Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, I think the main thing here is that you may want to slow down a little. "Slowing down" can happen in a few ways. For example, there's slowing down in the sense of investing more time in the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method (which of course should be used for all of these marks). This will help you maintain greater overall control of your contour lines, getting them to fit more snugly within the sausage form's silhouette, so you can actually capture the illusion that the lines are running along the object's surface.

Then there's slowing down when actually executing your marks - this is a little trickier because drawing "slowly" is often what students think of as meaning to draw more carefully and hesitantly. One should still, as always, execute their marks confidently, but slowing the pace down a little while maintaining a confident execution can help you to achieve the specific characteristics of simple sausages (as mentioned in the instructions) a bit more easily. Remember that we're aiming to keep the ends circular in shape (you often tend to stretch them out), and equal in size. From there, we also want the midsection to maintain a consistent width, not pinching or swelling.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I can see that you are making a notable effort to build up each one from simple to complex. There are however a number of recommendations I can make to help you achieve better results, and to feel more comfortable as you work through these drawings.

First and foremost, it's great that you're drawing several insects per page, but this can sometimes result in us forcing our drawings to fit within a more limited space - perhaps giving them less room than they really need. This hinders us because it limits our brains' capacity for spatial reasoning, while also interfering with how comfortable it is to draw with our whole arm. Both of these can result in clumsier drawings, and you may be finding that with some of the especially small ones, things just don't feel right. Of course, with mileage and experience, drawing smaller will get easier - but in the interest of dealing with one problem at a time (or fewer problems at once), we prioritize giving each drawing as much room as it requires.

We do this by focusing on the first drawing, letting it occupy however much of the page as feels natural. Then when it's done, we assess whether there's enough room for another. If there is, you should certainly add another. If there isn't however, it's perfectly okay to end up with just one drawing on a page.

Second, I'm noticing a tendency to break your drawings into two distinct phases. You seem to approach the initial masses more faintly and loosely, not quite committing to them or treating them as though they're actual solid masses. Once you're more comfortable with it, you then draw later forms with darker lines on top. This is not the approach I want you to be using in this course. Every drawing we do here is focused not on creating a pretty end result, but rather they're all exercises in spatial reasoning. We're effectively playing with forms - we construct forms in the world, we make them intersect, connect, wrap around one another, etc. and build up to a more complex result. Every single form is solid, like a piece of marble introduced to the world - so they should all be drawn as such - nothing should be left faint or half-formed because you're not sure you want to commit to it. You commit to everything.

You can see this kind of approach embodied in the two demonstrations at the top of the informal demos page - specifically the shrimp and lobster. Note how every single element I add, every mark, is made with clear intent. I use the ghosting method for every stroke, I'm focusing on every form I construct, and how they relate to one another in space.

This tendency to make your initial masses feel less solid/real also has a real impact on your viewer's ability to buy into the illusion you're creating. 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.

You do this a lot, though in a bunch of small places, because you aren't treating those initial marks as defining solid forms - even though that's how the viewer will interpret them. So we see it in places like those marked out here. The same issue can also arise when extending out the silhouette of a form you've already drawn - really anything where you're adding flat shapes, or partial shapes (which aren't their own fully enclosed silhouettes) and not considering how they exist in 3D space, and how they relate to the existing structures.

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.

As a side note - remember that when we're talking about the detail phase of a drawing, we're not talking about just arbitrarily decorating it and making it look nice. I think that's a bit of a misconception you end up with, and it's actually a lot harder to work with because there's no clear point when we've decorated enough. It's a subjective, unclear goal to pursue. 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.

As a rule, reserve your areas of filled solid black for cast shadows only. Whenever you add such a filled shape, you need to be thinking about how the specific design of that shape implies the presence of a textural form that you're trying to capture. In this course, leave form shading out (as discussed back in Lesson 2), and don't worry about capturing any local colour - like where the surface itself is black whether it's an insect's eyes, spots, patterns, etc. You wouldn't attempt to capture any other colours, like green, red, blue, yellow, etc. so there's no reason to make black or dark areas a special case. Whenever the viewer looks at your drawing and sees an area filled with black, their brain will first try to understand it as a cast shadow, and when they realize it doesn't make sense that way, they'll move onto figuring out what else it might be. Leaning into the viewer's first guess will help you communicate with them more clearly.

The last thing I wanted to call out was about your leg constructions .I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects (and of course, this is something you called out yourself). It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. The key to keep in mind here is 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, 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). 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.

Also, when it comes to making the sausage forms themselves, I understand that it's difficult - but something being challenging is not enough of a reason to go find alternative approaches. Some things simply come with practice, persistence, and mileage. If you try to find another approach, then you're simply going to avoid getting that practice in.

Now, I've pointed out a number of things you need to work at, so I'm going to assign some revisions below to give you the chance to do so. I strongly recommend you try to follow the general process/markmaking/mindset you see exhibited in the shrimp/lobster demos I linked from the informal demos page. Apply those principles to your insect drawings, and you should see better results by merely changing how you approach the problems.