side.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, the first thing that stands out is that you've got very strong observational skills right off the bat. This is certainly a very good thing, but it's also something of a risk as far as adhering to the concepts in Drawabox goes. Fortunately you haven't strayed too much, but I have seen a lot of students of this sort get into Lesson 5, where they finally get to draw animals, and kinda take a hard left away from the constructional principles and focusing more on the idea of "drawing animals" however they can, rather than looking at the drawings we do in this course as exercises and spatial puzzles.

To that point, there's definitely some advice I can impart here, and it all starts with the importance of distinguishing the actions we take that occur in the three dimensions in which the object is meant to exist, primarily by introducing new, solid, fully enclosed 3D forms to attach to the existing structure, and those actions we take that occur in 2D space - meaning, putting individual marks and flat shapes down on a flat page, and not necessarily considering how they interact and connect to one another on a granular level. The latter results in a greater focus on the resulting image at the end (which is not of concern to us in this course), and the former speaks more to how we can use these drawings to train our brain to understand what we're creating in three dimensions.

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.

Now this one is definitely the biggest example of this (given that you started with an arbitrary ellipse, then ignored it and drew the rest of the insect on top of it, but let's look at this one instead, where the issues are somewhat smaller and subtler. I've highlighted there in red where you've cut back into your forms' silhouettes to refine the resulting drawing's shape - but without clearly defining how those alterations exist in 3D.

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.

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 see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page. As I've been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.

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 - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

Lastly, a quick note about detail. Your detailed drawings, like this one, are quite lovely, but they don't actually adhere to the principles of texture as discussed back in Lesson 2. Rather, your aim here appears to largely gravitate around the idea of "decoration" - that is, the construction is finished and it's time to do what we can to make this drawing as visually pleasing as possible. Unfortunately decoration is not as clear a goal as we could be aiming for, as there's no specific point at which we've added enough. This can be tricky, because now we're left finding reasons to put more marks down, as more mark = more detail = more better.

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.

Now, while your drawings are quite beautiful, I do need you to demonstrate that you understand these concepts so that we don't risk you running into the same problem. You'll find some revisions assigned below, which will give you the opportunity to demonstrate that you understand what I've explained here.