Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are coming along decently, but there are a few things I want to draw your attention to:

• You're definitely keeping them fairly simple, but as far as the actual characteristics of simple sausages go - that is, sticking to two circular ends of equal size, connected by a tube of consistent width - there is definitely room for improvement here. Avoid stretching the ends out, and avoid any pinching through the midsection.

• The degree you're using for your contour lines doesn't appear to be correct. In some cases you're using the same degree, in others you're widening the degree as it gets closer to the viewer, and in some cases it's a bit random. I recommend you watch the lesson 1 ellipses video. It was updated several months ago with a better explanation of how the degree of an ellipse (or a curve) changes the orientation of the circle it represents relative to the viewer.

• In general, keep working on improving your accuracy. The execution of your marks is coming along great, but investing more time into the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method will help get them to fall more consistently between the edges of the sausage, helping you to maintain the illusion that you're drawing a line along the three dimensional surface of the form.

• The contour ellipse at the tip of a given form should not be drawn as a circle each time. It needs to follow the same pattern of degrees as the contour curves preceding it. Right now you appear to be drawing it quite wide regardless of the contour curves that come before it.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I feel that you're making a fair bit of improvement over the course of the lesson, specifically in how you approach and apply the principles of construction. Earlier on you seem a little less certain on how to approach it, but I feel that as you move forwards, your mantid fly and especially your ant construction move very much in the right direction.

The key strength - particularly in the ant - is that you focus much more on constructing through the addition of complete, solid, three dimensional forms. You also ease up on your overuse of contour lines with the ant, although you do still use a lot more of them in the mantid fly than is really necessary. You've also got a lot of partial contour lines that seem to be a weird mixture of attempting to add texture and attempting to add contour, but without actually doing either all that effectively. Stick to one task at a time.

When tackling texture, remember that it's all about implying the specific textural forms that sit along the surface of an object, through the use of specific cast shadow shapes (as discussed back in lesson 2). These aren't random marks that we're just slapping on - they are designed, intentional shadow shapes. Not one-off strokes or lines.

With contour lines, the thing to keep in mind is that every single mark you draw needs to be executed using the ghosting method - meaning that during the planing phase, you need to be asking yourself, "what is this mark supposed to achieve," "is this mark the best one for the job," and ultimately, "how do I make this mark to better achieve its goal." Contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form suffer from diminishing returns - meaning the first one you add to a surface may have a greater impact, but the next one will have less so, and the third even less. You're piling a ton of contour lines on a bunch of your constructions, but they're not actually contributing - instead, it's just something you're doing by habit, without necessarily considering why.

One thing you aren't doing too much, but still comes up, is that you should avoid altering the silhouettes of forms, once they've already been drawn. The silhouette of a form is just a flat, two dimensional shape that represents a three dimensional form, and when you make changes to it you end up reminding the viewer that what they're looking at is two dimensional. It's most easily demonstrated when looking at what happens when we cut into the silhouette of a form, but it also occurs when we extend it - as you've done with the weevil's abdominal shell. There you tried to create little cones, but then wrapped them in elements that didn't really exist in three dimensions, as shown here. Those red areas are just elements you've drawn in 2D - not things you've constructed in 3D.

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. Fortunately you have worked more closely to that in a lot of places, but this is still an important thing to keep in mind.

The last point I wanted to call out is that 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. 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, in 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.

Now I do feel you have a fair bit of room for growth and improvement, but I think you can continue addressing the issues I've called out here as you move into the next lesson. So, I'm going to go ahead and mark this one as complete.