To be completely honest about the point about texturing/shading - a lot of that confusion comes from the fact that most of the demos in the main lesson (those with videos) are several years old. As I do critiques of students' work, my understanding of the concepts I'm teaching and how to best approach or explain them, evolves. Unfortunately updating all of the demonstrations and explanations in the lessons is an undertaking that I haven't really had the time to even consider - usually I'd update smaller chunks, or drop in "informal" demonstrations I'd done as part of critiques - until now, anyway. I am currently working through the whole course from top to bottom (specifically because I now am working on Drawabox full time, or at least as my primary form of employment). This of course will take many, many months, but my goal is to replace all of the demonstrations with new ones.

That said, the existing demos still have a lot to offer, and any that were outright unhelpful have been removed/replaced over the years.

I will mention this however - in cases like the black widow demo, you definitely see me employing form shading, but I am using it more as a tool to give me somewhere I can sneak in some textural information. This is what is demonstrated in the form shading video. This is an acceptable use of shading, because the goal is not the shading itself. The goal is to have somewhere to include texture. To that same point, it's also why it's fairly limited in scope, only being applied to a small area.

Anyway, onto your work. Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you've done a great job here. You've stuck to the characteristics of simple sausage forms, and you've employed the contour lines quite effectively. The only thing I'd mention is that while you are demonstrating a degree shift in the contour lines as you slide along the length of the form, you appear to be hitting a point where you're not comfortable making them any wider, even if the sausage's orientation in a point may demand that contour line get wider. Definitely keep an eye on this.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I am very pleased to see that you are going whole-hog on additive construction, mindfully building up your insects through the addition of simple forms, achieving greater complexity through these means instead of simply drawing forms that are more complex from the get-go. I can see plenty of places where you're defining the relationships between those forms as they're built up as well.

There are a few places where you cut back into the silhouette of a form once it's been constructed (for example, the initial head/thorax mass of your rhinoceros beetle ends up floating there, as though it's been ignored - this is something to avoid because it can flatten out your construction, as shown here. It's important to always treat every component of our construction as though it is solid and present.

I am very glad to see that I'm not seeing this issue often at all.

You're definitely going to some lengths to apply the sausage method to construct your legs - there are some small deviations at times from the characteristics of simple sausages (usually when they get small enough to become quite difficult), so that's something to continue to keep an eye on. It is however clear that the intention is there in most cases.

When building up construction upon those legs, one thing that will help make the relationship between the additional masses and the underlying structure more believable will be "wrapping" those masses around the sausages with more attention being paid to how its silhouette needs to develop inward curves where it makes contact. Here's a diagram of what I mean, and for its application to leg construction, take a look at how the sides making contact are specifically designed in this demo. We employ this same tactic when integrating other forms onto one another.

These kinds of additional structures can be applied quite broadly, building up a lot of them into interlocking arrangements as seen in this ant leg construction, and in this dog leg construction (because these techniques are just as useful into the next lesson).

Looking at your coconut crab, I'm quite satisfied with the direction of your development here, and you're already applying the idea of "wrapping" forms around one another in a number of places. There just happen to be some where the additional masses are drawn on without quite as much integration to the underlying structure, as seen here.

Circling back to the subject of texture, your crayfish drawing definitely falls into shading for shading's own sake on its thorax. Here you're not really thinking about the specific textural forms you're trying to imply, but rather are building up repeating patterns (hatching) to visually separate the top from the underside. This use of shading is often a tool students will use for capturing the 3D aspects of what they've drawn - but this is something we can do more effectively through the basic principles of construction. That leaves shading to exist only as decoration, and decoration is not the goal of texture.

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.

So! All in all, I'm very pleased with the direction in which you're moving. There are a few things to tweak and adjust, but all things considered you're doing very well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.