Looking over your homework submission, while your drawings are certainly lovely, it appears in many cases that in all the effort you put towards achieving that, you took effort away from following the instructions precisely as they were written. This is not an uncommon issue, but it is an unfortunate one, as I believe you are entirely capable of completing this lesson effectively and correctly - but your enthusiasm no doubt got the better of you.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally decently done, but there are two key issues:

• You neglected to include the central minor axis line to which the contour curves are to be aligned. You've still drawn them well, but there was no reason to neglect this part of the exercise.

• While in many areas you did adhere generally speaking to the characteristics of simple sausages, there were some areas where you did not do so as consistently as you could have. A couple had ends that were of different sizes, and a couple got wider through their midsection.

Moving onto your insect constructions, it's basically a non-issue, but the first thing I'll call out as you not following the instructions, is your using a marker to draw cast shadows. It certainly makes them pop off the page, and it looks great - but the reason I insist students follow the instructions to the letter with no embellishments or attempts to make things more "interesting" is because it always has a tendency to make students deviate from the instructions. They get caught up in their own fun that they forget that we're not simply drawing pretty pictures. Each of these drawings is an exercise to help develop your sense of spatial reasoning, and in deviating in seemingly harmless ways, you're distracting yourself from that core purpose.

Next, I'm seeing a lot of use of what I often regard as the "underdrawing/cleanup-pass" approach. That is, drawing construction lines faintly, and then going back over it all with a much darker stroke to set down the "real" lines. Some students manage to do this with a single pen, by cleverly controlling the ink flow and using the pen at different angles, but it seems in your case you may well have just reached for different pens instead of sticking to the 0.5mm prescribed in the instructions.

Now, there are a couple of reasons why I strongly discourage students from using this kind of approach (which I initially discussed back in lesson 2's form intersections):

• It tends to result in the clean-up pass being applied by tracing back over the lines more hesitantly, resulting in lines that are a little wobblier, not quite as confident, and as such not quite as effective at maintaining the illusion of solid, 3D forms. Tracing itself is problematic because it focuses overmuch on how the lines sit on the flat page, and now how they're meant to represent edges and forms that exist in 3D space.

• It, by definition, results in students redrawing the silhouettes of their constructed 3D forms, which tends to break the relationship between the given silhouette on the page, and the 3D form it is meant to represent, leaving us with a flatter, often more complex shape.

This second point is one students will sometimes use purposely (for example, you did so in your weevil drawing, where you started with a rather large ball form for the thorax, then cut back into it). As explained here this undermines the solidity and 3D nature of the drawing. This however can also happen when we extend the silhouette out - really any change or alteration at all.

As explained in that diagram, there is a correct way to apply subtractive construction, but it is really better suited to hard surface/geometric construction, and doesn't work well in organic contexts. Instead, for subject matter such as this, we have to work additively - starting small and building up new forms by drawing them in their entirety, either crafting their silhouettes so they wrap around the existing structure, or having them interpenetrate that structure and defining their relationship/intersection with a contour line. Always work from small to big, not in reverse.

Some examples of this include:

• This ant head demo

• This newer lobster demo

• This beetle horn demo

You'll notice how in every one of my demonstrations, I purposely pick a photoshop brush that forces me to make my marks dark and bold. At no point do I ever work, though I certainly could, with brushes that allow me to do anything but commit fully to every mark I put on the page. This is precisely what I expect from students' work as well, and is why I instruct them to work with this specific kind of pen. Towards the end, I'll often employ line weight to help clarify specific overlaps between forms, but up until that point, construction is all about laying down solid, three dimensional forms, and building upon them.

The last point I wanted to make comes down to how you approached your drawings after your "construction" was settled. Specifically, how you tackled detail.

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.

Again - your drawings are beautifully rendered, but that is kind of the problem. Your focus was on decoration, on making the drawings look as pretty as you could. There's definitely texture in there (which came out quite well), but there's also a lot of rendering/shading (which in lesson 2 was mentioned as something to skip over). Remember that the difference between form shading and the cast shadows we use in implying texture is that form shading is the darkening of a surface as it turns away from the light source, whereas cast shadows are where a form casts a shadow on an entirely different surface by blocking the light. All the filled areas of black we draw should be reserved for cast shadows only. Even if you see something that is of a dark local colour in your reference (like patterning for instance, or a black eye), it should be ignored. We are really only capturing the information that pertains to three dimensional information - the kind of stuff we could feel with our fingers, in the absence of sight.

Now, I've laid out a lot for you to correct, but I'm fairly confident in your capacity to do so. I considered having you redo the lesson in full and submit it anew, but I don't think a whole detailed recritique will be necessary. Instead I'll just assign revisions below, and we'll move forward from there.