That is honestly really strange, about your pens - I've been having my girlfriend go through the Drawabox lessons to do recordings for people to see how they should pace themselves, and she's exclusively been using the pens we sell to test their longevity and general wear/tear (except for during the box challenge where she tested a wider variety of pens), and we've never seen them get sharp. I did ask her about it though, and her theory is that maybe turning your pen may help it wear down more evenly. She does think that pressing too hard is likely at least part of the problem, as that'll wear down your pens faster, but she does have a habit of turning it as she just idly fidgets with her pen, which may have helped keep it more even.

For what it's worth, drawing quickly and confidently is definitely what you should be aiming for, as it helps create nice, fluid, tapered strokes.

Anyway, moving onto your work, your organic forms with contour lines are definitely better but there are a number of things I want to bring to your attention, so you can continue to work on them moving forwards. Here are some notes directly on top of the work, but I'll outline the major issues below as well:

• You seem to be inconsistent in drawing contour ellipses on the tips of the sausages that are oriented towards the viewer. This isn't something you should skip.

• When you DO draw the contour ellipses, you don't appear to be drawing them with a degree that matches the contour curve nearest to them, in some cases resulting in a sudden jump from a very narrow contour curve to a very wide contour ellipse in a short distance.

• You still need to work on maintaining the characteristics of simple sausages more consistently. You match them pretty well in some occasions, but in others you stray pretty far.

• You still appear to struggle a great deal when it comes to controlling the degree of your contour ellipses, and specifically in getting them to get wider as we slide away from the viewer. In a lot of cases you do reverse your contour curves' degrees correctly, but you tend to stick to the same overall degree.

• Lastly, while you mention that you try to draw your marks quickly and confidently, there are signs that you may not be doing so correctly. Here's a diagram on the differences between marks drawn confidently vs. too slowly or with too much pressure. Note how confident, light execution results in nice tapering on both ends - you sometimes end up with tapering on one end at most, but not both. The opposite end often comes out looking quite heavy.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I focused on the ant drawing specifically with some notes written directly on the drawing.

• You're getting better with the sausages, but it varies. There are still cases where they get wobbly/overly complex, so make sure you're drawing them from your shoulder. While you should still be applying the ghosting method and executing those lines with confidence, that doesn't necessarily mean drawing quickly - slowing down a little, as long as you're able to keep pushing forward and not hesitate, can help you regain a little control.

• Defining the intersection between forms like your head/thorax/abdomen helps make them look like solid forms relating to one another in 3D space rather than as flat shapes on a page.

• Keep working on the idea of wrapping forms around one another - especially when you get into the segmentation at the end of the insects' legs. Don't draw them as flat shapes - always draw an underlying structure and then focus on how the segmentation wraps around it in three dimensions.

• Perhaps the biggest concern is that you're approaching these constructions in a very simplistic fashion which suggests that you may not be studying your reference as closely as possible. Construction is not about your end result being simple and general - a ball for the head, a ball for the thorax, etc. It's about building up in complexity in phases, still paying attention to all of the forms that are present in your reference but focusing first on the most simple and building on top of them to capture the more complex. As you can see, I put together a quick demonstration of how I'd construct an ant's head - where you drew an ellipse/ball and then slapped on some mandibles, I broke the head structure down into a series of phases, constantly looking back at my reference to identify the kinds of elements I need to capture. Admittedly I picked a random reference so the species isn't likely the same as yours, but yours is definitely far too simplified regardless of what kind of ant you're drawing, and it is likely that you didn't look at your reference enough to inform your choices.

Overall this is definitely an improvement, but I'm still not confident that you're really fully establishing the sense that you're building up forms in 3D space. I'm going to assign some additional work once again, below.