Looking over your work, I definitely agree that while you may have tried to slow down and spend more time on each drawing, the results definitely still suggest that you're still rushing. Perhaps the truth sits in your wording - you said you're spending more time on each drawing. That's a good first step, but what matters most is just how we approach each individual mark we draw. Specifically how much time we invest into the planning and preparation phases prior to the confident, smooth execution. Thinking about just what each given mark is meant to accomplish, what task it is responsible for, and how it will best do that job, is incredibly important and has to be done for each and every individual stroke. While this can be difficult because it is asking a lot, it comes down quite a bit to the fact that our brain wants to move quickly, to move onto the next step, and so it's focusing not on what we're doing at this moment, but what we will be doing.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, what I mentioned above stands out in two ways:

• You're not sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as laid out in the instructions themselves. It's unfortunately not uncommon for students to assume that they remember everything they're meant to be doing with an exercise, and thus don't take the time to reread those instructions. Never rely on your memory. Always go back and reread things. Your sausage forms should have circular ends of equal size, and should remain consistent win width throughout its length. Yours tend to get pointy on the ends (they're not quite circular), and widen through their midsections.

• You definitely need to be employing the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder more consistently when drawing those contour lines in order to execute them with greater overall control and accuracy. A lot of these are well rounded and hook around nicely, but it seems like as you get further through the exercise, you put less and less time into each stroke, trying to just get through it all.

One last point about this exercise - in a number of these (like these on the first page), your contour curves are implying that one end faces the viewer, but you're placing the contour ellipse on the opposite end. The contour ellipse is a contour line like any other, except that since that tip points towards the viewer, we can see all the way around the full elliptical line. Therefore you need to think about precisely what your contour lines are saying about the form's orientation in space, and place the contour ellipse to match. Here are some examples of this done correctly.

Moving through your insect constructions, there are a lot of issues that come up frequently.

• The most notable is, as discussed previously, you're rushing. I completely understand that drawing insects can be extremely discomforting. Even I had trouble with it when learning this myself, and even when doing the demonstrations, and I can understand that someone with more significant fears can find it all the more challenging. The result of not spending much time looking at and studying your references is that you're working off memory rather than direct observation (as explained back in lesson 2), resulting in a vastly oversimplified representation of what is present. Not taking your time with observing the reference has a tendency to then trickle down into not putting much time into the markmaking itself, since we're left to work off a relatively vague, unclear idea of what we should be drawing, rather than a more specific intent. Without that clear intent, we just put down loose marks and trudge on forward.

• When constructing your insects' legs, you are not adhering to the sausage method as demonstrated here. It's clear that you're trying to apply that methodology, but the first clear sign that you're straying from it is that all of your segments are ellipses rather than sausages. Note that you're also drawing through them multiple times, which would be fine if we wanted you to draw ellipses - but since they're sausages and don't maintain the same kind of consistently even/rounded shape, you should be drawing only once around the whole sausage outline. Note the bottom left of the sausage method diagram where it says not to use spheres/ellipses. Also note the importance of reinforcing the joint between those forms with a contour line, and having the forms intersect.

• Once you hit the crustaceans, you pretty much stop trying to use the sausage method altogether, and instead opt for using a lot of excessive contour lines. It's important to understand that contour lines, while they're a useful tool, we can't just use them thoughtlessly all over the place. The first reason is that they suffer from diminishing returns - the first one you add may help a fair bit, but the second will be less impactful, and the third even less. Instead, it's important to place your contour lines where they'll have the greatest effect, and to ensure that each one we draw is drawn well. When we just draw a bunch we have a tendency to be less careful with each individual one, opting for quantity over quality, and that never works out.

• Getting back to the sausage method though, 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.

Now, unfortunately you are going to have to do some revisions because what you've submitted here is far below what you are capable of, given the appropriate focus in the right areas. It's not that you're not working hard, but you are definitely bumping up against certain factors that have made it harder for you to observe your references carefully, and that have caused you to rush through drawing each individual mark.

So, for the pages I assign below, I want you to focus only on crustaceans. Try to find drawings you feel you can study carefully, and really invest your time into each individual one. Work on no more than one drawing per day, to keep you from trying to hammer out a bunch all in one sitting. Take your time with each and every mark, and really think about what each line is meant to accomplish, what form it is meant to introduce, and so on.

Also, do not use any contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form for your insect constructions. The contour lines that define an intersection between different forms are still fine (like the ones used in the sausage method), but the sort you covered your crab legs with should be left out.