Starting off with your organic forms with contour lines, these are coming along pretty nicely - confident linework, smooth, consistent contour lines that mostly stay snugly within the silhouette of the form, etc. You're also fairly close to sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, but this is also an area where you could stand to get better in small, subtle ways. Mainly watch out for cases where the midsection gets wider (most of your sausages tend to do this slightly), and also keep working on getting those ends to be properly circular in shape.

Moving onto your insect constructions, as a whole you are most certainly demonstrating a good grasp of how the things you're drawing exist in 3D space. The manner in which you position your different forms really conveys a strong sense of depth, and this definitely helps produce more solid, more tangible structures as a result. There's a lot of good that you're doing here, and as a whole I am pretty pleased with your results, but there is also a critical issue in how you're approaching the drawings that is keeping you from getting the most out of these exercises.

That's actually an important point in itself - the fact that each of these drawings are exercises. The end result really doesn't matter so much, beyond being something I can use to see the process you employed. A common thing students struggle with is that they still feel so compelled to make sure that end result comes nicely, that it interferes with how they go about the process itself. Each exercise is itself just a three dimensional spatial puzzle - we figure out how we can combine forms, gradually working our way towards a particular general goal (as informed by our reference image). The real meat of it is in how we go about combining those forms, and defining how they relate to one another in space. Doing so is what rewires our brain, slowly but surely, to better interpret the world in which our drawings exist as being three dimensional.

This is something you have developed at well - but there's definitely aspects to how you're drawing that are making further growth a little less efficient than it could be.

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.

This lobster is easily your best drawing, and it's got a lot going for it. You've done an excellent job of working with a particularly challenging orientation (with the creature turned slightly towards the viewer). It is, however, also a good example of where you've cut into the silhouettes of your forms (in red) and where you've extended out those silhouettes (in blue). At the end of the day, the exercises works far better if we push ourselves to treat every mass we add to be something solid and tangible, rather than taking shortcuts of jumping back into 2D space to make quick adjustments, which in turn break the illusion for ourselves.

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. It's also featured quite prominently throughout the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page (which is where the more recent demos go, until I have a chance to integrate them properly into the lesson material). As you noted yourself, the approach to construction shown there is more granular, broken down into more steps. That is because the way we're thinking about how these pieces fit together is definitely different from how you're going about it.

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.

Another point that jumped out to me was just how many marks you tend to be putting down. Now, it's normal (and required) that you draw through all of your ellipses two full times, since it basically leans into the arm's natural desire to want to draw smooth, even ellipses. This doesn't apply to any other kind of mark or shape however - so not to sausages, and not to any other one-off strokes. Looking at that lobster again, specifically here at the claw, that's a hell of a lot of linework, and it is most definitely breaking the principles behind the ghosting method where you're effectively expected to go through the planning, preparation, and execution phases for every individual stroke you put down, and where you basically take one go at it, and stick with however it comes out.

In general, it's important to keep in mind that what we're doing here is not sketching - we're not thinking on the page, and or experimenting and keeping what sticks and ignoring what doesn't. Everything we add to our construction is something solid and tangible - so even the tendency to make your initial masses particularly faint (as we can see on the drawings on this page sets things up such that those aren't "real" and present. So, be sure to draw every mark with the same confidence, and avoid having part of your construction exist as a sort of "underdrawing" or "sketch". Everything is part of your final construction.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. Overall I can see that you are largely trying to apply the sausage method as introduced in the wasp demo, and I'm glad to see it. Do however keep the specific requirements of that technique - keeping to the characteristics of simple sausages, for example. You often handle this well, but there are definitely times where you veer more towards stretched ellipses rather than sausages.

Beyond that, 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).

To be fair, you're mostly handling the sausage method well - I just wanted an excuse to share those diagrams of how to use the sausage method most effectively, as I felt they'd be helpful.

Now, I've shared a number of things here with you, all of which will help you get more out of the exercises. All the same, I feel that you'll be able to explore them further in the next lesson just as effectively as you would here - so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, and leave you to it.