Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, there are two things to keep in mind:

• You're pretty close to sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, but you need to work on keeping the width through the midsection consistent. Right now you've got most of them swelling, which adds complexity to the forms.

• Keep working on the control of your contour lines. You're definitely putting a good bit of effort behind them, and it's paying off, but continuing to employ the ghosting method to help plan and prepare prior to executing these contour ellipses will help get them to fit more snugly between the edges of the form, which in turn will sell the illusion that they're running along the surface of the form.

Moving onto your insect constructions there are a couple major factors that I want to address.

First and foremost, I think you might be underestimating how much time you can really spend on an individual drawing. Based on what I'm seeing, there are some pretty significant differences between your references - certain more obvious proportions being off, or the positioning of limbs being way off - and the most common cause of this is that students work more from memory than direct observation. This is something that was touched upon back in Lesson 2's section on observation and memory. To put it simply, you need to put more time towards studying your reference, looking at it almost constantly and only looking away for long enough to construct a very specific form before looking back and refreshing your memory. Don't jump right into drawing, and then commit yourself without having a strong sense of which aspect of your reference you're looking to reproduce.

While we are by no means chasing perfect reproductions of the photos, the reason this is so important is that it helps avoid the kinds of oversimplifications that I'm seeing in a lot of your constructions here. There's just so much information packed into any object that we don't easily pick up on, and if we don't look at our reference frequently, it falls through the cracks. The result is often something that looks more cartoony. That's also the reason that drawing along with the demonstrations - like the louse demo - is much easier. I've already stripped down the reference photo into the specific forms for you, so they're easier to follow and transfer into your own drawing. Working from a photo however takes a great deal more effort, focus, patience, and time.

Of course, you are by no means required to complete a drawing in a given period of time. Not in one sitting, not in one day... your responsibility is merely to take as long as you need to execute the work to the best of your current ability.

The next thing I want to mention is that I'm noticing in some areas that you have a tendency to put down your initial construction without necessarily feeling that you've 'committed' to it. For example, let's take a look at this page. With the cricket on the top, I can see where you've drawn your initial masses - the head, the thorax, the abdomen. These appear to be drawn more lightly and faintly (almost as if with a totally different pen - which of course would be breaking the rules of the course) and then you go back over everything with a much darker pen, deciding what you want to commit. This is not how I want you approaching your drawings in this course.

Everything you draw here establishes a solid, real, three dimensional form in space. Once drawn, you cannot ignore a form, or alter the nature of its silhouette. Instead, all you can do is build upon it with new forms that themselves are solid and fully enclosed. We either establish how they relate to the existing structure by adding a contour line to represent that intersection, or we draw the new form's silhouette such that it actually wraps around that existing structure.

So, looking at the drawing at the bottom of that page, we can see where you started with a long form for the abdomen, and then completely ignored it, cutting across its surface. Here I explain why we can't simply cut across existing forms - it simply flattens them out. As for working additively and building upon our constructions one piece at a time, you can see this in practice in a few examples:

• This beetle horn demo

• This ant head demo

• This more recent, detailed lobster demo

I want you to take a look at each of those and look at how the approaches shown there differ from how you tackled your own constructions.

Another point I wanted to call out has to do with how you construct your insects' legs. It's clear that you are definitely trying to apply the sausage method, but you deviate in a few ways:

• First off, you're starting with a line. It really is best, even if you find it difficult at first, that you follow the process I demonstrate without deviating from the instructions. In this case, I start with sausages only.

• Secondly, you do at times deviate from the characteristics of simple sausages. These can definitely be hard. Purposely drawing bigger on the page (even if it means that you can only fit one drawing on a given page) will help give you more room to maneuver your arm, and will give your brain more room to think through spatial problems.

• There are places where you're not placing a contour line at the joint between sausage segments - this is important to establish the relationship between those forms in 3D space, and to make them appear more 3D.

• As mentioned before, make sure you're studying your reference closely and frequently, to identify how you need to position those legs.

Once you have your sausage structure in place, that's really just the first step to building up the legs for many insects. From there we can build upon them by attaching additional forms to the base structure as shown here and here. Ultimately, if you study your reference closely, you'll find that there are all kinds of smaller structures you can capture in this manner, as shown in this ant leg demo and even in this dog leg demo (because we'll be employing this technique when dealing with animals as well).

The last thing I wanted to mention was just a quick reminder that in this course we are not employing any form shading for our drawings. I only mention this because of the hatching you added to the beetle at the end.

So, you definitely have a fair bit to go through here. I'll assign some pages below for you to apply what I've explained here.