Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally coming along well, but there are a couple things to keep an eye on:

• You're close, but slightly deviating from the characteristics of simple sausages, specifically in how your sausages are getting wider through their midsection instead of maintaining a consistent width.

• Currently you're generally maintaining roughly the same degree for your contour lines, or at least are avoiding pushing them beyond a certain width. As explained here in the lesson 1 ellipses video, as we slide away from the viewer along the length of a sausage form or a cylindrical structure, the degree used to define its cross-sections will get wider.

Moving onto your insect constructions, overall I'm pretty pleased with your work. I think you're showing a fair bit of thought towards how these constructions can be built up through the combination of simple elements, one at a time, and avoiding jumping into levels of complexity that are too great to maintain the illusion of solidity. There are some small tendencies that I want to correct, but as a whole you're moving very much in the right direction.

Before I get into talking about those tendencies - at least those in regards to construction - I did want to point out that in a few of these drawings (fortunately not even most of them), you did experiment with various uses of solid black shapes that deviated from some of the points raised in previous lessons. For example, in this one's forelegs you ended up delving heavily into form shading (which back in Lesson 2 we mentioned would not play a role in our drawings). I can see that you were trying to employ it with some relation to texture, but it ended up putting more focus on shading as the goal, rather than shading as a tool. In general, this happens when we look at the detail phase of a drawing as being an opportunity to decorate our drawings - which is not really what we're doing here.

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.

Continuing on, there are ways that we can improve the solidity of your constructions through the manner in which you approach, and even treat them as you build them up. 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 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.

While I don't actually see any instances of you cutting into your forms' silhouettes, there are plenty of places where you modify them by extending them or adding flat shapes to them. For example, on this insect, when creating that bump towards the front of its thorax, you did so through the use of individual lines and edges, which took something that already existed and changed its nature. We can see similar strategies where you've bridged across from its abdomen to its thorax with a single line across the top.

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.

Moving onto your leg construction, I can see that you were clearly making a good effort to employ the sausage method here, which I'm pleased to see. You did sometimes deviate from the characteristics of simple sausages, like some of this guy's back legs which were more stretched ellipses than sausages, but all in all you've held pretty well to the technique.

When it comes to building upon the structure however, there are more effective ways to do so. As shown here and here, try to break up the forms you add so as to increase the amount of contact that is made between the new form's silhouette, and the existing structure's surface. This will help you create a stronger relationship between them. You can see this in action 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).

I've shared a few things with you that you can continue to work on as you move forwards - but as a whole I think you're still moving in the right direction and are doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You'll be able to apply what I've explained here in the next lesson.