Alrighty! Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing a decent job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, although there is still room for improvement here, especially when it comes to maintaining a circular shape for both ends. Still, this is moving in the right direction. There is one issue that I noticed in two places that is of some concern however, and it has to do with the little contour ellipses we include on the tips that are facing towards the viewer.

On this one from the first page, as well as this one from the second page, you've placed ellipses on one end - telling the viewer that this end is facing towards them - and then drew all of the contour lines to suggest that this same tip is pointing away from the viewer. The thing about these ellipses is that they are no different from any other contour lines - it just so happens that when an end of the sausage faces towards the viewer, we're able to see the contour line all the way around, rather than just a partial curve. You do demonstrate a good grasp of this in all the other cases, but this definitely stands out as a choice that was made very much in error, and that does speak to a possible uncertainty as to how those contour lines work.

It may help to look at this diagram - as you can see there, there are different ways in which the same sausage shape can be represented, but no matter what, the contour curves and ellipses always agree on which side is facing the viewer, and which side is not.

Anyway, continuing onto your insect constructions, you're certainly moving in the right direction here, and I can see throughout the set that you're trying to hold to the core principles of construction, focusing on building up from simple to complex - but there are definitely ways in which your use of these exercises can be improved, to help you get as much as you can out of these constructional drawing exercises. The first of these is going to focus on understanding the distinction between actions we take that occur in 3D space, engaging with a solid, three dimensional object, and actions we take in 2D space, which engage only with a flat drawing on a flat page.

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.

On this ant, I've called out areas in red where you've cut into the silhouettes of existing forms, and in blue where you've basically extended off an existing form's silhouette, or otherwise added a flat shape to the construction. These are shortcuts we often take to help refine our construction, or to add structural details, but unfortunately they do undermine our construction's solidity and remind the viewer (as well as ourselves) that what we're looking at is flat.

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. You can also see this in action in the shrimp and lobster demonstrations on the informal demos page. These, being newer, are more in line with this concept which we're trying to push more and more as time goes by. This will eventually be integrated into the lesson material more fully when my overhaul of the course material reaches this lesson (we're still working on refining Lessons 0 and 1) - but until then, it's mainly those receiving official critiques who get a sort of earlier preview of these more effective approaches to handling these kinds of constructional drawing exercises.

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. Focus especially on how, in the shrimp and lobster demos, at every stage we focus on ensuring that each new form that's been added feels solid and three dimensional, before moving forward. If at any stage that solidity is lost, we won't really be able to get it back - and furthermore, the more we undermine that sense of solidity, the more likely we are to then make yet more marks that undermine it. Conversely, the more we maintain and reinforce the solidity, the more likely we are to continue engaging with the drawing in ways that further establish it as solid and 3D.

Anyway! The next thing I want to talk about is that I am noticing a tendency in some of your drawings - especially those you did from your own references, rather than from my demonstrations - to get somewhat more haphazard with your linework. It's not by a huge degree, but I am noticing a greater tendency to perhaps work with less forethought prior to executing each mark. This can at least in part be a result of the fact that drawing from your own references requires you to do a ton more mental processing of all that visual information coming in, and with your mental faculties wrapped up in that, you may be less consistently employing the ghosting method for all of your marks.

Remember, above all else - every single mark you put down must be the result of planning and forethought. Nothing goes down without thinking through exactly what the nature of the mark you want to make is, what task it's meant to accomplish, and how it can best accomplish that task. It is normal to be overwhelmed when you get hit with a lot of visual information, but rather than seeing to just put marks down and figure things out from there, take a step back instead and take stock of the situation. Always go back to those core principles from Lesson 1. It does undoubtedly take more time, but it will always result in marks that, while not necessarily always correct, are at the very least explainable. That is to say, of someone points at a certain line and asks "why'd you draw that mark?" you should be able to provide them with a reason, even if it's not a good one. Looking at some of the extra lines on your mantis' arms, you might be hard pressed to explain why there are so many more strokes than are actually necessary there.

Continuing on, I can see that you've put some effort into employing the sausage method for constructing your legs, although you don't always adhere to it as and its specific elements (as explained in the diagram I just linked) as you should. 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).

The last thing I wanted to talk about how, once you're finished your construction, you approach adding details. While you are often fairly light in adding details (which is not by any means a bad thing), you do tend to be somewhat uncertain of what you should be aiming to achieve in the addition of that detail. And so, there's a lot of different things going on. For example, here in your ant drawing you've definitely delved more into form shading (which as explained here in Lesson 2 is not to play a role in our drawings for this course). Conversely, here on this swordtail butterfly you resort to a lot of scribbling and erratic marks (which also is something you're not supposed to be doing). This general sense of uncertainty often comes from an interpretation that detail is about decoration (or in other words, doing what we can to make our drawings more visually pleasing). Unfortunately, decoration is not a particularly specific goal - in fact, there's no clear point at which "enough" decoration has been added.

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.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that.

And with that, I think I've hit all the major points. I am indeed going to assign some revisions to allow you to demonstrate your understanding of all of the things I've called out here. You'll find them below.