Questions are certainly fine - but the bullet point self analysis should probably be kept for your own use, and not included in your submission. So, to answer your question, this is not a course that offers deadlines simply because in the context of what we're exploring here - the core fundamentals of drawing, those base habits and practices that will hold up what you pursue in the future - there is more harm than good in telling students how long they "should" take. Being slow is not a problem in the context of our goals here - our goals being that you absorb and understand the concepts and demonstrate the mindset that we're attempting to instill. That may not line up entirely with your goals (students often bring their own intent to the table, to finish the course in a specific amount of time, or by some certain date, or just to not be slower than their neighbour for whatever reason), but those are not our concerns. So, when it comes to what we hold as important, all that matters is that you take as much time as you need.

And frankly it's all the better that you're applying the 50% rule, despite the fact that it's obviously slowing you down.

Now, all that said, your work here is by and large really well done. There are a few minor points that I'll call out, and some things to consider when it comes to building on top of your leg constructions, but as a whole you're definitely knocking it out of the park. You're showing a fair bit of care towards ensuring that your individual components are solid and three dimensional, that you're sticking to simple components and building them upon one another step by step, and avoiding jumping into too much complexity all at once. You're also making a lot of effort to stick to working strictly in 3D space (and avoiding most of the temptations to take little 2D shorcuts afforded by the fact that wwe're working on a flat piece of paper) - although there are a couple little places where I caught such things, so I'll point them out as well. But really, overall you're doing a great job, and when it comes to what I hope to see from students at this stage, you're ticking all the boxes.

The first thing I wanted to call out is often a major issue for most students at this point, but for you it's only a minor slip-up. As I mentioned before, you're generally treating all of your forms as though they're solid and three dimensional - but if we look at your crab spider's abdomen, I've marked out a few places in red where you cut into the silhouette of forms you'd already drawn. While this may seem entirely fine, it's actually an operation applied on 2D shapes, rather than 3D forms. It's an adjustment being made to the silhouette of the form, which is a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional structure - modifying its shape breaks the connection between it and the 3D form it represents, rather than actually passing those changes off onto the 3D structure.

So, as shown here, such an action actually ends up flattening out parts of our drawing - although in your case it's to a fairly minimal extent. Also, it's worth mentioning that in your case it appears to have always happened around your ellipses, where rather than intentionally cutting into your silhouettes, you probably just had multiple lines to choose from (since you're drawing through your ellipses, which is required for our freehanded ellipses in this course, and not a mistake on your part). In that case, the correction I'd offer is to always treat the outermost perimeter of your ellipses as the silhouette of the resulting ball form. This will ensure that all of the other lines are contained within it, rather than falling outside as loose marks.

As you appear to understand quite well, instead of making such modifications in 2D space (either cutting into or extending our silhouettes through the addition of other flat shapes), we want to actually introduce new simple forms to the construction, either defining how they intersect the existing structure using contour lines as shown in lesson 2's form intersections (in the case that they interprenetrate), or if one form wraps around the other, we employ the specific design of that new form's silhouette as shown here.

You're applying these concepts well already, but I figured I'd provide the demonstrations for this concept I usually do to most students anyway for the sake of posterity:

• https://i.imgur.com/LjQ53ao.png

• https://i.imgur.com/X4tx6KB.png

Continuing on, there's really just one other thing I wanted to mention, I can see throughout your drawings that you are correctly not just constructing your insects' legs as simple sausage structures. Rather, you start with the sausage method to build up a solid and flowing base structure, and then build upon them. Right now you tend to introduce ball forms, or ellipses, to add bulk where it's needed, but in doing so you are falling back to the previous issue of attaching flat shapes without clear, distinct spatial relationships being defined. That's not a mistake, insofar as the material that's available in the lesson currently, but there are better approaches, which will be integrated into the lesson material in the future.

Take a look at these demos:

• https://i.imgur.com/8O2RTcT.png

• https://i.imgur.com/t6oz7Tv.png

These employ the same principles of additive construction, of introducing simple forms and designing their silhouettes such that they convey the relationships between this new form, and the structure they're wrapping around. In the case of the first one, you can see how instead of adding an ellipse tnat engulfs the entirety of the sausage, we actually break our addition into a few separate pieces. This is so each piece's silhouette can make as much contact with the existing structure as possible, thereby defining a much stronger spatial relationship. You'll also note how we "twist" those masses around the sausage structures - this is simply something that better matches the way in which musculature and whatever the hell insects have tends to form, giving a more organic, natural appearance to it as seen in this ant leg demo as well as this dog leg demo (since this same approach will continue to be used for your animals in the next lesson.

So, with that all laid out, I'll happily go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.