Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing a decent job maintaining simple sausage forms, though you do have a tendency to stretch out your ends, which keeps them from being properly spherical as the instructions require. These characteristics are especially important, and while you're close, you definitely need to keep focusing on achieving all of those characteristics fully. It can be a bit difficult to nail these ends correctly. One thing that may help is to try and slow down your execution a little bit - still maintain a confident, hesitation-free pace, but assuming you've been using the ghosting method a great deal up to this point, you may be able to slow things down a little without wobbling. This may help improve your overall control. Drawing from the shoulder is also very helpful here - though your linework is smooth which suggests that you already have been.

There is one other point I noticed - the degree of your contour curves remains the same throughout your sausage forms, rather than shifting naturally as shown here.

And, as also shown in that diagram, putting a contour ellipse on the tips of your sausage when those tips point towards the viewer can be very helpful in making those forms feel three dimensional.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I honestly feel like there's only one drawing that is actually worth critiquing, simply because it is vastly better than all the others - and that is the coconut crab. I will however point out a number of issues present in many of these other drawings quickly, before I move on:

• You're drawing them WAY too small. You've got a whole page, and are drawing some of these insects in just a small fraction of that space. This likely causes you to draw more from your wrist and elbow, rather than executing your marks confidently from your shoulder.

• The sausage sections in your insects' legs are definitely struggling to maintain the characteristics of the 'simple sausage'. As shown here, this is a very important part of this technique, which is why it's stressed back in the organic forms exercise.

• You also don't tend to follow the principles of the sausage method for your legs - you usually apply parts of it, but you pick and choose what suits what you're doing at the time. It's important that you apply them all consistently - even if the leg you're drawing doesn't look and feel like a chain of sausage forms, keep in mind that we're drawing an underlying structure or armature for that limb. Our only focus is on establishing a structure that feels both solid/three dimensional, and conveys a sense of flow and fluidity. Most approaches to drawing legs will accomplish one or the other, but rarely both. The sausage technique is very good at this. Once the structure is in place, you can always go back and reinforce it with further masses as shown here to add bulk where needed.

• This point - about applying multiple phases of construction, not just stopping with the most simple masses - is also something most of your drawings appear to be missing. Our reference images contain a lot of nuance and structural detail - that is, smaller forms that you won't capture on your first pass, but that can be later built atop the existing structure to carry over the more specific information. We don't jump from simplest forms straight to texture - we build up successive passes, breaking things down more and more, whilst spending most of our time observing our reference and studying it to identify these elements.

• I noticed that you seem to confuse texture/detail with shading/rendering. Back in the lesson 2 section on texture, I explain that we don't actually deal with any form shading in this course. The only large, filled areas of black we use are cast shadows. Cast shadows are where one form casts a shadow onto another form's surface by blocking the light source. Its results never go on the form casting it. Form shading however is based on the orientation of the surface of a form relative to the light source - as it turns towards the light it gets lighter, as it turns away it gets darker. The results of form shading go right on the form in question. If you have trouble remembering the difference between the two, keep that in mind. Cast shadows go on other surfaces, form shading goes on the form itself.

Now, all said and done, your coconut crab is infinitely better. You're drawing big, you're building things up in successive passes with both larger, simple forms as well as smaller ones (like around the head). You're doing a much better job at applying the sausage method (there are still some deviations from the 'simple' sausages but the spirit of the technique is being applied far better here), and as a whole your construction feels a lot more solid. Just a few things to point out:

• Don't put contour lines along the length of a sausage form (when using the sausage technique). Only place them right at the joint between forms.

• Some of your lines are placed down a little sloppily, so slow down and invest your time into the planning/preparation phases of the ghosting method. You're not doing too badly, obviously, but the marks are a little more "shot from the hip", and I know you can do even better given the proper investment of time in the right places.

• Your cast-shadow-shape seems to cling to the crab itself, rather than actually running along the ground. The thing to remember is what that big cast shadow on the ground does. It helps describe the object's relationship with the ground based on how far that shadow is from the part casting it. So if we're looking at the tips of the claws or the legs, the shadow shape is going to be right up against them. But the part of the shadow being cast by the head or the main body (which is being held up over the ground) will be much further from the actual object itself. Here's a quick demonstration of what I mean. Notice how the shadows are really close at the claws, but much farther from the body.

Anyway, your coconut crab gives me a lot of hope that something clicked there at the end - but since the rest has so many critical problems, we're not going to call this lesson done just yet. I'm going to assign some additional pages below.