Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, there are a few things that we need to look at:

• First and foremost, your contour curves are generally okay, but you're having trouble with the contour ellipses that sit at the tip of your sausages. This leads me to believe that you may not entirely understand their purpose. All the contour lines - both ellipses and curves - are the same. All of the contour lines are ellipses that wrap all the way around the form. We draw them as curves in most cases here because we can't see the opposite side, but we know the contour lines continue on. At the tip, however, we can see the whole ellipse - at least when the tip is facing the viewer. Now here's the problem: you appear to be drawing the contour ellipses with fundamentally and completely different characteristics than the contour curves immediately preceding them. The orientation, degree, etc. is all different, even though there's no real reason for it to differe so much. A slight change in degree makes sense, because we're sliding closer to the viewer, so it's going to be a little bit narrower - but you're pretty consistently drawing much wider contour ellipses instead. You also need to work at ensuring that they actually sit on the tip - you have a tendency of placing them further back, as you can see here.

• While you've got some shifting in the degree of your contour lines, it seems to be kind of inconsistent, which suggests that you may not fully understand how the degree of your contour lines helps convey the orientation of each cross-sectional slice. I recommend that you give the lesson 1 ellipses video a watch. It's been updated a few months ago, and has a clearer explanation as to how the degree of a given contour line demonstrates the orientation of a given circle in 3D space.

• While you're generally keeping your sausages fairly simple, there are definitely ways in which you're not quite adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned back in Lesson 2. Remember that we want to keep the ends equal in size, and circular in shape (a lot of yours get more stretched out). We also want to keep the midsection to a consistent width from end to end, avoiding any pinching or swelling.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I can definitely see that this lesson was challenging for you. I'm going to go over a number of things that may help you achieve better overall results, and that should address the key issues that are coming up.

The first point is a relatively simple one: draw bigger. You actually are drawing pretty big already, and that's great - but there are a lot of areas in which having more room to work and think through your problems can really help. One such case is with sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages when drawing your insects' legs. When drawing tiny sausages, it becomes vastly more difficult to hold to all those characteristics. If we make the drawing as a whole larger, we in turn make the legs themselves wider, making them easier to sort out. Once you're comfortable drawing them at a larger scale, a lot of the challenges of drawing them smaller tend to diminish, allowing you to make more headway there as well.

So, don't be afraid to turn your pages on their side (to a landscape orientation), and really take advantage of the space available to you.

Secondly, slow down, and observe constantly. There are two kinds of mistakes a student can make. Either they attempt to draw the right thing, but draw it incorrectly (lack of accuracy/control) - this is totally fine, and is the sort of thing that improves with practice - or they weren't trying to draw the right thing in the first place. This second type is basically a situation where a student may simply be rushing into things, and not giving themselves nearly enough time to really see what it is they're supposed to be doing. A lot of students go into this with expectations that they should be able to complete the drawings in a certain amount of time - but no such thing exists in this course. The only requirement is that you take as much time as is required to complete each and every drawing, and each and every component of a given drawing (every shape, every mark, etc.) to the absolute best of your current ability. If that takes one sitting, fine. If that takes multiple sttings, great. If it takes multiple days, fantastic. It doesn't matter how long it takes.

If we look at this early draw-along with the louse demo, there are clear improvements from the first attempt to the second - for example, in the first attempt you didn't draw the eyes in any way resembling the demonstration, but in the second you corrected that. This does show however that you rushed forwards and drew the eyes without thinking about it, the first time. And there were undoubtedly a lot of other elements for which we can say the same - cases where, say, a contour line was drawn incorrectly because not enough time was given to think about it, or where you laid in a form too quickly without necessarily thinking about the specific nature of the form you needed to draw.

There is also the contour lines you added to the louse's "skirt" that were left unfinished in both attempts. As shown here, you never completed constructing the forms that wrapped around that abdominal area.

Along with taking the time to observe your reference patiently, carefully, and constantly (since our brain is constantly working to oversimplify the things we've seen, we have to look at our reference again and again, only ever drawing one mark or one form before looking at it again to "refresh" our flawed memory), the use of the ghosting method is incredibly important. The ghosting method should be applied, in all three of its stages, to every single mark we draw.

That means that for every line we draw, in the planning phase we need to ask ourselves, "what is this mark meant to accomplish?" "how can I plan out this mark to best accomplish its job?" "are there any other lines that accomplish the same thing?" etc. If we don't understand exactly what a mark is supposed to do for us, then it doesn't make any sense to be drawing it. All this comes back to investing more time into every individual step.

At this point, it is worth pointing out that you had your Lesson 4 work marked as complete for June 1st, which brings you very close to the 14 day cooldown period having just expired. Whenever I see that, it's a red flag that a student is perhaps focusing more on getting their work done in some predetermined amount of time, rather than focusing on the time they need to put in.

Anyway, I'll stop harping on that and move forwards. The next issue I wanted to address pertains to how you're approaching construction, and how you're building upon earlier phases of construction to add greater complexity to your drawings. 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.

This issue comes up a lot in your work. For example, looking at this beetle, we can see areas where you both cut back into the silhouettes of the initial masses you laid down to establish the head and thorax, and also where you added flat shapes for the spikes along its mandibles.

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.

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. Also, if you take a look at the informal demos page - specifically at the shrimp and lobster constructions - you'll see a ton of very intentional, careful construction that embodies everything I've mentioned here thus far. That is, from executing each and every mark using the ghosting method to ensure I've thought through what each mark is meant to accomplish, and how I'm going to go about it, to building up my constructions additively, being sure to establish a strong relationship in 3D space between any form I add, and the structure that already exists.

So! I am definitely going to be assigning quite a few revisions for you to work through. I recommend that if you're particularly tired of insects, crustaceans are a good option to explore as well. You'll find my revisions listed below.