Starting with your organic intersections, generally your work here is coming along well, in that your masses are sagging and slumping over one another in a believable fashion that establishes a clear illusion of gravity - although there are a couple things I want to call out:

  • Firstly, be sure to draw each of these sausages forms in their entirety, rather than cutting them off where they are hidden from view. This will help us consider both how those forms sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it.

  • I adjusted your cast shadows here. As you can see, the shadows on the ground plane should not have any gaps, because there are no gaps between the masses themselves. Also, adding some additional line weight to clarify the overlaps between the forms can help to organize what we're seeing.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, there's a lot here that you're doing quite well. The areas in which I want to offer critique fall into the following categories:

  • The use of additional masses

  • Leg construction

  • Head construction

  • Fur

Starting with your additional masses, you're actually handling this quite well in many situations, and I can see that you're putting a lot of thought and effort into how those masses are meant to wrap around one another. There's just one main point I want to call out here.

In your earlier constructions like this one, while you don't entirely use sharp corners in how you're designing the masses themselves, you're very close to doing so, with some of them only being ever so slightly rounded. If we look later in your constructions however, those corners do get more rounded, like here on this construction.

In essence, as you progress through the constructions, your focus starts out in the right place, but gradually shifts away as you get more confident.

One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette. Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure.

You can see this demonstrated in this diagram. Here it is in action - it's important that you use sharp corners where you need the mass to convincingly wrap around the structure.

Continuing onto the next point (leg construction), in my critique of your last attempt at this lesson, I did point out the fact that you weren't really employing the use of additional masses from the diagrams I shared in the critiques of your Lesson 4 work, specifically on your legs' sausages structures. You use them in a couple places (like on the joints of this wolf), but it's very minimal. Observing your references more closely and carefully, once you've got the basic structure down, will reveal various opportunities to use this approach. This will also allow you to stick more closely to the characteristics of simple sausages (which you are doing more, but do still have some discrepancies with).

Take care not to only focus on the things that impact the silhouette of the structure. Considering the "inbetween" forms is important as well, as it helps us to think about how the forms fit together, creating a more solid, grounded, three dimensional structure as shown here on another student's work.

Oh, one more point about legs before we move on - specifically, feet. I can see you jumping into more complex shapes to try and capture the feet, with all the toes, all at once. This of course breaks the core principles of construction. Instead, build up the basic structure with a "boxy" form (you don't have to draw the internal edges, but rather taking care to include corners in the boxy form's silhouette will help imply the distinction between the planes). Once it's in place, you can then build upon it with yet more boxy forms. Here's an example of what I mean on another student's work.

Moving onto head construction, this one's going to be pretty quick - it does not appear that you followed the information I provided on this topic in my last critique. I'm not going to get into it further, but you can read through it again. The notes there share a specific approach to head construction, and I'm not really seeing clear signs that you were following along with the provided demos.

The last thing I wanted to do is to take a quick moment to discuss how you're tackling your fur. The main thing is that you tend to add your fur with a lot of marks, but without a whole lot of thought going into how each individual mark needs to be designed. As a result, you get marks that:

The biggest thing to remember with any kind of texture here is that what we're doing is not reproducing our reference images one-to-one. Rather, it's as though we're attempting to convey what we can see to someone who can only look at our drawing. It's all about communicating visually, giving them enough information to understand that what they're looking at is furry. This also means that we don't need to go all over the entire thing and make it all as furry as possible - although that isn't something you did either. You focused your attention to the edge of the forms, which is the right call. But it also means that you don't actually need to add nearly as much as you did here.

A few marks placed with intent and consideration, taking the time to design those tufts, even if it means only adding a handful of them, is far better than laying down repetitive or erratic strokes.

This kind of issue does come up, and I have an example from another student that should help. Here's the original - as you can see, they pushed the fur farther than you did. Here's my edit. I've concentrated the tufts (which I do talk about here), into specific areas. Each one is drawn with care, each tuft is designed, but ultimately even this minimal quantity is still enough.

Anyway, that about covers it. I have called out things for you to work on, and some things that you have not yet addressed, but I do feel that you have enough information now to be able to work on these things on your own, and I'm confident enough in how you've developed in the areas where you have improved, that this should be well within your capacity. Just be sure to read through both my initial feedback and my new feedback here periodically to make sure you're not letting yourself forget things.

Also, when my overhaul of the course material reaches this lesson, I'll essentially be reframing all of the information I've given you, but in a more cohesive manner - so revisiting the lesson at that time (even just the text/video material, not necessarily doing all the homework or getting feedback) would be a good idea.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.