All in all, I think you've done a pretty good job! I can definitely see the issue you pointed out about jumping into line weight and cast shadows too early, and ending up with certain things being a little too committed too soon. It definitely explains aspects of the overall appearance where I think your insects are largely very well constructed, but the process behind them seems a little to me like someone attempting to get down a hill while being chased by a rolling boulder. You got down the hill, but it feels like you didn't have 100% control over how you went about that. I'm glad you were aware of it however, and hope to see you improving on that front in the future.

Stepping back a bit to start, your work on the organic forms with contour lines is largely quite well done. You're sticking to simple forms (for the most part - there's a slight tendency in some places to end up with ends that aren't quite spherical and instead come out a little stretched so watch out for that). Continue to keep an eye on the degree of your contour lines however - as explained here they should widen/narrow as you slide along the length of a form. I see this to an extent in your contour curves, and less so in your contour ellipses. Also, watch the alignment of the contour lines when your sausage forms are turning.

Overall your use of construction throughout the insect drawings is well done, though early on there's one thing I saw that gives me an excellent opportunity to explain a major aspect of construction as a whole. It's about how constructional drawing requires you to treat everything you draw as being a solid form in 3D space, and to avoid any situation where you - even for a moment - take action that treats those forms as though they're just flat shapes on a page, or things that can be ignored. This kind of thing leads to contradictions on the page, which breaks the illusion you're trying to create for the viewer.

What made me want to call this out was the top left of this page. Notice how you initially drew a much larger ellipse/ball form, then ended up drawing your subsequent phase of construction with all the segmentation inside of it? In this way, you effectively cut back into the 2D shape you'd drawn on the page, instead of treating the initial form you'd placed in the world as thoug hit was three dimensional, and in doing so, you undermined the illusion you were creating.

Now, you don't do this very often, and throughout your work you generally do a good job, but it's such an important concept that I figured I'd jump on it anyway. It comes to the idea of the two flavours of construction: additive and subtractive.

Additive is what we do most of the time, and what you've employed a fair bit throughout this lesson. Put down a solid 3D form, and then build on top of it by adding new forms with a clearly defined relationship in 3D space between those forms. Sometimes it involves wrapping one form around another, or having one form stick out of another, etc. It's not only extremely effective, but it also helps students continue to develop their underlying understanding and belief in the idea that they're drawing 3D forms in a 3D world, not just flat shapes on a page.

Subtractive construction is the opposite - it involves cutting back into a form (not a shape) by dividing that form into two distinct, separate 3D entities, then designating one of those sections as being positive space (the form still remaining) and the other as negative space (the form being removed). We do this separation through the use of contour lines - just as in the sausage method we define the spatial relationship between two connecting sausages by drawing the intersection line along their joints, here we do that to create an artificial 'joint' between two forms that were naturally one cohesive unit. I demonstrate that here.

On the subject of the sausage method, I did notice that you didn't appear to use it very much throughout your insect drawings, and when you did, you usually did so in half-measures, applying elements of it but usually approaching those leg constructions in a case-by-case basis. The thing is, while you may look at the legs in your reference images as not entirely matching a chain of sausage forms, what we're doing here is creating an underlying structure or armature that maintains two qualities: the illusion of solidity of the segments (making them appear 3D), and the maintaining of a sense of gestural flow. Most techniques will focus more on one than the other, but using the sausage method as your base will achieve both. You can then build upon that structure as shown here. You should really be using this method for all your creatures' legs - and this applies in the next lesson as well, even though most animal's legs look even less like a simple sausage chain than insects' do.

As one last point, I noticed that on a number of your drawings when applying shadow shapes you went further than just focusing on the shadows being cast by the forms present, and also got into attempting to capture the form shading of your objects. As explained back in Lesson 2 (which was rewritten and given additional short videos to better explain the material that was there before), we aren't applying any kind of form shading just as decoration. If and when we do actually add that kind of shading, it's always as an excuse to convey some kind of textural information in the areas where we need to transition gradually from light to dark. You can see such form shading in the scorpion's torso/abdomen where it isn't really doing much to add information to the image.

Aside from those points, I think you're doing a pretty good job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Hi, it seems like there is something wrong with the imgur link?