Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are looking great - you're doing a great job of sticking to simple sausage forms, and your contour lines are drawn confidently, wrapping around the forms nicely and show a solid grasp of how their degree shifts as we slide along the form.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, by and large you've done an excellent job. You're demonstrating an overall strong understanding of how the forms you draw are three dimensional, and how they interact with one another within that 3D space, rather than just as flat shapes on a flat page. You're also generally buiilding things up quite well, although there are a few things I want to draw your attention to, in order to reassert some of the particular techniques and approaches, or manners of thinking we employ throughout this course in order to keep you focused on each of these drawings as exercises. While you're far from just focusing on drawing insects by any means possible, there are some ways in which you stray from aspects of the course that will need a bit of a nudge to get you back on track.

Overall there are three separate issues I will touch upon.

The first of these comes down to the tendency I'm seeing to lay down your construction, and then to go back over those lines with a darker stroke, purposely replacing the linework with a more "final pass". What I want to emphasize here is the fact that we are not working in terms of an underdrawing/clean up pass - a two phase process that involves putting structure down underneath, and then redrawing the entirety of the object with new lines. The entire process of these drawings is construction - if, from phase to phase, as we build up complexity, a line from an earlier stage of construction has not been changed, then it should not be redrawn. Sometimes students will misinterpret the use of line weight as being about reinforcing all the lines they deem important. Instead, line weight is used to clarify specific overlaps between forms, being added only in limited sections of existing lines, and blended back into the original stroke.

Furthermore, keep in mind that we interact with our construction through the addition of new 3D forms - we never take steps that involve simply adding a stray line. We always think about each individual addition in terms of being a complete form that we understand, and that is being added in some way to the existing structure. An example of this is looking at the scorpion at the top of this page. Along the end of its tail, you captured a sort of serration that we often see upon such things, but you did so by simply drawing a zigzagging line which itself did not really go very far to sell the illusion of 3D information. Instead, each individual little spike needs to be considered as an individual form - either captured through more explicit constructional means as shown in this demo, or since these serrations are much smaller and more numerous, implicitly as a texture, which means capturing those forms using the shadow shapes they cast on the tail itself.

The second issue I want to address is also most easily seen on this scorpion. When drawing its torso, you first started with a box to get a general sense of the space it would occupy, but then you went on to refine it further, and in doing so you did not maintain any clear and firm relationship to the original box in three dimensions. The box served as a sort of loose exploration, and by the end it was thrown aside and ignored, preferably as something we could have erased.

It is critical that when you employ constructional drawing, that the relationships between your forms, and that the way in which you move from one simple 3D form to a more complex one, are extremely direct, clear, and strong. If you look at the scorpion video demo, you'll notice that I actually also started with a box, but I cut along the plane of the box, drawing a contour line upon that surface to separate that 3D form into distinct forms that themselves were still three dimensions.

In most cases when tackling organic construction however, you'll find it more suitable to work additively, by starting smaller and then building up forms on top. I can explain why by looking specifically at the various segments of the scorpion's tail, where you started with larger ball forms, and then in some cases cut across the silhouette of that form to capture more nuanced aspects of a given segment. The problem is that cutting across the silhouette of a form is an action that is performed in two dimensions - not three - and in doing so, we reinforce the idea that we're just looking at a drawing, not at an actual 3D object. I explain why this kind of 'subtractive construction' is incorrect in these notes.

The last point I wanted to discuss has to do with how you construct your insects' legs. 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 use the aspects of the sausage method quite a bit more than most who make this mistake, but there are still ample cases in which you break away from it.

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.

So! With those points laid out, I am still entirely happy with your results, and I expect you'll continue working on the points I've raised as you continue forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work.