Starting with your sausages, for the most part these are well done. You're adhering fairly closely to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, although you do stray from them here and there. While it's a little more obvious when talking about, say, sausages that have ends of different sizes, but one you may not be as consciously aware of is where the ends of the sausages aren't quite circular. Sometimes you have a tendency to let them get more stretched out (like here) or otherwise squashed or malformed (like here).

Moving onto your insect constructions, the first thing I want to talk about is how you've definitely focused very heavily on the idea of making your drawings look as detailed and as heavily decorated as possible. The direction you've taken here isn't quite what we're aiming for in this course, although it's not an uncommon mistake.

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.

So when you're moving onto the detail phase of a drawing, don't think of it as though you're looking to decorate your drawing and go to whatever lengths to make it visually pleasing. Our focus is still on conveying and communicating information. Specifically information that relates to what we could touch and feel with our hands, rather than what we can see with our eyes.

Additionally, remember that as discussed back in Lesson 2, you should not be incorporating any form shading into these drawings. It is sometimes unclear for some students where the line is drawn between form shading and cast shadows. Form shading is where an object's surface gets darker as it turns away from the light source. Cast shadows is where an object actually blocks the light source, casting a shadow upon an entirely separate surface. So for example, looking at this crop of your hercules beetle, the part on the beetle's abdomen is form shading - it's the part of that form which is turned away from the light source. The part along the legs however is cast shadow, because it's the abdomen blocking the light from reaching that surface. That said, the cast shadows should be curved to wrap around the legs, rather than following the silhouette of the abdomen so closely. Cast shadows are projected onto other surfaces, and they conform to those surfaces.

Moving onto your insect constructions, let's take a look at this ant. Firstly, I marked out some areas around the head in red and blue. These are areas where you've taken the silhouette of a form that had already been established on the page, and then modified it by either cutting back into it or extending it through the addition of further flat shapes.

The silhouette is itself a flat shape on the page. It represents a 3D form in the world, but only insofar as it maintains the specific shape. Sometimes students will attempt to introduce changes to the given 3D form by altering its silhouette, but in doing so they'll only break the connection, being left only with a flat shape on a page. We can understand this most easily by looking at this explanation of how cutting back into a silhouette flattens out our construction, but the same thing can occur when we extend a given form's silhouette. While there is (as mentioned in that diagram) a way to cut back into forms in 3D space, in a manner that preserves that illusion and form, this doesn't work so well for organic subject matter, and so when working on insects, animals, etc. we will mostly be working additively.

This means that every mark we introduce to a drawing defines a new, solid, three dimensional form in the world, which we either wrap around our existing structure, or have intersect with that existing structure (with the intersection defined by a contour line as explored back in lesson 2). You can see this demonstrated both in this beetle horn demonstration and in this ant head construction demo. Note how we're starting smaller and building our way up, step by step. You on the other hand jumped into a larger form and tried to hammer out too much too quickly.

You'll also find a great deal of additive construction in this more recent lobster demo.

Taking that one step further, I noticed how when drawing your ant's thorax and abdomen, you started with smaller masses (which is good) - but when building your segmentation on top of them, you did so as though those original masses were much bigger. As a result, your original masses ended up kind of "floating" inside of these larger envelopes. This is something I'd like you to avoid, where possible. Instead of enveloping forms one inside of another, always build upon them in smaller chunks, where you can establish how one form actually touches and grips another.

Here's an example of what I mean - note how there's a separate step where I build up some additional forms to add the necessary bulk before building the segmented plates on top. Every form that's added has a clear relationship with the structure that exists before it, so everything feels more solidly built. Yes, this results in more lines, but at the end of the day every drawing in this course is just an exercise, focusing on improving your spatial reasoning skills. We're not aiming for pretty pictures.

This critique's getting pretty long at this point, so one other thing I'll offer you on this topic is these notes I put on top of another student's dragonfly drawing. It should give a good example of how I'd approach drawing a dragonfly, so you can compare it to your own.

Lastly, I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. In your case you kept fairly close to the sausage method, but deviated where it suited you.

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, 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 make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

As I've called out a number of points here, I'm going to assign a few pages of revisions below, where you can demonstrate your understanding of what I've laid out.