Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing reasonably well here, but there's certainly room for improvement in a few areas. Specifically, keep working on getting those sausage forms to enclose properly (you definitely are struggling with where the ends of that continuous line meet). You may find this improving if you actually slow down your stroke as you draw. Remember that while the execution of your mark should always be with a confident, persistent pace, this does not inherently mean fast. Drawing quickly is the easiest way for beginners to draw with a confident pace, but as one gets used to it, they may find the speed they need to maintain to avoid wobbling/stiffness decreases, allowing them to regain additional control. Of course, being sure to draw from your shoulder also helps, especially around the curves at either end of the sausage.

Secondly, keep working on getting your contour curves to fit snugly between the edges of the sausage form's silhouette to emphasize how they rest along the surface of the form.

Moving through your insect constructions, you've got a lot of good work here, but I'm noticing a few issues that I'd like to address.

First and foremost, you definitely are attempting to use the sausage method to construct your legs in a number of places, but you're not consistent in how you actually apply it. In many cases, it ends up being half-used, adhering to some of its stipulations, and not to others. The sausage method, as described here, demands the following:

• The sausages be simple with as little complexity as possible. This means having them essentially be two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Avoid having the ends stretch away from a spherical proportion, avoid any pinching or swelling through the midsection, and so on.

• The joints between sausages must be reinforced with a single contour line that defines the relationship between them in 3D space. These kinds of contour lines - those that define the relationship between two forms in space - are exceptionally effective, far moreso than the contour lines that simply sit on the surface of a single given form. This is the case because they create a connection between forms such that if one feels three dimensional, then that illusion will carry over to the second, which in turn will apply that illusion once again to the first, and back and forth recursively reinforcing each other.

• With the single contour line defining the joint, any additional contour lines become redundant and unnecessary - so don't add them along the length of your sausages "just because". Every mark you put down needs to have a specific task, something it is meant to accomplish, and before drawing it you need to consider what that job is, whether it is necessary, and whether this stroke is the best one for the job. You have a tendency in many places to overuse contour lines (which quickly diminish in their effectiveness, with the second being less effective than the first, the third being less effective than the second, and so on).

Now you may look at an insect's leg and feel that it does not appear to be a chain of sausages - but that's entirely fine. What we're doing here is constructing a base structure, or an armature, onto which we can continue to build up masses to bulk things out where necessary. I can see you doing that in a number of places, though in others you've jumped to more complex sausages to try and get too much done all at once. When adding additional masses, you can get the most out of it by actually wrapping these masses around the given sausage, as demonstrated here.

Another issue that I'm noticing is that you have a tendency to cut back into forms as they exist as shapes on a flat page, rather than with regard for the fact that they're solid and three dimensional. We can see a lot of this in the claws and abdomen of this drawing, where you've laid out initial masses, and then cut back into them leaving the viewer to ignore aspects of forms that were placed within the scene. The fact of the matter is that we are not simply drawing lines or shapes on a page - every mark we put down establishes a solid, three dimensional mass within the world.

There are two ways in which we can interact with these 3D forms, either doing so additively (where we build them up on top of one another, ensuring that an added form acknowledges and interacts with the ones already existing within the space) or subtractively (where we cut into the existing forms). I generally recommend that students work additively wherever possible, as this reinforces one's understanding of how they're interacting with 3D forms. Working subtractively however, which is sometimes but rarely necessary to solve a problem, can leave us open to forgetting the fact that we're dealing with 3D forms, causing us to make mistakes that undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

The correct way in which to approach subtractive construction is to treat the pen as though it is a scalpel, cutting lines along the contour of a given form - not treating it like a shape on a page, but rather reinforcing the fact that it's three dimensional. These contour lines then split the form into two separate, but solid volumes, allowing us to establish one as being "positive space" (the piece of the form we want to keep) and the other as being "negative space". Here's a quick demonstration of the difference.

Now, as I mentioned before, generally students should be using additive construction, as this will continue to further develop their understanding of how forms interact within 3D space, so they'll be more prepared to use subtractive construction when it is absolutely necessary. Here's how I'd approach a claw using additive construction.

The last thing I wanted to mention is a fairly minor point. In a few places (like this crab), you employ shading-for-the-sake-of-shading, which is something I discourage back in lesson 2.

All in all, you're definitely making progress and are showing a sense of 3D space and form that is developing well. You've got a number of things to keep in mind as well, but you'll be able to continue to explore these things through the next lesson (everything here applies there as well, including the use of the sausage method to construct the underlying armature for your animals' legs), so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.