Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, I think you start out doing this exercise quite well, but as you move through it, there are little signs that you're maybe putting less time into the contour lines you were drawing. This resulted in more and more slight inaccuracies that would undermine the illusion that the line actually runs along the surface of the form. At the end of the day, it's important that the mark you execute does its job - and to achieve, that you need to first be fully aware of what you need it to do for you, and then invest as much time as is required to pull it off. Mistakes can happen, but we need to do what we can to set ourselves up properly in order to reduce their likelihood.

In your actual insect constructions, there are definitely some issues that stand out. There are also some considerable strengths, but I think that overall while you understand a great deal, and are showing that you have it in you to do this well, you aren't focusing in the right areas.

The first thing I noticed was that your use of the sausage technique seems a bit... haphazard. There are definitely places where you're using it better than in others, but I'm definitely seeing you play a little fast-and-loose with the sausage shapes themselves. Remember that as shown here, we want the forms to have spherical ends of equal size, and to maintain a consistent width throughout their length.

Looking at your tarantula, I get the impression that you may be drawing some of your smaller sausages more from your wrist, which really impacts your ability to control the shapes. You also forgot to reinforce the joint between some of your sausages with a contour curve, though you generally did do that most of the time.

Speaking of contour lines, that brings us to another point worth discussing - you tend to use a lot of them. Contour lines really are great tools, but their contribution to a construction does suffer from diminishing returns. This means that if we start throwing them everywhere, we can quickly run into a situation where most of them aren't really having any impact at all on the drawing. One example of this is your hercules beetle.

It's really important that instead of just adding contour lines because we have a vague sense that they'll help make our drawing feel more three dimensional, that we think about exactly what we're trying to get out of every single stroke we put down. This is essentially what I mentioned above - every mark has a job, it has something it is trying to add to your drawing, and you need to first be aware of what the job is, and then weigh whether the mark you're going to put down is actually the best one to accomplish the task. This is what we spend the planning phase of the ghosting method on - identifying exactly what mark we want to put down.

When it comes to contour lines, not all of them are equal. The ones that sit along the length of a single form (like what we learned in the organic forms with contour lines exercise from lesson 2), are actually the least effective. More effective than that are the ones we explored in the form intersections - that is, the contour lines that are shared by two separate forms, which actually define the relationship between those forms in space. By defining this relationship, they create a connection where if one of those forms is perceived as being three dimensional, then both forms will be interpreted by the viewer as being 3D. These are also the kind of contour lines we use when we reinforce the joint between sausage forms, when using the sausage technique for our leg constructions.

Just one such contour line can do the whole job of making both forms feel solid. As you can see here, we could have eliminated all but one of the contour ellipses along the beetle's larger horn.

Moving on, another thing I noticed was that you have a tendency to limit just how far you take the drawings that are meant to be construction-only. From the looks of it, you focus on the simplest forms present, and then stop. I had another student recently who worked the same way, and I demonstrated it for them in this diagram. As you can see, both he and you would draw the leg only as a simple chain of sausages, neglecting all of the more nuanced forms that were present and that could be built up (if you're unsure of how to do that, take a look at this diagram). Focusing on construction does not mean just working at the absolute basic level. The vast majority of what goes into a drawing is construction. Texture and detail isn't, though many beginners tend to focus a great deal on it, to the detriment of their forms.

It's critically important that you spend more time studying your reference image and identifying the various levels of form that can be built up - starting from the most simple, but gradually adding more simple forms to that, with clearly defined relationships between them to make it all feel solid.

Now, when you get into your "detailed" drawings, you do start adding some additional forms, though there are a lot of elements you try and add by simply adding loose lines. For example, the little spikes you added to your scarab's front legs. You didn't draw these as form, and they don't convey any sense of how they exist in space or relate to the forms that are there. They're just lines pasted on top.

Looking at your honey bee, you also have a tendency to go really heavy on your line weight. Line weight should always be subtle - it's something that your conscious brain may not even pick up on easily, but that your subconscious will detect. Line weight does not function in absolute terms, but rather in relationships - one line may be slightly thicker than another, and this helps us understand how they are arranged. When your line weights get really thick, it starts to flatten out a drawing into more graphic shapes. Often when students push them to this point, they're actually trying to work with cast shadows - where one form casts a shadow shape onto another's surface. The difference however is that these shadow shapes exist on another form's surface, not attached to the one casting it, as line weight does.

I also noticed that you filled in the honey bee's eye with solid black. You likely did this because you saw that it was black in your reference image, and since you were working in black, the obvious choice would be to colour it in. We don't however reach for a red pen to colour in red things, or a yellow pen to colour in objects that are yellow - and so, we shouldn't be giving black sections of our drawing special treatment. Treat the drawing as though it is made up of a solid grey material, and reserve your filled black shapes for cast shadows only.

The last issue I wanted to point out is most prevalent in your scorpion, where you end up focusing a lot on form shading rather than cast shadows. As covered back in lesson 2, we are not concerned with using any form shading in our drawings, and focus only on cast shadows. Where cast shadows are projected from one form onto another, form shading always goes on the form in question. It is where a surface is made darker or lighter depending on whether it is turned towards or away from the light source. Leave it out of your drawings - and with it, refrain from using any kind of hatching textures, as this is usually used as an attempt at adding form shading.

It's worth mentioning that I did quite like your praying mantis drawing. It has plenty of its own concerns (which have been raised already in the context of other drawings), I think you pushed construction further with this one, and thought more about how the different elements exist as 3D forms in space.

So! You say that you feel you did a lot of things I said not to in the instructions, and with that you'd be entirely correct. I think you're getting a little over-eager, and are rushing forward to draw without always keeping the instructions in mind. On one hand, this is good - it means you're having fun and aren't experiencing the kind of paralysis many do. But it does mean you need to slow yourself down, and to give yourself a lot more time for each drawing, for observing your reference and for executing each and every single mark carefully, using the ghosting method, and from the shoulder.

So, I'm going to assign a number of additional pages to give you the opportunity to do this be fore I mark this lesson as complete.