Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're generally doing a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms, except for the few cases where you end up with one end larger than the other. A bigger concern I have however is that while you are applying a degree shift to your contour lines as you slide along the length of the form, you've got it backwards - it should be getting wider as it moves away from the viewer, you appear to be making it narrower. Fortunately this is something I put some time into explaining in the new revised ellipses video for lesson 1. I demonstrate the mechanics of this with some props and visualizations, since it's something that confuses most people at first, and definitely needed more attention.

Moving onto your insect constructions, as a whole you're actually doing a really, really good job. Most importantly, your constructions are almost entirely additive and show a clear respect for the fact that you are building with solid, three dimensional forms, bit by bit, developing complexity through the addition of more forms.

There are a couple places where you deviate from this a bit - for example, in this dung beetle's foreleg where you've drawn a larger sausage, but the end up cutting back into it to add more complexity.

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.

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. This of course is what you have been doing for the most part - but it's still valuable to lay it out like this.

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.

Moving on from that, when you get into more texture and detail, you end up getting a little misguided with what it is you're aiming to achieve. It's not uncommon to see this, but basically you're currently regarding detail as decoration. Decoration itself isn't really a concrete goal, and so it's not really that useful.

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.

To this point, focus primarily on conveying to the viewer the information that we feel with our hands and fingers, rather than what we see with our eyes. Also, remember that back in lesson 2, we discussed that form shading would not play a role in our drawings throughout this course. In general, the textural principles introduced in Lesson 2 basically mean that you can't just try to use quick, rough solutions to imply texture (as you attempted to do with the hatching on this ant's legs. That doesn't communicate anything concrete to the viewer, so it doesn't actually accomplish the task at hand.

Instead, every textural mark is itself a cast shadow, implying the presence of a specific textural form, and defining its relationship with the surfaces around it. This takes time, and cannot be rushed.

Anyway, all in all you're still doing a great job. You will need to be more patient and mindful when handling texture, but the core construction is largely coming along quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.