Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're generally doing a decent job with these, except that you're somewhat deviating from the characteristics of simple sausages. You tend to have one end larger than the other - try to keep them the same size, and keep them circular in shape as well. Maintaining these particular characteristics will help the forms feel more solid and believably three dimensional.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I can see that you're definitely making a clear effort to build up each of these through the addition of simple forms, one at a time, to gradually build up to greater overall complexity. While I feel that in many ways you are moving in the right direction here, there are some adjustments we can make to your approach.

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.

If you take a look at this ant construction, you'll see how in red I highlighted a spot where you'd initially blocked in a simple ball form for your abdomen, but you ended up cutting across it as you built up your structure. You basically refined the silhouette of that form, changing it after the fact, not by altering it in 3D space but by altering it as a flat element.

While it's easiest to see this kind of alteration of silhouettes when a student cuts back into a form, that's not something you do often. Instead, the same issue actually comes about where I've marked in blue - where you've extended out a given form's silhouette, adding partial shapes to latch onto existing forms. This unfortunately is the same problem - we're working in 2D space, where we should bew orking in 3D.

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. You can also see more complete demonstrations in the informal demos page, specifically the shrimp demo and the lobster demo. These are especially good for seeing the whole process broken down, step by step. In particular, you'll see how every mark I put down is specific and committed - everything establishes something new and three dimensional, nothing is sketched or loosely half-defined.

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.

I think this praying mantis construction definitely moves closer to what I'm talking about. The addition to the head for the mandibles - that triangular structure - is more than just a flat shape. I can see that you were thinking about how it would exist in 3D space, and how it would relate to the main head mass within it.

Moving forward, I do feel another point you struggle with at time is observation. Now, don't get me wrong - I can see that you're clearly making big efforts on this front, to study your references carefully and patiently, and I can also see it paying off. Just remember that there is a lot of room for growth in this area, and that we need to constantly push ourselves to look at our reference continuously, to avoid working from memory. It also helps to identify all of the little forms that are present in our references - once we've laid down the major masses, it's very easy to lose track of what we should do next. The reference is always the answer.

Ensuring that you always use high resolution images is important too. Working with lower resolution images can often lead to oversimplification, without really realizing it.

I did want to take a moment ot explore how you're approaching adding detail in some of these drawings. Of course, detail isn't really he main focus of this course, but there are certain kinds of details we tend to focus on more than others. In your work, it does feel like you're not entirely sure of how you should be going about it, and what kind of details you should add. Often you fall back into the trap of trying to decorate your drawings, relying on arbitrary form shading, or just filling certain things in with black without necessarily knowing what you're trying to convey to the viewer. I may be able to help clarify that for you.

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.

The last thing I wanted to discuss was how you approach constructing your legs. While it's very clear that you're making a definite effort to employ the sausage method when constructing your insects' legs, I think there are some steps we can take to improve your results here. To start, you are definitely trying to adhere to the sausage method's core tenets - you're sticking to simple sausage forms in most cases, you're defining the joint between the segments with contour lines, etc.

Taking it further, you're also making an effort to build upon those structures in varying ways, but I think I can provide you with an approach that may work better. Once our base sausage structure is in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here. Note how we're breaking the additional forms into strips that we twist along the sausage - this allows the new form's silhouette to make more contact with the existing structure, more clearly defining how it wraps around. This works well with the points I raised before, about working additively.

You can also see this at play in 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).

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'm going to assign a few revisions below to help you push yourself a little farther. This should provide a solid foundation for when you move into the next one.