For what it's worth - and I plan on focusing on this a bit more with the demos in the coming months - crustaceans are also valid choices for those who struggle especially with drawing insects. So while I haven't really looked at your homework just yet, if I do ask for revisions, crabs, lobsters, shrimp, crawfish, etc. are all things you can choose to draw.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're generally doing a decent job of sticking to simple sausage forms (although there are places where you seem to more purposely push their boundaries in ways I wouldn't recommend - like bending them into dramatic U shapes at the bottom right of the second page - so remember that it's not about making them interesting and different, it's about learning how to create these simple components effectively). One issue I am however noticing is that since you're not overshooting your curves as explained in these notes, you do jump back and forth between wrapping the contour lines around the sausage forms correctly, and having them come out more shallow and flat. Don't be afraid of overshooting those curves - it's perfectly allowed, and encouraged, as long as it helps you wrap the contour lines around the form more effectively. After all, it's all just exercises - the focus is on developing your spatial understanding of how that surface deforms through space.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I think in most areas you've actually done a really good job in terms of applying most of the principles of construction and demonstrating a good understanding of 3D space. There is one issue however that I'm going to take this opportunity to correct you on, and it's an important one.

Looking at your drawings, you appear to be treating the process of construction as a two step thing. First you rough in your underlying construction, then you go back over it with cleaner, more purposeful marks, to end up with a nice pretty drawing at the end. This is a common misconception, and one you actually execute better than most (since your second pass is still confidently drawn and still for the most part creates a strong illusion of 3D forms, rather than flattening out), but it is still incorrect.

It's incorrect in two specific ways:

• First of all, you should not be thinking of a subsequent phase of construction as an opportunity to replace the marks from the previous one. Every single mark you add to a drawing is introducing a new 3D form to the scene. During the first phase we're placing solid, three dimensional elements floating in the world, but after that we're largely going to be wrapping additional forms on top of those from the previous phase. At no point are you redrawing the forms you've already added. This also means that those early forms need to be drawn as confidently as those that follow - you should not be going out of your way to draw them more faintly, as though they're meant to be somehow hidden. I noticed that you seem to be working with two different pens here, where one is making considerably fainter marks. The instructions state clearly that you are to use one kind of pen only.

• Secondly, the process we are using here is not one that involves loosely sketching and exploring on the page, then committing to things once we've figured them out. If we look at your rhino beetle drawing, we can see how you've jumped right in and started putting marks down to get a sense of the structure. While there is nothing wrong with this process in general, it is not what you were instructed to do within this course, nor is it what is demonstrated in the lessons. The point raised previously, about every mark drawn introducing another solid form into the world, is key. If we look at this bee drawing, you'll notice how you drew the abdomen with a simple ellipse (basically placing an elongated ball form into the world), and then later on you drew another form on top of it that cut into its silhouette, placing another 3D form within the space already occupied by the original ball form, but without actually acknowledging its presence. This provides the viewer with contradictory information - is the simple ball form there, or is the more refined, segmented form present? No matter the answer, the presence of this contradiction will immediately serve to undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief. As it gets undermined further, eventually it'll hit a point where the viewer will go back to understanding the drawing as a series of lines on a page and nothing more. I explain this concept further in these notes, but the main takeaway is that you need to respect every form you draw as being something that exists concretely in the world. You can't choose to ignore something if it doesn't fit the drawing you wish to achieve. Once it's in place, it needs to be dealt with in 3D space.

The other point I wanted to raise was in regards to how you approach drawing your insects' legs. 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, 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 all laid out, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. I think for the most part you are demonstrating a good grasp of how to think in 3D space and how to build up your constructions, so I will leave it to you to avoid the mistakes I pointed out here in the next lesson.