Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, there's one issue I'm noticing that impacts both how you're drawing the sausage forms themselves, as well as how you draw the contour ellipses - there is a fair bit of hesitation in your execution, causing those lines to waver/wobble slightly. This is getting in the way of you executing smooth, confident, even shapes.

Make sure that you employ the ghosting method for every single mark you draw - that means investing your time in the planning and preparation phases, and executing confidently regardless of whether you're worried about making a mistake. The second that pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake goes out the window. All you can do is commit and push through, as explained in these notes, which (along with the video) have been updated quite recently. I recommend you go through them to refresh your memory of this process that should be applied to all the marks you draw.

Aside from that, I did notice that you were doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, which is good to see. There's just one other issue - the assignment for this lesson asked you to complete two pages of organic forms with contour curves - you went with contour ellipses instead.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I can see a number of areas where I can provide some advice that should help you keep on the right path. I can see signs that you're moving in the right direction in a number of ways, but certain issues come up now and then, suggesting that while you handle them correctly in some cases, you're not necessarily doing so as intentionally. Understanding what we're doing that works and what we're doing that doesn't basically arms us with the ability to choose one approach or the other more consciously.

So, let's go over the issues I'm seeing.

First and foremost, because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In your drawings, you tend to jump back and forth between drawing complete, enclosed, 3D forms, and more partial shapes that are left open on one side, or that are only closed because they're set against the edge of another form or shape.

For example, the protrusions coming off this insect's body were all drawn as shapes that are open where they make contact with the insect's abdomen. Because they're left open this way, the viewer isn't given any information to help them interpret those shapes as being three dimensional, and so they're reminded immediately that what they're looking at is a flat drawing on a page.

In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo.

This is all part of accepting that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for the viewer to believe in that lie.

Secondly - although this is technically also mentioned in the previous point - defining the relationships between your 3D forms is incredibly important. That means doing things like putting a contour line to help describe the intersection between two forms. This is something that is a specific part of the sausage method, but it appears that you aren't consistently adding the contour line as shown in the middle of that diagram.

Thirdly, keep in mind that the sausage method itself only builds up a sort of base structure or armature for the legs - one that is able to capture the illusion of solidity while also maintaining a gestural sense of flow. Once you have that structure in place, having adhered to all the parts of the technique (that is, making sure you're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, making sure your sausage forms are intersecting nicely, and making sure that you're defining that intersection with the use of a contour line at each joint), you can then build upon that structure by introducing new, solid, 3D forms as discussed previously.

The key to making these additional parts feel 3D is to make sure that they're wrapping around the existing structure, as shown here and here. By breaking those forms into smaller individual pieces, we're able to have each piece make more overall contact with the underlying structure, giving us more of an opportunity to define their relationships in 3D space. This principle can be used as shown here on this ant leg to build up all kinds of complex structure that currently you're not really engaging with in your constructions. You keep the legs fairly simple instead. You can also see this in the context of this dog leg - because this technique is used plenty in the next lesson as well.

The last point I wanted to discuss for now was just that when it comes to adding detail, it seems to me like you're primarily focused on the idea of decorating your drawings - adding little things to make them feel more complete. In doing so, however, you're kind of sidestepping the core principles and focus of what we're doing in this course, aiming for something more superficial.

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.

Remember that as discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we capture detail/texture entirely through implicit means - that means suggesting the presence of our textural forms by capturing the shadows they cast, not by drawing them directly. It seems to me that this is something you've forgotten, so I recommend you review that material again.

I'm going to assign some revisions below, but for this round I think it's best if we focus entirely on construction and constructed forms, building every step of the process through the addition of complete 3D forms (rather than partially open shapes), and by defining the relationships between those forms using contour lines and by specifically designing those forms' silhouettes to show how they wrap around one another. For now, leave any texture/detail out.

Before you tackle the revisions, I'd like you to study the following demonstrations to see what I mean by building things up with complete 3D forms, and how the relationships between forms can be defined at every stage of construction:

Also, if you aren't already, make sure that you're using high resolution reference images. We can sometimes end up using low-res images without realizing it. It's obvious when someone points it out, but low res images tend to make things WAY harder to discern and understand, in a way that kind of sneaks up on you.