There's a lot of good in this submission, along with one really important issue that I will spend most of my time focusing on. Before I get to that though, a couple things first:

• Looks like when drawing ellipses in your organic forms with contour lines, you weren't inclined to draw through them. In some parts of your constructions however, you really get into drawing through your ellipses, to the point that you do it too much. As explained here, you should be drawing through all of your ellipses, but ideally doing so two times before lifting your pen. Three is okay as well, but aim for two.

• In this drawing of a fly, you went and broke the rules. You appear to have used a pencil to put down your underlying rough sketch, then traced over your linework with a pen. No. Bad. Don't do that. It does however give me an opportunity to explain precisely why it's bad. Back in lesson 2's form intersections video, I explain that line weight is not used to replace existing linework. It's not a matter of putting down a rough sketch and then redrawing your whole object on top of that with a fresh line. For that reason, I don't want students employing any sort of two-stage "underdrawing/clean-up pass" process. Every single mark you draw should be done so confidently, and should be respected as a part of the drawing itself. Line weight should only ever be used to clarify key overlaps between forms, and should be limited to specific local sections of lines, not the entirety of a line's length. While this is the only drawing where you straight up used a pencil and completely replaced the entirety of your linework by tracing (another technique that I don't want students using, since tracing over linework focuses really heavily on how that line runs across the flat page and not how it represents an edge in 3D space, flattening everything out), there are elements of this issue that can be seen in your other drawings where you continue to think in an underdrawing/clean-up pass sort of mentality. Remember above all that these drawings are all exercises - the focus is not to create a pretty clean drawing at the end. It's about what the process teaches you about the relationships between forms and how those forms can be combined to create solid, complex objects.

So! Onto the main course of the critique: constructional drawing is all about the idea that at every step you are adding solid, three dimensional forms to a three dimensional world. These forms are present, and cannot be ignored or denied - once drawn, there is a solid mass there, and to move forward you need to interact with it. Throughout most of these drawings, you've set out earlier masses that, as you move forwards with the construction, ultimately are ignored and treated as though they were not there.

In some cases this is really prevalent - for example, the early abdominal mass you drew for this cricket can be seen faintly sticking out. These result in really strong contradictions - the viewer is faced with information that suggests that there is a form in a particular spot, as well as other information that suggests that it is not there at all. These contradictions quickly undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief, and causes the illusion that they're looking at a real, three dimensional object, to fall apart.

There are other cases that are not as egregious, but still significant - these are cases where you try to cut back into forms you've drawn like this one's thorax, to "refine" and carve into them.

Constructional drawing focuses on two different flavours of technique - additive construction, where you build forms directly on top of one another, and subtractive construction, where you cut back into the forms you've drawn. What you've attempted to do there with that insect's thorax, is to employ subtractive construction. The issue is that you did so in two dimensions - cutting back into the silhouette of that form (which is itself a two dimensional shape on the page), not demonstrating any understanding of how the piece you were cutting away and the piece that was being left behind exists in 3D space. As a result, this action flattens out the form, and undermines the illusion that what we're looking at is 3D.

All construction has to be performed as actions in 3D space, constantly reinforcing the impression that the forms in question are three dimensional. Now, I've been ragging pretty hard on your mistakes here, but the fact of the matter is that aside from this pretty frequent problem, you actually otherwise demonstrate a really strong grasp of how your forms exist in 3D space. For example, there are many components in this insect that feel extremely 3D. You may be overusing the contour curves a little bit, but the relationships between those forms in 3D space are really well defined, and so you end up with a battle between the little marks we're supposed to ignore (which we can't), and the strongly defined 3D forms warring with one another for the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

I explain this kind of issue - the incorrect use of subtraction - in this diagram. In it, you'll see that organic construction generally isn't a great place to apply subtraction in the first place. It is instead better to always work additively, to start smaller and build your way up instead of starting big and cutting back.

There is one other issue that I want to address, and that is the use of the sausage method when drawing your legs. You are indeed aware of it, and you apply it to varying degrees, but you're pretty willing to depart from it whenever it suits. Instead, this technique should be used to construct all of your insects' legs, without exception. This is because the technique is not about making every leg into something that looks like a chain of sausages - it's that a chain of sausages is something that we can construct as a base structure, or an armature, that captures both the gestural flow of a limb and its solidity simultaneously. Most other techniques lean too hard one way or the other - capturing gestural flow but appearing flat, or capturing solidity but appearing stiff.

The sausage method lays down a structure that does both in equal measure, and onto which we can build up additional forms to provide further bulk where it is necessary, as shown here. Also, the importance placed on reinforcing the joint between sausage forms with a contour line and not placing contour lines anywhere else allows us to focus on the contour lines that are most effective (those that define the relationship between two forms in 3D space), and not to waste time on those that won't contribute much more. You do have a habit of adding contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form without necessarily thinking about whether or not they're actually contributing to the drawing, and as a result, tend to overdo it.

Those kinds of contour lines - the ones that just sit along the surface of a single form - tend to suffer from diminishing returns. The first you add, with no other contour lines present, will help make a form feel more three dimensional on its own. The second however, will only serve to reinforce the first, and will have far less of an impact. The third, the fourth, etc. won't really accomplish much. It's always better to focus on the contour lines that define relationships between forms, as these tend to be VASTLY more effective, and will often render any further contour lines unnecessary.

So! Since the whole subtractive construction thing is present throughout your drawings, I'm going to assign a few additional drawings for y ou to complete to show that you understand what I've laid out here. You'll find them assigned below.