Doing additional exploration on your own to better understand the creatures you're drawing is entirely okay. I appreciate that you didn't include them with the main body of the work (as that makes it easier for me to critique, since I can focus on the drawings that were done following the requirements of the course, as exercises to help develop your spatial reasoning skills), but there is nothing wrong with you figuring out how their bodies work on your own to help your decisions. Just remember above all that the drawings you do for drawabox are not about impressing anyone, nor are they about drawing pretty things. As I already mentioned, these drawings are exercises. Exercises to help you think about how you can manipulate simple 3D forms and how you can combine them to create more complex objects.

In addition to this, deciding not to explore texture much is okay as well - it is not the focus of this course, and choosing to focus entirely on construction is entirely acceptable.

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're largely doing a good job with this, but I do want you to keep pushing yourself to stick to simple sausage forms and avoid ending up with situations where one end of a sausage is larger than the other.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, as a whole you've done a great job in drawing these, and have demonstrated an overall strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space, and how they can be combined. There are some issues I want to draw your attention to, but as a whole you're doing very well.

The first issue is a minor one (although I have a lot to say about it) - remember that in this course, our filled black shapes are reserved only for cast shadows. There will be situations where you'll see objects that are black in colour, and you may think that because you're working in a black pen, it'd make sense to capture those - for example, these butterfly wings. Instead, I want you to focus on the idea that the entirety of your object is the same flat white colour. Ignore all patterning and local colours, and focus only on capturing the cast shadows with your filled black shapes. Because we're limited in our tools/colours, this allows us to communicate more clearly, assigning just one purpose to a particular kind of mark.

Looking at your grasshopper, you ran into a similar problem where you appeared to focus more on capturing the patterning of its surface, rather than the actual shadows cast by the little rough areas.

The last point of this nature I want to mention is that back in lesson 2, I mentioned that we will not be using any shading in our drawings in this course. So for example, what you did on this beetle should have been left out. Capturing the actual specific texture of its carapace is one thing, but what you did there was just using generic hatching to add shading as decoration. Because your constructions are already as strong as they are, the drawing doesn't need shading to help it look 3D and solid - so that hatching didn't serve any real purpose.

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.

Moving forward, there were a few places where you definitely used a lot more contour lines than you needed to. For example, on the scorpions' claws and legs. Contour lines are very effective, useful tools, but it's important to always think about what you're trying to achieve with a mark you're putting down, and whether it is actually the best choice for the job.

Contour lines suffer from 'diminishing returns' - meaning that while the first one you add may be very impactful, the second will be less son, and the third even less. So piling on a bunch of them isn't actually going to necessarily help. Instead you need to focus on which contour lines are going to be the most effective - like those that define the relationship/intersection between forms (which you've made good use of throughout your drawings).

The last thing I wanted to point out is that I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. 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, 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! As a whole you are doing a great job, and you are demonstrating a very strong grasp of 3D space throughout all of these drawings. A bigger concern is that you appear to be quite heavily self-critical, which isn't a good thing. It is important not to focus only on the areas where you've failed and need to improve. Recognizing the areas of strength (and there are many here) is integral to developing in a balanced fashion. It is for that reason that we try to discourage students from including long self-analyses as part of their submissions.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.