Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, there are a number of points I want to call out:

  • It's somewhat unclear whether you're aiming to adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages. You definitely do hold to them at times, but there are quite a few cases where you've got ends of different sizes, or pinching through the midsection.

  • You're currently drawing all of your contour curves with roughly the same degree. This issue came up in regards to your branches back in Lesson 3 as well - the degree of these cross-sectional slices should be getting wider as it moves farther away from the viewer, as explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

  • When we have an end of the sausage facing the viewer, we basically are able to see all the way around any contour lines placed at that point, resulting in a contour ellipse instead of a contour curve. While you're generally handling this correctly, I noticed a number of instances where you had some issues. In some cases you jump to making that ellipse considerably wider than the contour curve preceding it (as we see here), and in a number of cases (one on the first page, several on the second) you place the ellipse on the end that is, according to those other contour curves, facing away from the viewer. Here's an example. The contour curves tell us that end is facing away, but the ellipse tells us it's facing towards us, leading to a contradiction. To help explain the issue, here's a diagram in which the same sausage is represented with different configurations of contour ellipses and contour curves.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there are two main things that jump out at me right off the bat:

  • Each page has a ton of different drawings on them

  • Each of these individual drawings are quite simplistic, and do not demonstrate a particularly significant investment of time. Of course I can't be sure of that - everyone works at their own pace - but as a whole, I do get the impression that you're not giving these drawings nearly as much time as they really require.

Looking at my first critique of your Lesson 3 work, it appears that the same issue was present here. Here's what I said in regards to that:

Drawing more smaller drawings on each page, rather than giving each one as much room as it requires - something that can definitely impede our brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage our whole arm from the shoulder when drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

While I understand that we've gone through many rounds of revisions since then, it is the student's responsibility to do whatever it is they need to apply the feedback they've received to the best of their ability. That doesn't mean in immediate response to the given feedback - but going forward, whatever you need to avoid forgetting the points that I've raised in the past, must be done. If that means reading through all of the feedback periodically, or taking notes and reviewing those (though going back to the original feedback now and again would still be recommended). Whatever it is that you need to avoid making the same mistakes - especially when the mistakes are the result of choices you're actively making, as opposed to matters of skill where we improve with practice - you need to be doing it.

Another point I noticed is that you don't appear to have drawn along with any of the demonstrations, as instructed here in the homework section. While you may well have done these outside of what you submitted, what I'm seeing does make more sense, if you jumped straight into drawing your own insects without having given yourself the opportunity to follow the steps outlined in each of the demonstrations.

Also, remember that along with the main demonstrations (which are at this point getting old - they're scheduled for an update) there are also a number of useful demonstrations on the informal demos page. This is where I put the more recent demos that I've done for some students as part of their own critiques. Of note here are the lobster and shrimp demos, which I strongly recommend you follow and apply to your own constructions where possible. As the course material is always evolving based on what I learn about conveying these concepts through doing critiques, the informal demos page is how I can provide that more up-to-date information until the video overhaul reaches this lesson.

I am going to require you to take another swing at this lesson in its entirety. Once you've completed the work, you'll have to submit it as a fresh submission, which will cost you 2 additional credits. Be sure to make full use of the resources available to you - both the demonstrations in the lesson, and the feedback I provided previously. If we continue to run into these issues going forward, we will have to reassess whether this course is able to provide you with the kind of attention and resources you require. Drawabox is of course limited in how much attention it can give any one student, due to its extremely low price point, and so there are circumstances where we are not able to provide what is needed - but before we get to that, do your best to apply the points I've raised here (which admittedly were less about technique and more about how you approach the material as a whole).

Hopefully that should resolve the issues, and put you in a much stronger position to benefit from what we can offer you here.