Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're largely making good progress here, though there are two things for you to continue paying special attention to:

• You're adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages (as explained here in the instructions) to varying degrees - sometimes you stick to them quite closely, other times you have ends of different sizes, or ends that get stretched out instead of remaining circular. By and large you do seem to be demonstrating an awareness of the importance of trying to keep things as simple as possible - just be sure to keep working towards doing that more and more consistently.

• You're frequently drawing the contour lines with roughly the same degree as you move along the length of a given sausage. Instead, as we move farther away from the viewer, those contour lines should be getting wider, as discussed back in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, by and large one thing that stands out is the fact that you are definitely putting a lot of focus and attention towards ensuring that every single form you introduce to your constructions, be it one of the early, initial masses, or something added afterwards, feel solid and three dimensional. This is very important, and I'm glad to see it, as it helps to contribute to the overall solidity of your resulting structures, while also helping you to keep challenging your brain's capacity to understand these things you're drawing as though they exist in 3D space.

This relates to one of your questions:

To add new shapes to my basic figure. Should I draw on top of them or remove some parts to achieve the similary to the original figure?

Technically you can do either, but for the purposes of this course, as we work through the organic subject matter in Lesson 4 (insects) and 5 (animals), I do push students to try to work "additively" rather than "subtractively". The reason is simply that when we work subtractively - that is, cutting into our existing structure to build up complexity - it's very easy to unintentionally operate in 2D space by modifying the 2D silhouette of the forms that are present, rather than engaging with the construction in three dimensions. Here's an example of what I mean.

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 - but this is largely how you have been working in your own constructions, as I mentioned earlier.

To answer your other question, it comes down to a fairly simple rule: every form you draw should be drawn in its entirety, avoiding having them get cut off (which turns them into flat shapes). So, if something on the opposite side of a structure - like an insect's leg for example - is visible, then you should draw every visible form in its entirety, even where they're hidden from view. For the parts that are not visible at all however, they do not need to be drawn. So, we'll expect you to "fill in" small gaps based on your logical understanding of how to close off your forms, but we won't expect you to completely make up forms that you cannot see at all.

Continuing on, there are three main concerns I have for your work here. The first of these is simply that you have a tendency to overuse contour lines. This is an issue that is most prominent in your first few drawings (like the orchid mantis and the spider beside it), but it is present here and there throughout your work. That is, you tend to use way more contour lines than are actually needed, which suggests that you're not actually thinking about what exactly those contour lines are meant to achieve prior to drawing them.

The ghosting method's planning phase is very important in this regard - it allows us to ask ourselves, what is the mark we wish to draw, what purpose is it meant to serve, and how can it be best drawn to meet that purpose. When we skip over this step, especially with contour lines, we have a greater tendency to just pile them on, thinking that more is better. In the case of contour lines, the more you add, the less of an impact each one's going to have (a concept known as diminishing returns), and further than that when we allow ourselves to just draw a bunch of marks on thoughtlessly, we're less likely to take the time to execute each one as well as we can - leading to a prioritization of quantity over quality.

Long story short - be careful with your contour lines, and ensure that you think through the purpose behind every mark you draw.

The next point I wanted to call out is to do with detail. When you hit the detail phase of a drawing, you have a tendency to shift gears and start focusing on a more general desire to "decorate" your drawing - that is, doing what you can to make it appear more visually pleasing and impressive, usually relying on piling on a lot of ink to give the viewer more interesting things to look at. Unfortunately, for our purposes in this course, this is not really what we're after. The fact that "decoration" is a fairly arbitrary goal (since we can't really know when one has added enough decoration) makes it less reliable, and thus breaks away from the idea that every drawing we do here is an exercise.

Instead, what we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Remember the points raised in the lesson 2 texture section - specifically the fact that all the textural marks we put down are meant to each be the cast shadows cast by specific textural forms, rather than just arbitrary marks added to capture a general impression. I'm also seeing you using a fair bit of form shading - remember that as discussed here, form shading will not be playing a role in our drawings here.

Lastly, I can see that you are making an effort to employ the sausage method to your drawings - but you aren't necessarily adhering as closely to the specific requirements laid out in that sausage method diagram. Really it's that use of extra contour lines that is the main point on which you're straying, but taking it a step further, the key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well).

Just be sure to review those diagrams, so you can apply that approach as you move forwards.

You do have a number of things to keep in mind here, but all in all your work is coming along well. If anything, the biggest shortcoming is the point about decoration - you're handling construction well, but on that front you're getting derailed from the main focus of what we're doing in this course, which is all about understanding how forms exist together in 3D space, even when we draw them as flat shapes on the page.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep working on the points I've raised as you move into the next one.