Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are moving in the right direction. For the most part, you're aiming for the right things - your sausage forms are fairly close to adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages (a bit of hesitation here and there caused a tiny bit of wobbling but all things well done), your contour curves are accelerating well at the edges to properly curve all the way around, although they're also just a bit hesitant and have some slight gaps, etc.

Just continue to invest more time into the planning and preparation phase to ensure that you're comfortable with a given mark, then execute it with confidence, without any hesitation, accepting that any opportunity to avoid mistakes has passed the second your pen touches the page. Also, one other thing - it looks like you're maintaining the same degree for your contour curves. Remember that they should be getting wider as they move away from the viewer.

Moving onto your insect constructions, you're honestly doing a pretty good job, but there are three main things I want to address to keep you completely on the right track.

First, a simple point. I'm noticing that as you progress through a construction, you tend to make your early phases lighter, and the steps that follow darker. We can see this really clearly in this beetle where the initial masses are visibly lighter than every mark that follows. This suggests that you're thinking of those early masses as being more of an underdrawing or sketch, and not part of the final drawing. Instead, draw every mark with the same weight/pressure (of course make sure you're not pressing too hard in general), and then only add additional line weight at the end of the whole drawing process to clarify specific overlaps between forms.

Playing off that one, we come to the second point. Here's a rule I want you to adhere quite strictly to: once you've added a form to your construction - for example, adding the initial masses, or really any situation where you introduce a complete, three dimensional form to the scene, you are not allowed to alter its silhouette after the fact. Either cutting back into the silhouette of a form, or extending it to kind of "refine" that shape doesn't actually change the form itself. It merely breaks the connection between the silhouette (which is a 2D shape on the page) and the form it's meant to represent. We can see this happen most easily by looking at what happens when we cut back into a silhouette.

There are ways to cut back into forms while keeping everything believably 3D, but these techniques are better suited to geometric construction, and don't work too well for organic subject matter like what we're dealing with here. Instead, we want to work completely additively - meaning building up more complexity not by changing the forms we've already drawn, but rather by adding new complete, enclosed, solid, 3D forms to the construction and then defining how they relate to the structure that already exists in 3D space. We can define these spatial relationships either by using a contour line to mark the intersection between forms (like the form intersections from Lesson 2), or by having the silhouette of our new form actually wrap around that existing structure.

Here are some examples where we can see this in practice:

• A beetle horn demo - note how we're not jumping into any real complexity at one time. We're taking small steps, building things up with simple forms, adding complexity through the addition of more forms. Compare this to how you handled the horns in this construction where you drew a much more complex silhouette right from the start.

• An ant head demo - similarly, this shows how everything gets pieced together, but by bit. Yeah, we end up with a lot of extra linework, but each drawing here is just an exercise in spatial reasoning. We're not here to draw pretty pictures, and end up with something we can pin to the fridge when we're done. To be honest, there are cases where you do this already quite well, like in this one's head.

• This more detailed crab demo - it just shows additive construction being applied in many different areas, and the mindset behind every mark I draw. I'm not trying to hide anything, I'm simply drawing every form in its entirety, understanding how each one sits in 3D space, and avoiding jumping into levels of complexity that are too great for what can be supported by the existing structure.

Remember that part of drawing each form as a "complete, enclosed, solid" entity is to ensure that we are drawing them all completely and not cutting them off where they get overlapped by other forms. This is something you don't do often, but it comes up in a few places.

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. In your case though, I think you were actually trying to employ the sausage method, but strayed from it fairly often. For example, you aren't always sticking to the specific, strict characteristics of simple sausages, and you're not always reinforcing the joints between segments with a contour line.

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 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.

So! I've laid out three main things for you to keep in mind, and I expect you to work on applying them as you move forwards. I am still happy to mark this lesson as complete, however.