Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you've generally done a pretty good job sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. Your contour lines are looking pretty good too, although there are two things I noticed:

• The alignment of your contour lines are at times a little off, so keep working on that

• You appear to be drawing the contour lines with the same degree as you slide along the length of the sausage form. The degree should be getting wider as you move away from the viewer. While this is explained in a few places in the course, I recently updated the Lesson 1 ellipses content, and I made a point of explaining the mechanics of this in the video.

Oversimplifying

Moving onto your insect constructions, you definitely started off drawing insects that seemed to be really heavily simplified. You were approaching a lot of the core principles of construction reasonably well, but the information you were carrying over from your reference images definitely seemed to be more from memory than direct observation. This doesn't mean you weren't looking at your references at all - just that you were spending too long without looking back at them.

This did improve as you moved through the set, and I could see you trying to capture greater levels of complexity as you reached your dragonfly, although there were definitely still areas - like the legs - that could have been pushed much farther.

Reduce the overuse of line weight

I will get into that a little further, but before I do, I noticed that you appear to be going back over your linework pretty often, reinforcing the line weight of your form's silhouettes very liberally. Line weight is a specific tool, with a very specific purpose. We use it to clarify how different forms overlap one another, and we limit its use to localized areas, blending it back into the existing linework rather than having it continue all the way around a form's silhouette.

One of the reasons this is so important is that redrawing the silhouette of a form once it's been constructed will often flatten out the drawing. Going back over something with line weight in this manner is one way of causing this problem, but there's actually a much more direct example in your work I can point to.

Avoid modifying the silhouette of your forms once they've been drawn

With this hercules beetle, you ended up starting with a much larger ball form for the abdomen, but ultimately ended up trying to redefine it to lose some of its underside.

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, but simply working in 2D rather than 3D - like how you created a pretty complex shape for the beetle's horns, instead of building them up from simple 3D forms - puts us in the same kind of problem.

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.

Just to drive the point a little further home, I noticed you doing the same sort of thing - that is, cutting back into your forms' silhouettes - in this fly. There will be times where you find you've drifted away from what your reference image shows, and you may feel that the only way to get back to the reference is to cut back into your silhouettes like this. In those situations, it's better to accept that you've strayed from the reference, and keep going as it is. The goal isn't to reproduce the reference image perfectly, after all - it's to use the reference as a source of information, and use that information to construct something in 3D space.

Building upon the sausage method

Getting back to the point about the legs, the key thing to remember is that the sausage method itself (which you're generally employing pretty well) 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).

Detail vs. decoration

The last thing I wanted to share was that in your very last drawing, you definitely showed a strong capacity for careful observation and study (at least when it comes to the detail - the core structure was still kind of oversimplified), but it's pretty clear that you interpreted the "detail" phase here as being one focused on decorating your drawing to make it "impressive".

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.

Additionally, don't forget that back in Lesson 2's texture section, we discussed that form shading would not be a part of our drawings for this course. Whenever you put down something solid and black, it should always be a cast shadow. Ignore all form shading, and also when you catch any local colour or patterning (basically the colour of a material), ignore it altogether. Treat the object like it's white in colour. After all, we only have a black pen to work with, so it's best not to bother trying to capture colour information at all.

So, I've shared quite a bit here - I expect it'll take some time to parse through it all. Once you do, I've got some revisions assigned below for you to complete.