Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are coming along pretty well. Just a couple things to keep in mind:

• Make sure you're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. You're not far off, but your forms tend to get wider through the midsection and have ends that are sometimes a little stubby. Remember that we want equal, circular ends connected by a tube of consistent width.

• Right now your contour lines all look to have the same degree. Make sure you're making them wider as they slide away from the viewer. Those contour lines define the cross-section of the form, so as the sausage turns in space, it'll also impact the degree.

Looking through your insect constructions, there's definitely a mix here. There are areas where you're demonstrating a solid, well developing grasp of how to think about the objects you're drawing as being a collection of solid, three dimensional forms, with the relationships between them clearly defined on the page. Then there are drawings where you definitely seem to forget that every drawing in this course is just an exercise in spatial reasoning. These are the ones where you delve more heavily into detail, and leave the actual structural components a bit behind.

So to be clear, drawings like this ant where you drew every form individually and tried to define how they relate to one another are headed in the right direction, and drawings like this orchid mantis stops focusing as much on construction and gets distracted more with detail. When you get into the detail phase, it's important to understand that this does not mean "do whatever you can to make the drawing pretty". Throughout this course, you'll find that we don't actually care about making pretty pictures.

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.

Moving on, there are a few distinct issues in your drawings that I want to call out.

The first of these is that you tend to jump between drawing using 3D forms and 2D shapes. Every time you draw something as a 2D shape on the page, it reminds the viewer that what they're looking at is flat. When we draw things as 3D forms, thinking about them as they exist in three dimensional space and how they relate to the other forms present in 3 dimensions however, we reinforce the idea that the viewer is looking at something real and 3D.

One key rule to follow to avoid flattening out your drawing is to never redraw the silhouette of a form. Sometimes students will attempt to alter a form once they've drawn it, and they'll do this by "refining" the silhouette on the page, either by cutting back into it, extending it, or just plain drawing something new on top of it. We can see this in the orchid mantis' head (where you started with an ellipse that you drew lightly - by the way, don't attempt to draw any of the phases of construction lighter than the other, every one of these marks should be firmly committed on the page - and then drew your "real" head right on top more from observation than from construction). We can also see it in the ant's head, where you created extensions of the basic head structure's silhouette to establish the protrusions on either side. Both of these approaches are incorrect.

The silhouette of a form is just a 2D shape, but it represents something in three dimensions. When we alter it, we don't change the 3D form it represents, we merely break the relationship between them. We can see this most easily when looking at what happens when we cut back into a silhouette, though the same thing happens when we extend things. We can take this concept and push it farther: don't draw anything that isn't a 3D form. So these spikes on the hercules beetle's leg are also breaking this rule, because they're effectively just 2D shapes created by drawing a line against a 3D form's silhouette.

Instead, we must approach construction in an additive fashion, building up new, complete, enclosed 3D forms and attaching them to the existing structure. We can either do this through intersection - defining how the forms connect by drawing a contour line right where they intersection - or by crafting the silhouette of the new form so it wraps around the existing structure where they meet. You can see this at play in this beetle horn example, as well as in this ant head demo and in this more detailed lobster demo.

You were definitely approaching this better in the hercules beetle - though I'd say the top horn was drawn more as a 2D shape extended off the thorax's basic silhouette, rather than its own form. Also make sure that you build up from simple to complex - if the complexity of the form we want to draw isn't supported by the existing structure, then we need to start it off with a simpler structure that will feel 3D on its own, and then build on top of it.

Taking a quick step back to how you approached detail, I want to provide a quick reminder: don't attempt to add any form shading to any of the drawings you do for this course, as explained here back in lesson 2. Also, try to reserve your areas of filled black for cast shadows only. If you see patterning or local colours (like the spots on the ladybug's shell, or the grasshopper's eye), ignore them. Treat everything as though it's the same flat white colour, and focus only on the information that we can actually feel with our hands, rather than see with our eyes.

Onto the last 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, 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.

So! You are definitely moving in the right direction, at least with the drawings that did focus much more on construction, but having laid this all out, I want to give you the opportunity to apply the concepts I've shared here. I'll assign a few additional pages below.