So there's a bit of a mixed bag here. As a whole, I'm going to point out a bunch of mistakes in your approach, but I will tell you now that I am not really worried at all. You've shown enough that suggests to me that with a little bit of redirection in terms of how you're tackling these drawings and what you're focusing on, you'll be back on track and doing great in no time.

Starting with the organic forms with contour lines, you're doing a good job of sticking fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages (but you should reread what that's about to be sure to follow it more directly), as explained in the instructions. But there are two main areas where you're encountering issues:

• Firstly, you need to be drawing through each and every ellipse free-handed in this course two full times before lifting your pen, as explained here.

• Secondly, the assignment asked for organic forms with contour curves. Sometimes I get students doing one page of ellipses, one page of curves, and I don't bother calling it out, but in this case you ended up not doing the one that was assigned at all. Read the instructions more carefully!

Moving onto your insect constructions, the first thing I want to point out is that once you finished up with the construction phase of your drawing and got into detail, I think the goals you had for what "detail" really entails are a little bit off from what this course is really about. Right now, it seems like you're more focused on "decoration", attempting to make your drawings feel.. well, just nicer-looking.

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.

Texture specifically, as discussed back in Lesson 2, is all about capturing cast shadow shapes. No shading, no capturing local colour/patterns (like if something has a black surface, don't worry about it - it's not like we're capturing things that are red, yellow, blue, pink, etc. - just treat everything like it's the same flat white and focus instead on information that pertains to the actual 3D forms that are present, whether large or small).

The other point I wanted to raise comes down to how you're approaching the constructions themselves - specifically the freedom with which you're allowing yourself to draw forms, then draw new ones on top of them. 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.

Sometimes you do this very intentionally, but there are other cases - mainly where you go back over your drawings with a darker line to kind of create a distinction between an underdrawing and your "real drawing" where it has the same effect, redrawing the existing silhouette by tracing. Remember that line weight itself is a tool that has a specific purpose - to clarify overlaps between forms in localized areas. We add line weight using the ghosting method and drawing confidently, just as we would when making our initial marks. Your drawings should definitely not be separated into these kinds of phases where part of the drawing ought to be erased or removed - at least, not for the purposes of the exercises we're doing in this lesson.

Getting back to the whole no-altering-silhouette thing: 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.

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.

So, I've given you two major things to shift in your overall approach. With that, I'll assign some revisions below so you can apply them and demonstrate that you understand.