Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, your sausage forms are looking solid and you're doing a good job of adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages (for the most part). Your contour lines however are definitely a bit sloppy though - be sure to apply the ghosting method with every mark you draw, and avoid rushing through making those marks. Strive to keep the contour curves snug within the silhouette of the forms, and ensure that they hook around properly at the edges so they give the impression of wrapping around the form.
Looking at your insect constructions, your work here isn't bad - it in fact features a number of strengths. My bigger concern however is that your priorities appear to be somewhat misplaced, and there are key, integral elements to this lesson and to this course as a whole that you are rushing through, in favour of investing your time in rendering and decoration. This is actually something I called out in regards to your lesson 3 work, and I will no doubt repeat myself here.
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.
Let's take a look at this page. What stands out to me most is the fact that both of these drawings appear to exist in two distinct levels. There are the initial masses, which have been drawn in a much fainter line, and more roughly (drawing through ellipses is good, but you should really aim only to do it two full times before lifting your pen - doing it too much can cause us to lose track of what this ellipse is meant to represent). Then there are all the lines that follow, which are considerably darker and to a point, more purposefully drawn (although these appear somewhat quick in their own way as well).
The distinction is that it looks like you didn't really intend for the initial masses to really be considered part of the drawing. Instead, if you were working in pencil, they'd be something you'd have erased, once they were all properly replaced with the "real" lines. That is not how I want students to approach these drawing exercises. Instead, it is important for you to treat every stage of construction as being the introduction of solid, tangible, real masses into the world. You can see this, for example, at the very beginning of the wasp demo. In the first step, the masses are drawn to be specific and clearly define individual solid forms. In the second step, we build on top of them, respecting the fact that they are solid and present, not a loose plan that will be ignored when it becomes convenient to do so.
On that same point, if you look at the praying mantis on this page, you'll see that the mass you constructed for the thorax ended up being cut into with a later form, effectively attempting to erase or undermine its existence in 3D space. Once a form has been added to the world, modifying its silhouette (either by cutting into it as shown here or attempting to extend it) is not an option. There are ways to cut into forms, but this happens in 3D space, by cutting along the actual surface of the forms as explained here - this is better suited for geometric constructions instead of organic ones, though.
Every stage of construction needs to be performed in this manner, not introducing lines or flat shapes, but rather adding new complete 3D forms. Looking again at the page I pointed to earlier, both of these have little spikes/protrusions on their legs, but they've all been drawn as elements that could not actually be interpreted as 3D on their own. Without the existing construction, they'd just be lines. As you can see in this demo, every individual spike should be drawn as its own form, with a clearly defined relationship with the existing structure.
Another issue I noticed was that you tend to be very liberal with your use of line weight, in ways that don't really make all that much sense. To elaborate on this, I'm going to explain the distinction between line weight and cast shadow. Line weight exists along the silhouette of a form. It is not overt, nor heavy - it is a subtle, relative shift in the weight of a line's thickness where that is noticeable primarily to the subconscious, like a whisper rather than a shout. It clarifies how one form might overlap another. Cast shadows however have no limitation on how large they can be, and often they're very bold and noticeable. Their limitation is that they must be cast by a form onto an existing surface. In being cast, they cannot "cling" to the silhouette of the form that casts them, and if there is no surface to receive them, then they cannot exist.
What we're seeing here is that you're putting a lot of very bold dark areas that look like cast shadow shapes along the edges of forms, muddying the distinction between line weight (in that they're clinging to the silhouettes) and cast shadow (in that they're large and obvious).
There are some places where you're leveraging cast shadows very effectively - like the praying mantis' abdomen, where you've used cast shadows to help separate the segmentation. But more often you use it quite liberally in places where it doesn't really make any logical sense. As a last possible explanation, you might be attempting to use them as a manner of form shading, but as explained in lesson 2 this is not to be included in your work for this course.
If you're using a brush pen, only use it to fill in cast shadow shapes you've already outlined using your fineliner. Don't use it for line weight.
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 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.
Now, this critique leaves you with a lot to think about. So I'm going to leave it at that. Once you've had a chance to absorb the many issues I've pointed out, I want you to do an additional 5 pages of insect constructions. Take your time with each one. It is very clear to me that you've got previous experience with drawing, and you are likely letting some of your previous methodology and approach leak into how you tackle drawing here. For the purposes of this course, it is critical that you follow the instructions and techniques given to you here - from applying the ghosting method to every single mark you draw, drawing from your shoulder, establishing every single form as a solid and concrete mass, and so on.
Next Steps:
Please submit 5 additional pages of insect constructions as explained at the end of the critique. Do not include any rendering or texture. Focus on construction only.
As you suggested I took extra precaution to ghost every line. My main priorities in these were to establish Those bases you spoke of and to use the original shapes as the true form with minor additions rather than obliviously ending up drawing over it and creating new less 3-dimensional forms. I also did my best to keep any limb sausage like, though on occassion my hand did slip and ened up creating unbalenced shorter ends to it. This was a part that I struggled with last time, as I was confusing myself over how they should look, and whether I was supposed to go over them with two passes.
Thank you and I look forward to your critique as always.
This is definitely a marked improvement, and while there are still areas with room for improvement (which I'll list below), all in all you're moving in the right direction.
You are improving with your sausage forms, and this will continue to get better with further practice. It is challenging, and it takes time, so be sure to continue practicing them as you move forward.
Also, you don't appear to have moved beyond the basic sausage structures in your constructions, which suggests that you ignored the part of my initial critique which talked about how you could delve deeper into the complexity of your insects' legs (as shown in the ant leg example I provided and the dog leg example). When I mention something in a critique, I'll generally want to see it applied in your assigned revisions where applicable.
To that same point, there definitely were some areas where you oversimplified internal details, like the cephalothorax (the head/thorax section) of these spiders. The eyes certainly don't just exist as a series of basic ellipses floating arbitrarily on the structure. Observe your reference more closely and identify additional forms you could build up along its structure, giving those eyes a more concrete, integrated way to fit purposely into the construction.
In general, once a form has been added to a construction, avoid changing its silhouette at all. This is similar to what I mentioned in my critique about avoiding cutting back into it, but the same thing goes for redrawing the silhouette to extend it out. For example, the bottom right ant on this page (bottom right once it's rotated correctly, that is) shows a head where you blocked in a basic ball form, but then redrew part of its silhouette to add the mandibles and add a little additional complexity. Manipulating the silhouette in this manner is an action performed in 2D space, and therefore encourages us to understand it as though it is flat and two dimensional. You did something similar on the bottom left ant as well. Instead, every single thing you add to a construction must be solid and three dimensional, drawing each form in full such that it doesn't require any ot her forms' edges to be fully enclosed, and defining how it relates to the rest of the structure. You approached this more correctly for the two ants across the top, where the mandible sections where established as separate 3D forms that connected to the original head mass.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you can continue to work on these points in the next lesson.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.
Thank you. For some reason every time I read through the critique before working I interpreted the leg part to mean (only use sausage forms in these exercises, but when we want to correctly draw the legs as forms this is what we'll do.)
I understand what you mean now when you're talking about adding and subtracting in 3d space. I'll try my best to implement that in the future. Though the concept is still quite abstract and fresh to me.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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