Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally looking good, though you do need to remember to stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained in the instructions. This means two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You definitely have cases of pinching or swelling through the midsection, or ends that are of different sizes, so be sure to work on that in the future, as simplicity is what allows us to help convey a stronger sense of solidity when using these forms as a base component in a more complex construction.

Continuing onto your actual insect constructions, your work here is for the most part quite well done. There are a couple of issues I want to address, but as a whole you are indeed doing a good job of combining a variety of simple forms to build up to identifiable complex results and a general sense of solidity.

The first issue I want to mention is a simple one - you have a tendency to add contour lines without necessarily thinking about what you want them to accomplish for you, or if they're really all that necessary. This is not an uncommon issue, but it comes from drawing without consideration for the purpose of each mark. This is something you need to be weighing during the first phase of the ghosting method. Ask yourself, what is this line meant to do for me, how can the line be drawn to best accomplish that task, and are there any other lines already present that are effectively doing the same job already.

When it comes to contour lines specifically, there are a couple different kinds. The ones that run along the surface of a single form (like those we draw in the organic forms with contour lines exercise) aren't actually all that useful. They're good for teaching the concept of what a contour line is, but there are only a handful of situations where we'll actually need to use them. Conversely, the kind that define the relationship between two forms in 3D space (the kind that we use in the form intersections exercise) are considerably more effective, because of the kind of relationship they define on the page.

To that end, looking at your praying mantis, most of the contour lines you added to the legs and arms didn't actually end up being particularly useful.

Moving on, in a few places - especially the grasshopper on the last page - I'm noticing a tendency to start applying construction a little more timidly (like it's meant to be a totally separate underdrawing) and then going back over things with a lot more line weight. This results in a couple problems. First off, it treats the construction like it's not a part of the final drawing, which makes you sloppier and more timid with those marks instead of drawing them confidently to create solid forms with each new line added. Secondly, it causes you to trace back over your lines with the intent of replacing that linework. Tracing in turn flattens out your drawing because it causes you to think more about how those lines move across the page, rather than how they flow through 3D space.

Every aspect of your drawing should be drawn with confidence. Construction is not about creating an underlying sketch so you can replace it with a prettier drawing. Construction is an exercise that involves creating solid forms, establishing how they relate to one another, and then line weight is added to a few key areas to help clarify how certain forms overlap others. It does not replace entire lines or wrap around the full silhouette of a form - it just clarifies the overlap at a specific location, nothing more.

Through most of your drawing you've approached this well, but I did notice a slight shift towards thinking in terms of an underdrawing/clean-up pass towards the end, which I wanted to address directly.

Lastly, 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's 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.

Also, reaching back to the point about contour lines, you'll notice that the sausage method specifically states not to add any other contour lines along your sausage segments.

With all that pointed out, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You do have a number of things to work on, but all of this can be addressed in the next lesson.