To address your concern at the beginning, "if I go fast and miss, it will ruin the drawing." You're treating the drawings we do in these lessons as though they're intended to result in something nice you can pin to your fridge and use to impress your friends and family. That is not our intent here. Each and every one of these drawings is just an exercise. We may be drawing ants and bees and wasps and scorpions and whatever, but really at their core it's just an exercise in learning how to combine simple forms to create more complex results, and beneath that, to continue reinforcing our ability to draw lines with confidence and control.

Mistakes will happen - and if you make a mistake, do not attempt to correct or replace it. If you think about the act of drawing as the same thing as trying to convince someone of a lie you've told, you can think of every mark you put down as being a statement you're making. If you make a statement, and then decide that statement was wrong and try to provide another in its stead, then you're going to give your audience two contradicting assertions. The more contradictions you add into your drawing, the more you'll undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Eventually the viewer will no longer believe in your lie, and the illusion that what they're looking at is real and three dimensional will fall apart.

It all comes down to the fact that the viewer doesn't know which lines to ignore, and which lines to accept. They treat them all the same - so once a line is on the page, you have to keep working with it. You may end up deviating from the reference you're studying, but at the end of the day, the viewer doesn't get to see the reference. All they get is your drawing - and so if your drawing is maybe a bit bigger, a bit longer, a bit skinnier, than your reference - as long as it is still believable and still maintains a consistent illusion for them to believe, they will believe it.

As for your question about shadows and details, you're doing pretty well with your use of cast shadows in most of these. Keep in mind however that cast shadows will generally have sharp edges, unlike how here you've tried to add hatching to create a steadier gradient from dark to light. Ultimately, you shouldn't be using any hatching at all - if you have an area where you want to transition from light to dark in this manner, then instead of using the basic, generic pattern of hatching lines, you should be actually employing the texture that is present on that form in your reference image, as we explored back in Lesson 2's texture analysis exercise. That's what the density gradient from that exercise is about - finding an alternative to basic hatching that actually conveys information about the object's surfaces.

That said, it is not required. You can leave out the hatching altogether and just have a nice, hard-edged cast shadow, and focus entirely on construction. That is ultimately what Drawabox is about - learning how to improve your spatial reasoning skills by focusing on construction, and as a whole, texture and detail is not a major concern here.

So, looking at your work, you've largely done a good job with a couple points that I want to call out, some of which are quite important. Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you suffered from a couple issues here:

• You didn't stick to simple sausage forms as mentioned in the instructions. It's important that before doing an exercise, you review its instructions to ensure that you're applying it correctly. You ended up with areas where your forms would pinch through their midsections, or where the ends were not equal in size, or spherical.

• You were not drawing through the ellipses you'd draw at the tips of your forms. As explained here, you should be drawing through each and every ellipse you draw throughout these lessons without exception.

Moving onto your actual insect constructions, these are largely well done, save for a couple things. You're largely doing a good job of drawing forms that are simple, and defining their relationships in 3D space so as to create a more solid, believable, and ultimately more complex object. You pay careful attention to your references to identify the kinds of forms you include in your constructions, and you don't generally skip constructional steps or move into overly complex forms too quickly.

Here are the main points I want you to keep an eye on however, and they are important ones:

• Again, draw through your ellipses. This isn't optional, and should be done for each and every elliptical shape you draw through these lessons.

• You tend to apply aspects of the sausage method, but you take too many liberties with it. For example, in that diagram you'll see that I mention you should ONLY be placing contour curves at the intersections between your forms, not through their midsections. This is because once you've established that relationship between the forms at the joints, additional contour lines through the midsections ultimately won't contribute anything, and won't be needed. You also don't stick to simple sausage forms, often relying on stretched ellipses instead. Simple sausage forms are important because they allow us to capture the illusion of solidity while balancing it with the sense of gestural flow that is required to make the limbs feel alive. Other techniques for capturing legs may focus more on one or the other, but this technique will achieve both very effectively.

• To extend the point about the sausage technique, you may find circumstances where the legs you want to draw don't appear to be a chain of simple sausage forms. That is fine - the technique should still be applied. That is because the sausage method is purely about establishing an underlying structure or armature that balances solidity and flow. Once in place, you can then wrap more forms around it as shown here to add bulk where necessary.

• For the most part, you do a good job of drawing each and every form in its entirety, which is very good to see. There were a couple places though - like this lobster's tail - where you only drew partial shapes, reminding the viewer that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing rather than a 3D object.

• To extend off the point above, remember that every single element you add to a construction must be done so in three dimensions. For example, with this ant you added a little point to its tip by extending its 2D silhouette. This, again, is a matter of working in two dimensions, and reminding the viewer that they're looking at a flat drawing. We see something similar with that little spike coming out of the ant's thorax. If you want to add additional forms to these constructions, you need to do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure. We can do this by either defining how they intersect with the existing form, or by wrapping them around the underlying structure, as I showed when talking about the sausage method.

• One last point. Just like how I stress the importance of reinforcing the intersections between the sausage forms at their joints, you should be doing this for any and all forms that intersect. In the drawing at the top of this page, we can see how the sections of the body were drawn as a series of overlapping ball forms, but there was no actual relationship between them defined. This is as simple as adding a contour line right where those two forms meet.

Now as you're doing a pretty good job (despite missing some pretty core elements of how Drawabox is meant to be done like drawing through ellipses), I am going to mark this lesson as complete. I feel you'll have plenty of opportunities to apply those principles when drawing animals.