Throughout this set, you definitely show an increasing understanding of the concepts covered in the lesson. There are varying levels of success throughout, and some areas are better than others, but overall things are coming along nicely. There are definitely things I'd like to point out in order to keep you moving in the right direction, of course.
Starting with your organic forms with contour ellipses, you've mostly done an okay job of sticking to the characteristics of a simple sausage as outlined in the instructions, though there are certainly deviations with some sausages having ends of different sizes, some pinching through their midsection, and some with ends that are not properly spherical. Drawing a sausage form isn't easy, but one thing that can help improve your control of the shape is actually to slow down your stroke a little. You still need to be drawing it confidently, without hesitation, but as you get used to practicing the ghosting method you'll steadily find that the speed at which you need to draw those lines whilst still being able to maintain a smooth, confident stroke, will decrease. This will allow you to reclaim some of the additional control you can get at a slower pace. Just make sure that if your lines start to wobble, you increase your speed once again.
Additionally, make sure you're drawing from the shoulder, as it also improves control with this kind of linework and forces a steadier turn to your curving lines. Drawing from the wrist or elbow will result in more erratic and irregular qualities.
Moving onto your insect constructions, I wanted to point out some elements I particularly liked. For example, in your wasp demo drawing, the abdomen especially came out very nicely with a strong impression of how it exists in three dimensions. The contour lines running along it wrap really confidently and convincingly around the form in a way that shows your own belief in the idea that these are three dimensional forms, not just shapes on a flat page.
There are of course other areas where this illusion is not sold as powerfully, but there are some specific reasons for this.
Firstly, if we look at the leg segments of the wasp, we'll see that some of these sausages get rather wobbly and don't quite maintain a consistent width through their lengths. This added complexity to their silhouette strongly undermines the illusion that they're solid and three dimensional. Construction as a whole is all about building up complex objects using simple elements, because it's easiest to make those simple forms feel solid and three dimensional. This can be maintained by continuing to build things up with relatively simple components being added bit by bit.
Looking at this spider, specifically its spinneret (on the tip of its abdomen), this element was added to the construction as a flat shape. You took the silhouette of the abdomen itself (which was a decently constructed, three dimensional form), and merely extended it as it exists as part of the flat drawing. This did not introduce a new 3D form to the construction, but rather only worked within the flat space of the page. As a result, the form itself ended up feeling flat, and it also flattened out aspects of the abdomen.
Instead, you need to make sure that every element added is drawn as a 3D form - that you're adding something separate that can stand as a 3D form on its own, and that also has its specific relationship with the existing structure established. Here's what I mean by that. Just remember above all, at no point can you jump back and forth between treating your drawing as a series of solid forms, to being lines on a page, and back to forms.
There are other ways in which this similar issue manifests, which I've identified over this drawing. For example, there's a case where you cut back across a mass you've already constructed in three dimensions, failing to respect its solidity and choosing to ignore parts of it as it suits you. You've also got other arbitrary extensions of the silhouette. Towards the top I demonstrate a better way to approach bridging the gap between the thorax and abdomen, which applies principles I also demonstrate in this diagram.
Overall, you've got a good start, but I think that you got a little too caught up in detail too early, and it caused you to set aside good practices in terms of respecting the full 3D nature of what you're constructing, cutting corners in order to focus on how the drawing itself turns out. As such, I'm going to assign a few additional pages of exercises below for you to further develop these areas.
Next Steps:
I'd like to see the following:
1 page of organic forms with contour curves - keep working on getting those sausage forms right
2 pages of "sausage chains" - that is, chains of 3 sausages applying the principles of the sausage technique. As before, focus on nailing your actual sausage forms, keeping the ends spherical and equal in size, and maintaining a consistent width throughout each sausage's length. Fill both pages with these 3-sausage-chains.
4 more insect constructions, but this time I don't want you to add any detail or texture. Take the actual form construction as far as you possibly can in terms of breaking down the smaller more nuanced form elements, but don't get into the things we'd otherwise capture using the texture techniques from Lesson 2. Just focus on construction, and see how far you can go while adding only 3D forms, and not making any additions that treat your drawing as being two dimensional.
Alright here are my revisions
Your constructions are definitely appearing more solid here, specifically in how you're understanding how they wrap around one another, how they connect to one another, and how they generally relate to each other in space. There are two issues, both relating to the legs though, that I want to address: the legs.
Part of this was my mistake - I'm not sure why, but it seems in my last critique I didn't address the fact that you weren't really reinforcing the joints between the sausage forms as demonstrated here using a single contour line. This step of the process is critical to establishing how those forms relate to one another in 3D space. So, what you've got in your page of sausage chains read more as flat shapes on the page, rather than solid three dimensional structures.
Another element is that I feel your leg constructions are often quite simplistic - you put down the sausages, and that's about it. You add the odd additional mass here and there, but you're not addressing much of the segmentation and other details that can be achieved through construction and form by building things up as shown here.
So, I'm going to ask for one more page, but we're going to make it a little more interesting: using reference, I want you to do a page of insect leg studies. Start them off with the sausage chain, and make sure you follow through every aspect of it including the contour lines at the joints. Then build up whatever additional forms are required on top to capture the more nuanced forms present in your reference images. Be sure to use high-res reference images as well, as that'll help you identify everything that's going on.
Next Steps:
1 page of leg studies, as described above.
Here are the legs
https://imgur.com/gallery/vZ1bZQG
I feel like I still have problems making the leg segments connect with a contour line when they are thin. Is there a way to make the connection more visible without making the legs thicker?
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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