As discussed back in Lesson 0, remember that you are not to move onto the next lesson until you've had the previous one marked as complete - that is to ensure that any feedback you get does not appear in your next submission unless you genuinely don't understand it. The critiques don't generally take more than a few days to come back, so there's no reason to be rushing forward like that - especially if you're spending half your time as prescribed by the 50% rule as well.

At the end of the day, if I have to try and consider whether or not a mistake is present because you're not understanding something, or because you just did that work before it was called out before, it's only going to make the critique more time consuming. In terms of other ways you can help to streamline the critique process - it definitely would have been better had your submission album consisted only of one image for each drawing, rather than multiple shots at different points. Multiple shots can be very useful in certain rare cases, but normally I can discern what a student is doing fairly easily. Best of both worlds would just be a matter of including any in-progress shots in a separate album, so I can go through your completed work more rapidly.

Anyway, starting with your organic forms with contour lines these definitely show that you're focusing particularly on maintaining the characteristics of simple sausages - sticking to ends that are circular, and avoiding pinching or swelling through the midsection to achieve a consistent width. While it's okay that you're actually drawing circles for the ends, then connecting them together, I would recommend that you try to draw your sausage in one go in the future, as getting comfortable with drawing sausage shapes without the additional steps will save you from some unnecessary clutter. Not a big deal though.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, overall you appear to be moving very much in the right direction. You're applying the principles of construction effectively, building up from simple forms to achieve more complex results, step by step, without jumping to greater levels of complexity too soon. There are however a couple things that I want to suggest to help you make the most of these exercises.

First and foremost - take full advantage of the space available to you on the page. Different drawings will demand different amounts of room, but it's common for students to draw smaller than they really should. Sometimes students do that out of enthusiasm, wanting to pack as many drawings as they can onto a single page, while others just do it out of a lack of confidence. Either way, approach your drawings by giving the first one on a page as much room as it demands. This will help you engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills more effectively, and will also avoid discouraging you from executing your marks from your shoulder. Then, once the drawing is complete, you can assess whether or not another drawing will fit on the page. If it won't, that's fine - but if another will fit, there's no real reason not to include another. So pages like this one with a ton of empty space, really should make use of that space.

The other point I wanted to call out is about how you approach some of your constructions - though it's not all over. 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.

We can see lots of examples of this in this wasp drawing, where you basically started big, then tried to cut back in to 'refine' those shapes. I can also see that you tend to draw those initial masses more faintly, not quite committing to them as you should. Every single mark we put down should be the result of forethought and planning, and they all result in new solid structures being added to the scene. That means that we have to treat them as such, and avoiding drawing faintly, or in a way that suggests the element we've drawn isn't really there will undermine that.

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'll also find more complete examples in the informal demos page - I recommend taking a look at the shrimp and lobster at the top of the list. They demonstrate how every mark that is drawn is done so with confidence and planning - there's no faint marks, no hedging, no hiding things, and every element that is drawn introduces a new, complete 3D structure with a clearly defined relationship with the existing structure.

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'm pretty happy with how you're trying to employ the sausage method to construct your insects' legs quite consistently. As a result, they feel quite solid, although they certainly can be taken further. Each chain of sausages introduces a sort of base construction or armature. 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.

I've shared a number of things for you to keep in mind here, but all in all I think you're doing well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. When submitting your Lesson 5 work though, definitely focus on submitting the assigned work on its own, and separate out any additional images you may wish to include, just so I can go through your submission more efficiently. I've got a lot of critiques to get through, after all.