Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are quite well done. You are mostly sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, as explained in the instructions, although you do have a few cases where an end might get a bit bigger, or where one end might get more stretched out instead of remaining entirely circular. It's clear to me however that you're aiming in the right direction, and are getting things right most of the time.

Moving onto your insect constructions, as a whole you are doing a pretty solid job here, and your overall approach lines up very nicely with the core principles of construction. You're clearly building things up with simple forms, working your way up to greater levels of complexity generally through the addition of more simple forms. As a result, your drawings feel fairly solid and three dimensional, helping support the impression that we're looking at something real, rather than just drawings on a flat page.

I'm also quite pleased to see that you are drawing all the steps of your drawings - starting from those initial constructed masses - with the same level of confidence, rather than drawing earlier phases lighter in an attempt to hide them and end up with a clean drawing. You're clearly all in on treating these drawings as what they are - exercises in spatial reasoning.

I've got a few things to recommend as you continue to move forwards, but all in all you're doing quite well.

The first thing I want to draw your attention to is the fairly heavy use of contour lines. Contour lines are a great tool, but it is important to make sure that we're thinking about what we're trying to achieve with every single mark we draw, and whether the one we're planning to put down is the best one for the job. It's easy to be a little too eager to put contour lines down, and so we may not always put as much thought behind them as we should.

There are two different kinds of contour lines, best categorized based on the exercise where they were introduced. You've got the contour lines that sit on the surface of a single form, which were introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, and those that define the relationship between two forms in 3D space, which were introduced in the form intersections. The latter are far and away the most impactful, entirely because they create a feedback loop - it works just like the first one, in that a contour line on the surface of either form will help it seem like it has volume and structure, but in having its relationship defined with the other form, they'll go further to reinforce the illusion that each form is three dimensional. In this way it bounces back and forth - if form A is three dimensional, then based on this defined relationship, form B must also be three dimensional, and so based on the defined relationship, form A is three dimensional... and on and on.

Always look for any opportunity available to define these kinds of relationships between forms. Given that there's really only one contour line that can be added for these, it's unlikely you'll end up overdoing it, whereas with the first kind of contour lines, we have the freedom to just pile them on and on, running into their diminishing returns. That is, the first contour line on the surface of a form may have a fair bit of impact, but the second will have much less, and the third even less than that. Usually you can get away with just the contour line that defines the spatial relationship, and anything additional won't really have much of an impact.

The second thing I wanted to discuss is how you leverage line weight and other thicker linework or broader solid black shapes. There are a few things to keep in mind, in terms of how and where those tools should be leveraged:

• Line weight should be used pretty sparingly. It is to be used only to clarify specific overlaps between forms, in localized areas - meaning it should blend back into the original thickness of a given line. Avoid having it run along the whole length of a stroke. Also, avoid making it too heavy. Line weight should be subtle, like a whisper to the viewer's subconscious, rather than a shout. That'll be enough for the viewer's brain to sort out what they're looking at.

• Cast shadow shapes aren't so limited as line weight (they can be big and bold) but they can't cling to the silhouette of a form - meaning when you get areas of line weight that seem to get too thick, we can't just say "well that's a cast shadow". Cast shadows have to fall on some other surface, and they have to help define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

• Sometimes students will try to use line weight or cast shadows to hide or correct mistakes - for example if we try to go over an existing line and miss the mark, one might think to fill the gaps in between, resulting in a really thick area of solid black. Avoid doing this.

• Form shading - that is, where the surface of a form gets darker as it turns away from the light source and lighter as it turns towards the light source should not be included in these drawings, as discussed back in lesson 2. So in any instance where the solid black shape you want to draw can't qualify as a cast shadow, it shouldn't be drawn.

I'm definitely seeing a lot of use of proper cast shadows and line weight - but I wanted to lay out these points to ensure that you're aware, so you can think through them as you make use of these tools in the future.

The third point I wanted to raise is one you don't get into too much - but we can see it in cases like the box you drew for the base of this ant's mandibles. Once you've added a form to your construction, refrain from altering its silhouette. I explain why cutting back into the form as you did here can flatten out your construction in this diagram. Instead, try to work completely additively - which you do quite well in most cases.

Lastly, since it seems like your use of the sausage method is pretty good - even if you don't use it in every possible situation, I am overall quite happy with how you've approached your legs. For future reference though, keep in mind 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, 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.

So with that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work.