Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are generally well done, though there is one thing I want you to keep an eye on. When drawing the contour ellipses at the tips of your forms, remember that their degree should follow the same trend as the contour curves themselves. As shown here, those contour curves are supposed to get narrower/wider as we slide along the given form, but there shouldn't be any sudden, major jumps without proper cause.

Moving onto your insect constructions, you're overall showing some good work here, but before I get into your actual use of construction there are three things I need to make very clear:

• As discussed back in Lesson 2, we do not use form shading for our drawings in these exercises. I know that when students start getting into adding texture and detail to their drawings they can very easily forget these restrictions, as they tend to just think in terms of "make a pretty picture". That is not what we're doing - every single mark we put down still serves a purpose, and our focus is not simply on making something that looks nice. Our focus is on visual communication - first and foremost establishing how the object exists solidly in space, and once that is accomplished, delving into the specific characteristics of the surfaces themselves - whether they're bumpy, rough, smooth, etc.

• Your brush pen is only to be used to fill in specific shadow shapes, not for adding line weight. Since when drawing texture we get into a lot of shadow shapes, we can approach them as shown here. That is, drawing the outline of the given shadow shape with our regular pen, and filling it in with the brush pen. Line weight itself is all about being really subtle. We go back over a given mark with the same pen, the same way we'd have drawn the original stroke (with confidence, using the ghosting method, etc). The intent is to make the line just a little bit thicker, because while our viewer's conscious brain won't pick up on this, their subconscious will. We're whispering to that subconscious, not shouting in their faces. As line weight gets obnoxiously thick, it starts to flatten out the drawing into graphic elements rather than three dimensional forms.

• Every mark you draw should be drawn with care, taking the time to determine what that stroke is for and what specific properties we need from it, and then going through the motions of ghosting through it to prepare. We need to have a specific idea of what kind of mark we're looking to make. There are a number of places where you've used hatching lines in your drawings, and they've pretty consistently been treated as afterthoughts. When you've got a pretty good drawing, and then you add really sloppy hatching lines to it, it makes the whole drawing feel sloppy.

Aside from these points, you've overall done a pretty good job in applying the principles of the lesson and building up these various insects from simple forms. You especially improved upon this through your last few drawings, where the issues I outlined above aren't particularly prevalent.

I am especially fond of how your fly turned out, because it specifically shows improvement in certain issues you've got beforehand. For example, the segmentation along the abdomen wraps tightly around the underlying form, making both that underlying form and the segmentation around it feel solid and three dimensional. Compare this instead to your ant's thorax, where you've constructed an underlying form and then pasted the shapes for the next phase of construction on top of it, cutting across it and treating it more like a 3D form.

Here's what I mean. Basically, constructional drawing is all about adding solid, three dimensional forms to a scene. As we go through successive phases of construction, we build more forms on top of the ones that exist. This is referred to as additive construction. The forms from each phase exist as solid as ever, and we have to interact with them while maintaining respect for the volumes they occupy and define.

We can also cut back into these forms, but doing so is often tricky for students - where additive construction helps students to further develop your belief and respect for these forms as they exist in 3D space, subtractive construction really tests how much you believe and understand how those forms exist in 3D. It's very easy to end up cutting into them as flat, two dimensional shapes, when instead we should be doing so by drawing contour lines along the surfaces of those forms in 3D to split them into two distinct masses, one of which can then be deemed "negative" space and treated as being empty, or a gap, like this.

If you just cut across them as 2D shapes as you've done with your ant's thorax, it's just going to remind the viewer that the drawing they're looking at is flat and two dimensional. We can see the same issue with your weevil. As shown there, you can achieve the same kind of construction more successfully by only using additive construction, and incorporating additional forms to bridge the gaps between the main structure and those spikes. In general, and as a rule, try to stick with additive construction wherever possible.

Anyway, overall you're doing a good job implementing the material from this lesson, and you'll have ample opportunities to play with the things I've laid out here in the next one, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.