Alrighty. So overall, you're doing a good job in terms of your understanding of the material, but there are a few ways in which you're getting caught up in certain behaviours that I want to touch upon. That said, as a whole you're clearly demonstrating a good grasp of how to build up your complex, solid animals through the use of simple structures.

Starting with your organic intersections, for all intents and purposes they're fine, but I do want to remind you to stick to simple sausage forms here. Avoid the ones that are getting flattened out, and where you've got the contour lines implying greater complexity to the forms themselves. Sticking to simple structures really is important as we get into construction as a whole, because it is their simplicity that allows them to feel solid with as little support as possible. We then build upon those simple forms to develop complexity in our results.

Moving onto the animal constructions, while I'm going to go into each one in greater detail, here are the main issues I want to address:

• Drawing small

• Erratic, scratchy application of detail/texture

• Overuse of contour lines

• Inconsistent use of the sausage method

• A few areas where your additional masses could stand to be simplified/broken down

• Sketchy/scratchy linework

Drawing small

This isn't an issue in all of your pages, of course, but there are definitely some - like among the wolves and some of your bears - where you're definitely trying to cram drawings into too small a space. Remember that drawing small is going to immediately make it harder for you to leverage the full capacity of your spatial reasoning skills. Our brains really crave more space to really get into the subtlety of spatial relationships. On top of that, drawing smaller also makes it harder at this stage to engage our whole arm while drawing, resulting in linework that is clumsier and more rigid. These issues all compound to make is less careful and intentional with our linework.

Always draw as big as you can. Don't worry about how many drawings you're going to fit into a page ahead of time. Draw the first drawing taking up as much space as it needs, and if you think you have enough room left over for another, go for it.

Erratic, scratchy application of detail/texture

When it comes to the tufts of fur and that kind of tighter detail, it's pretty clear that you're trying to rely on instincts rather than really designing them with the kind of intent and focus that they require. It's a common issue - we see other artists pull that stuff off with seemingly no effort, but it's because they've trained their instincts and underlying design sense so keenly through other more purposeful and intentional studies that it looks effortless. What you're doing here are supposed to be the studies that train your instincts - so don't rush through that part. Take your time, and really think about just how much jagged tufts you need, and how the overall goal is to communicate the idea that something is furry (rather than actually capturing the reference image with hyper accuracy). You can get the idea of what's in the photo across with much less than that.

Admittedly this is one of those things where drawing small also causes issues - when we're ending up with the clumsier linework that smaller drawing can cause (mind you that's something that'll improve with practice), we tend to be more inclined to be more haphazard with our texture and detail as well. After all, if the drawing's a bit clumsy, what's a bit more going to hurt? And in that, it discourages us from really digging in and thinking about the specific marks we put down.

Overuse of contour lines

The first contour lines we learned to work with are those that wrap around the surface of a single form. It's a great way to introduce them, but it's also their least effective, useful form. They help us make a form feel three dimensional on its own, but students will sometimes get into the habit of adding them without really considering what each individual contour line is contributing. The first contour line may help a form feel really 3D, strongly giving an impression of how that surface deforms through space. The second may help reinforce the first, having less impact, but still providing necessary aid. The third, however, and the fourth and fifth and on and on, they're not likely to provide much.

This is where creating a sort of "wireframe" pattern is something that comes about when a student is adding contour lines because they think they're supposed to - not because they're actually thinking about what they're trying to achieve with every individual mark. The planning phase of the ghosting method - that is, the first step - is where we consider what precisely we want to achieve with a given stroke, what job it's meant to do for us, whether it's necessary and how to have it best accomplish that task. Applied correctly, that first step of the ghosting method would generally cause us to decide that another contour line isn't necessarily going to be the right call.

As I mentioned previously, there are other kinds of contour lines - for example, we've got the ones that define the relationships between our forms. These are some you actually use quite a bit, and you use them well. Because you already use them well, and because they are in fact far more effective and impactful than the first kind, the many instances of the first kind of contour line become pretty much unnecessary. You could probably have managed most of these drawings without a single such contour line, relying only on the second kind - the ones that define the relationships between those different forms, in doing so creating an incredibly solid illusion of a 3D structure.

That's why I say that you didn't necessarily think about whether those marks would be necessary - because they're not. You just need to have a little more confidence with what you've already been able to achieve.

Inconsistent use of the sausage method

This is somewhere you actually didn't use that second type of contour line as much as you should have, despite making good use of it elsewhere. The sausage method was introduced back in lesson 4, but is equally as effective and important here, as I actually mentioned in my critique of your lesson 4 work.

You appear to have forgotten this, as you did not apply those additional masses as I explained that last critique, and you also refrained entirely from defining the relationship between the sausage segments with a contour line as shown in the middle of this diagram. I highly recommend that you go back and reread my critique of your lesson 4 work.

A few areas where your additional masses could stand to be simplified/broken down

This one's a pretty minor issue that I noticed on your elephants. Here are some notes on this topic to help you better grasp how to best utilize those additional masses.

Sketchy/scratchy linework

As a whole, your linework is definitely a lot scratchier than would be consistent with the techniques and methodologies explored at the beginning of this course. It's not always the case, but there are definitely a lot of signs that you're not adhering to those processes consistently. Definitely something to keep in mind.

As a whole your work is going well, but because there are a number of issues I pointed out, I think the right call is to have you do a few additional pages to demonstrate your understanding of what I've pointed out here. I'd like you to do 3 more pages of animal constructions, with one restriction - you may not use any of the first kind of contour line (the ones that wrap around a single form's surface). You are still encouraged to use the contour lines that define the relationship between different forms, like those in the sausage method which you are also required to use for your constructions.