Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're largely handling these well, though are still falling a little short from the characteristics of simple sausages - specifically in the tendency to have your ends come out a little more stretched (rather than remaining entirely circular), and with the midsection widening slightly. You're not far off, but these are things to keep in mind when doing this exercise in the future.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, there are a couple issues I want to address, but by and large - and especially towards the end - you really end up doing a fantastic job with these constructions, specifically in how attentive you are to the way in which each new element being introduced is its own complete, solid form, and how you largely avoid taking shortcuts that involve jumping back into engaging with the 2D drawing. That is to say, you almost always engage with your construction in three dimensions, and rarely attempt to alter the silhouettes of your existing structures, once they've already been established on the page. This of course would be a mistake simply because in altering an existing form's silhouette (which itself is a 2D shape representing a 3D form), we'd break the relationship between them, leaving ourselves with only the flat shape on the page as demonstrated here. Now, I say almost because it does come up in a few pages (mainly when constructing your legs), and I'll get into that in a moment.

Now, the main issue I did notice is not a deal breaker by any stretch - it comes down to how you're approaching adding textural detail to your drawings. Right now, if we look at the snail or the grasshopper (the main ones where you attempted to add more detail), it's very clear that your goal here is one of decoration. That is to say, with your construction finished, you're largely doing what you can to make your drawings look more visually appealing. The issue with this is that decoration is a fairly subjective thing - there's no clear agreed upon point where one has added "enough" decoration.

Instead, 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. So for this reason, as discussed in Lesson 2, form shading is not something we include in our drawings throughout this course (though it does show up on occasion in some of the older demos, prior to the specific direction of the lessons being more firmly established). Similarly - and this one is largely a factor of our more limited tools - we also are better off not worrying about capturing local/surface colour (like the patterns on the grasshopper's legs). Since we can only work in a strict black and white, trying to capture all the visual information can dilute our result. Instead, ignoring local colour and focusing only on reserving our filled areas of solid black for cast shadows is generally a much more effective way to communicate with the viewer when given such restrictions. Of course, that's my recommendation for how to tackle drawings in this course - outside of it, you can certainly experiment with using such limited circumstances in different ways.

Now, one thing I am very pleased to see is that I can see clear signs that you're trying very hard to employ the sausage method as consistently as you can. There may still be some odd cases where you stray from them a little (whether intentionally or not, I'm not sure). While such cases are really minor and not even worth mentioning, they do give me an opportunity to expand on the sausage method a little, and expand on what we can do to build upon them - something you are currently doing through the addition of partial/flat shapes, extending out those silhouettes slightly.

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, 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).

Note how every new piece we add is its own complete form, and that our focus is on establishing how that form relates to the existing structure. As needed, we can break those pieces down into separate parts, so as to ensure that the silhouette of each one makes ample contact with the existing, underlying structure (so as to establish a stronger relationship with it, rather than just trying to engulf it all in one go). Also, the way in which we "twist" these additional forms helps to replicate a more organic, muscle/exoskeleton appearance, as such things rarely run straight along the length of the underlying structure.

Aside from that, you've really knocked this one out of the park, and I feel this lobster towards the end demonstrates it especially well in how you've built up the segmentation along the tail.

Before I finish this up, I'll answer your questions:

• For the degree of those ellipses, you are correct - they're not technically correct for what they're trying to represent, which is the connection point along the underside of the body. I could just as well say that they're meant to represent ball structures (which would also be useful and valid to that point, giving us something to anchor against the body), but if I'm being honest that probably wasn't my intent at the time. Good catch!

• When we have a lot of forms packed into the same space, it can certainly get cluttered - but that's okay. As we deal with construction, and drawing through our forms, we inevitably face such situations, and it gradually gets easier to navigate them. Don't worry about making mistakes in the process however - just keep trying to draw those cluttered elements to the best of your ability, focusing on each one, one at a time.

• Shiny and reflective surfaces largely acquire that appearance by virtue of having no actual textural forms whatsoever. In such a circumstance, if it is especially important that we convey the glossiness of a surface, then we kind of have to cheat. Usually I'll use some limited hatching, especially with thicker "blocks" to help replicate a general impression of a reflection or shine, but in truth, for the purposes of what we're doing in this course, it's equally acceptable to just leave it out entirely, as it doesn't tell really relate back to our focus on understanding and conveying the relationships between different forms in space.

So, with that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work.