Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are largely looking pretty good, save for just a couple issues:

• You're mostly sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, but you've got a few - those that specifically end up just being elongated ellipses - where you aren't. Remember that you want those ends to be circular, equal in size, and for the sausage to maintain the same width throughout its length. The ellipsoid ones are getting wider through their midsection, and tend to be more stretched out towards the ends.

• Remember that the degree of your contour curves should be shifting wider as you slide away from the viewer. If you're not sure why, the best explanation for this is currently in the most recent version of the lesson 1 ellipses video.

Overall, your insect constructions are really well done. You're doing a great job of building things up using solid, three dimensional forms, introducing new forms to build up complexity, rather than trying to modify the silhouettes of the forms that are already in place. There are a few small issues that I will address, but all in all you're doing a good job.

The first point I noticed was that your use of line weight/shadows/solid black shapes appears to be a bit arbitrary. Outside of just putting down our main constructional linework, there are two tools we can use to help our drawings make more sense, but each of these has their own limitations and their own purposes.

• Line weight is something we add specifically to clarify how specific forms overlap one another. It is limited to specific, localized areas - meaning we don't go back over the entire silhouette of a given form, we only apply it where that overlap occurs between edges. It runs along the silhouette of the given form, but it must remain subtle and light. We apply it using the ghosting method, so we can achieve a nice, confident stroke that tapers towards its ends to blend more seamlessly with the existing linework. In terms of its subtlety, you can think of it as whispering to the viewer's subconscious to gently inform them of which form goes in front of which. It is not an obvious, loud shout. Line weight is not something we add to fix or hide mistakes. Sometimes when adding line weight confidently, using the ghosting method, we might miss the mark and end up with a bit of a gap between the line we intended to draw over, and the mark we actually drew. Students on occasion will feel that filling in the gap to create a very thick bit of line weight is the solution here - it is not. It will only draw undue attention to your mistake. It's better to just leave it alone.

• Cast shadows can, unlike line weight, be as broad and heavy as you need it to be. It is composed of shapes, rather than just additional strokes, but the key difference is that it doesn't just cling along the silhouette of a form - it is cast upon another surface, and if that surface is physically farther away, then that is something to take into consideration. You won't have cast shadows floating arbitrarily in the air, and your cast shadows must directly relate to the form casting them. So just drawing arbitrary shadows doesn't work, because without that relationship with the form casting it, it ceases to feel believable. The biggest thing to keep in mind here is the distinction between cast shadows and form shading - the latter being something is not part of our drawings for this course, as discussed in lesson 2. Cast shadows are cast from one form onto another surface, whereas form shading is generally where the surface of a given form gets lighter or darker depending on whether it is turning towards or away from the light source.

If you look at this beetle, you'll notice a very thick line along the bottom edge of its abdominal shell. This doesn't really make sense. It's too thick to be line weight, and if it were line weight it shouldn't be running along so much of its silhouette. It's not a cast shadow, because it appears to either be clinging to the shell's silhouette like line weight, or it might be on the surface of the shell itself, which would make it more like form shading. Either way, it shouldn't be there.

There's a similar issue on this insect's thorax, where it appears to have some form shading on it.

One thing that can cause students to end up getting into shading when they hit the detail phase of their drawing is when they get too caught up in the idea that they're "decorating". 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.

Continuing on from there, there's just one other issue I wanted to call out. 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.

With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You can continue to address the issues I've mentioned here as you move onto the next one.