Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, your sausages are generally coming along decently, though they're just a little off from fully adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages. Your ends tend to be a little different in size, and there tends to be a bit of widening through the midsection. You're very close though, so just keep those characteristics in mind. We want to draw our sausage forms like we've basically taken a ball, cut it in two, and then moved those two halves apart, stretching its midsection out like a simple tube.

Looking at the contour lines, I did notice that they're a little stiff and just a little uneven, which suggests that they're not being executed from the shoulder and are being drawn a little more hesitantly. Also, make sure that you're widening their degree as they move away from the viewer - right now they're all maintaining the same degree throughout, which makes them feel a bit more stiff.

In all these areas you're not far off, but there are definitely things to work on here to get your sausage forms and contour lines looking entirely correct.

Moving onto your insect constructions, you're definitely moving in the right direction throughout the lesson, and I'm pleased to see that in many ways you're focusing on building up your constructions piece by piece. There are however areas in which you delve into more complexity too quickly, so we'll address that to keep you on the right track.

The key thing to always remember is that in order to make a drawing feel solid and believable, we need to build it up using simple components. That's why we focus so much on the idea of simple sausage forms - the simpler the form, the more easily it will uphold its own illusion of being solid. When we start building up forms that are more complex, or jumping ahead into creating silhouettes of forms that have a lot more going on, we can easily lose that illusion of solidity. So for example, when drawing your lobster claws, you definitely did end up with a lot more complexity, which frequently resulted in you trying to regain that illusion of three dimensionality by adding contour lines. Working backwards like this - losing solidity and trying desperately to get it back - isn't generally necessary, if you instead take things a bit more gradually, building up to that complexity in smaller steps, and ensuring that each step builds right on the one preceding it.

The easiest way to look at this is by looking at your ant head constructions. Here you jump ahead into more complex silhouettes, or you put the basic ball form down (I noticed that you're not drawing through your ellipses - you should be doing this for all the ellipses you draw in this course in order to keep them smooth and evenly shaped) but then build up a more complex silhouette around it. Conversely, here's how I would approach the problem. Note that I start with the ball form, and then I attach complete, enclosed forms to it, establishing either how they intersect with the existing structure (using a contour line, like in lesson 2's form intersections) or I establish how the new form's silhouette wraps around the existing structure. Either way, I'm defining the relationship between two solid, 3D forms.

One thing you should absolutely avoid is that once you've drawn a form on the page, do not modify or redraw its silhouette. Technically when you drew a ball, then drew a new silhouette around it, you were telling the viewer to ignore the ball's silhouette, and instead pay attention to this new one that swallowed it up. It's important to always keep in mind that the silhouette is a 2D representation of a form that exists in the world. When we alter it, we don't alter the form it signifies - we simply break the connection between the two, resulting in a flat shape being left behind. We can see this in action most easily by looking at what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form, though this applies when we extend the silhouette as well.

So, instead we always want to work additively - introducing new, solid, 3D forms ot the construction, and establishing how they relate to that existing structure. Don't "swallow" one form with another, but rather wrap them around each other, or have them intersect. You can see this at play in this beetle horn example, in the ant head demo I linked previously, and also in this more detailed lobster demo. There you can see how my approach to building up those claws is all about sticking to simple forms, drawing every part in its entirety, and defining those relationships.

You're definitely moving more in this direction with this last ground beetle, so I'm pleased to see that. Here you're working more with smaller components, playing with how they can be connected to one another, and as a result they come out quite a bit more solid. I did want to mention however that your use of line weight seems to be somewhat poorly planned here - make sure that you're only adding the line weight at the end of the process. The whole purpose of line weight is to clarify how the different forms overlap one another, so if you're jumping into it before you even have a chance to get all your forms down, you're going to end up with miscommunication.

Also, remember that as discussed back in Lesson 2, form shading should not be included in your drawings for this course. In the main drawing for this page, you definitely got more caught up in detail as being about decorating your drawings. 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.

Lastly, 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- before I mark this lesson as complete, I'm going to assign a few more pages below for you to apply the points I've raised here.