So, let's step through these one exercise at a time.

Ghosted Planes

Here you're definitely focusing more on achieving an accurate stroke, rather than maintaining a smooth, consistent trajectory. To put it simply, you're executing those marks more hesitantly, resulting in a wobbly line as your eyes attempt to steer your pen. As discussed back in Lesson 1, this is not the correct order in which to arrange your priorities. This fundamental rule of markmaking emphasizes the importance of maintaining a consistent flow to all of your marks, and achieving that by drawing with confidence rather than hesitation.

There are a few factors that can contribute to this. First and foremost, is the importance of what the ghosting method itself actually is about. The ghosting method is at its core about breaking the process of drawing into multiple steps, each with its own responsibilities and priorities. First we identify the nature of the line we want to make, the job it is meant to accomplish, and so on. We pin down where it starts and ends, find a comfortable angle of approach, and so on. This is planning. Then we move onto the preparation phase, going through the motion to take this specific task your brain is consciously focusing on, and start pushing those marching orders down into your muscle memory. We repeat it over and over so your arm can accomplish this without thinking, without steering the mark with your eyes. Finally, we execute the mark with confidence, and with absolutely no hesitation. From the moment our pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed, and all we can do is push through and move on. Mistakes happen, and it's important to accept that - to give in and execute the mark more slowly, steering it with your eyes, is to give up before you've even made the attempt.

I explain this concept of multiple phases with different responsibilities further here in an answer I gave another student. It may be worth reading through.

Now, drawing these marks confidently can cause us to end up overshooting our lines (having them stop past the intended end point of a given mark). When we notice this happening, we may end up hesitating more, or perhaps holding ourselves back, resulting in undershooting. The solution for this is to get used to lifting your pen off the page instead of slowing to a stop. Slowing to a stop can cause some wavering towards the ends of our lines, but lifting the pen up is a far more reliable motion that can be performed more quickly.

Table of Ellipses

This one is generally pretty good. Your ellipses are being drawn fairly confidently. There's work to be done on tightening them up further, but this is more a matter of continuing to practice the ghosting method.

Organic Forms with Contour Curves

You do seem to struggle a fair bit when drawing with your contour lines, and the manner in which you're struggling suggests that you may be falling back to drawing them more from your wrist or your elbow rather than your shoulder. Drawing from your wrist can cause it to be more difficult to actually follow through the continuous rounded path that the contour curve is meant to follow, and in trying to counteract it you end up with a lot of stiffness. Remember that your contour curves are really just the visible portion of a full ellipse that wraps all the way around.

Drawing these lines from your shoulder, keeping your wrist and elbow more or less locked will help you maintain a consistent, rounded motion. If you try purposely drawing a contour curve with your wrist, you should see what I mean in how much more difficult it can be to control.

In addition to this, your sausage forms are at times struggling to match the properties of a [simple sausage](). You're not pinching or swelling through the midsection, which is good, but you're definitely struggling with the ends. Often you end up having the sausage end with ball forms that are more stretched out, rather than evenly spherical.

One last thing - on the bottom left of the page, you drew a form where both tips of the sausage are pointing away from the viewer (based on the contour curves themselves). That means that you should not have drawn the contour ellipses on either end. These are reserved only for situations where the ends of the form are pointing towards the viewer.

Sausage Chains

This one's a mixed bag. You've got some sausage chains that came out quite well as far as the sausage forms themselves, and others that got a little too wacky with pinching through their midsection and ends that were getting more stretched. The relatively straight chain along the top left of the page was more in the realm of stretched ellipses rather than sausage forms as well.

Also, your contour curves are pretty consistently coming out incorrectly, with two main problems:

• They tend to be in the wrong place - this could be an issue of accuracy, where you're struggling to get the contour line to actually fit directly where the forms intersect.

• The degree you use when drawing these contour curves doesn't match the actual orientation of that shared cross-section. A lot of these sausages are moving across our field of vision from up to down. This means that the contour line we'd use to draw their intersection would basically be pretty flat, of a very narrow degree/width (since that cross-sectional slice would be perpendicular to the flow of the sausages). You tend to draw them with a much wider degree than you should. Here's what I mean.

Looking at your insect constructions, I actually think these are steadily improving. There are a lot of basic mechanical things you need to continue working on improving, but your application of these things to your insect constructions are steadily yield better, more believable results. Still, before we really get into the insect/construction specific stuff again, I still want to continue working on figuring out the technical issues addressed in the other exercises.

In the context of your insect constructions, here's a quick overview of some issues to watch out for:

• Contour lines flying way off the surface of the form, like your ant's head.

• Every single thing you add to a construction should be a 3D form. The little spokes you drew along the ant's thorax are basically just loose lines and establish no real relationship in 3D space to the rest of the structure. Everything we add needs to somehow be a solid, 3D form that is establishing a relationship with that underlying structure either by wrapping around it like this and like this or by defining some kind of an intersection contour line.

• Stay aware of where the ground plane is. Your ant's left legs (those pointing towards the viewer) all seem to sit on roughly the same kind of ground plane, but its back right leg is raised way up. It looks more like it has lifted its leg. Keeping the different ground planes consistent will help you sell the illusion more readily.

• Keep working on tightening up your ellipses - the praying mantis' head ended up very loose. Also, in general, the construction of your insects' heads tend to be very simplistic. This doesn't relate to heads, but in terms of how to think about construction, take a look at this demo.

• In your last couple of pages, you started filling some things in with black. The only things we fill in like this are cast shadows. Everything else should be treated as being a flat white - we're not interested in the local colour of these objects, just how the forms sit in space and relate to one another.

So! I'll assign some additional pages below, and as before you can submit them as a revision in this thread.