Starting with the organic forms with contour lines, there are three points I want to draw to your attention here:

• Your sausages aren't consistently adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages as explained in the instructions for this exercise.

• While you are reversing your contour lines' degrees (from being curved in one direction, then shifting to another direction), you appear to be maintaining the same degree rather than allowing them to shift over the length of the form. The degree of those contour lines convey the orientation of each circular cross-section in space, and as we move farther away from the viewer, the contour lines should get wider and wider - not maintain the same degree.

• You appear not to fully understand what the contour lines you're drawing actually say about the given sausage form. The contour lines in pretty much all of these are set up in a very specific configuration, where the ends of the sausages are all turned away from the viewer. You do however include contour ellipses on one tip of each sausage form, which is only reserved for when the given tip is turned towards the viewer, as shown here. This shows that you need to reflect upon how these contour lines work.

Moving on to your insect constructions, there are a number of concerns that I will address one at a time:

• First and foremost, drawing big is important. When we draw small, we limit our brain's capacity to think through spatial problems, and we also give ourselves far less room to engage our whole arm while drawing. That makes it much easier to fall back to drawing from our wrists, and will generally result in drawings that are quite a bit clumsier, and that don't properly capture the forms we're drawing as being solid, and don't establish a clear grasp of how those forms relate to one another in space. So, for example, looking at this ant you've taken up maybe 20% of the page. There is plenty of room there - take advantage of all of it.

• Secondly, it's critical that we understand that every single mark we draw defines a new solid, 3D form in the world. These forms need to be treated as though they are real and tangible. We start with simple forms because they are the easiest to make feel 3D, and then in subsequent phases of construction we build on top of them by wrapping further forms around them, connecting forms to them, and so on. But the key to this is accepting that the form is solid and real - not just a flat shape on the page. This also means that we cannot end up in situations where we either cut across the silhouette of a form, where we just add flat shapes on to our drawing (or just one-off lines), and so on. For example if you look at the little spikes you added to this beetle's horns, you added them as simple shapes. There's no clear 3D relationship being created between those additions and the main horns. You're treating it as a 2D drawing, not something real and solid. This also relates to how you started out with smaller thorax and abdomen masses, and then engulfed them in the forms you used for their shells. While there's a little more room for this, because it doesn't define a clear relationship to the existing structure, and just ends up floating loosely around it, it doesn't yield great results. Instead, in this case you should have drawn the thorax and abdomen masses as being as big as those entire outer shell portions.

• 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.

• As a more minor point, I noticed that you filled certain areas with solid black in a number of cases. A wasp's eye, for instance, the butterfly's wing pattern, etc. Everything we're doing in these drawings basically focuses on one core idea - we're giving the viewer a lot of information to help them understand the forms of this object. With construction, we're conveying everything they need to know about what it would feel like to manipulate this object in their hands. With texture, we're conveying all of the information they need to understand how it'd feel to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. It's all about 3D forms - and for that reason, when we add filled black shapes, they should be reserved entirely just for cast shadows - the things we use to imply the presence of textural forms. Any sort of "local colour" (like the wasp's eye being black or the darker pattern of the butterfly's wing) should be ignored. All these forms should be treated like they're the same flat white colour. This will allow us to use that tool - the filled shadow shapes - that much more effectively, without our drawings becoming unclear.

As a side note, you mentioned you struggled a great deal with the dragonfly. I had these quick drawings I did over another student's work that I thought might help. It's not a complete demonstration or anything, but a few little diagrams that could help you better grasp how to build up a dragonfly's general construction and how to think about it.

For now I think I've pointed out a number of issues, so I'll leave it to you to address them with the revisions I'll assign below.