Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're doing reasonably well here:

• You're sticking pretty closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, with some deviation here and there - always strive to stick to two circular ends that are equal in size, connected by a tube of consistent width as shown here.

• Your contour lines are definitely drawn confidently, although you do have room to improve on their accuracy. Keep pushing yourself to use the ghosting method to reinforce them with appropriate control and precision through the planning and preparation phases. When they end up floating more loosely inside the sausage, you don't successfully achieve the illusion that these are lines running along the surface of the form.

One thing I did catch however is that you seem to be sticking to roughly the same degree for all of your contour lines. As explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the degree of your contour lines will get wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the form.

Moving onto your insect constructions, for the most part I am very pleased wtih how you're approaching these. Overall you're showing a fair bit of respect for how each of these constructions are built up one step at a time, from simple to complex. There are however a few things I want to call out.

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.

Now there are very few places where I see this specific issue in your work - maybe along the 'chin' of this ant, and along the backside of this beetle. But the same issue occurs when we extend off the silhouette of a given form as well, since both cutting into and extending a flat silhouette are both ways in which we can alter it and break its relationship with the form it's meant to represent.

This is something we see more frequently in your work - like where you wrapped these two masses together in a sort of "sock" which melded the two silhouettes together with these shapes bridging across the top and bottom. There are a lot of little adjustments like this that you've made, by modifying your drawing on the two dimensional level, rather than on the three dimensional one. In fact, it happens a lot more due to how you have a tendency to go back over everything with a lot of additional line weight, redefining the boundaries of your forms - but we'll talk about that in a moment.

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.

You can also see more complete demonstrations of approaching construction in this sort of purposeful, form-focused manner in the shrimp and lobster demos at the top of the informal demos page. You'll notice that these are very light on the use of additional line weight. When they do employ it, it's not to go back over the whole silhouette of a given form, but rather to help clarify how one form overlaps another in a specific, localized area. That's how line weight should generally be used, in a limited, subtle fashion. You can see this in action in these two overlapping leaves as well.

When approaching your constructions, avoid the tendency to start out lighter and get thicker/heavier as you progress. Keep that line thickness consistent throughout, then add line weight in a few key areas where it's needed in its own pass at the end. This will help you avoid redrawing and redefining the silhouettes of forms, and will help you continue to respect the solidity of all your forms, all the way back to the first that establish the core structure.

Moving on, 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, 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). 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.

Despite the issues I've called out, I'm still quite pleased with your constructions and feel that you are demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms all interact with one another in space. As such, I think you should be good to address the points I've raised as you move onto the next lesson - so you can consider this lesson complete.