Starting with your organic intersections, your work here is spot on. Your forms are solid, with believable interactions between them in 3D space, your cast shadows are minimal but very impactful, and your use of line weight blends helps bridge the gap between cast shadow and the base linework to produce a pleasant overall result.

Overall, your work on the animal constructions is well done as a whole, and does convey an overall strong grasp of the concepts covered in the lesson. There are a few issues I want to call out, but they are simply things that will help you continue to develop, and things to keep you on the right track as far as this course goes.

The first issue I'm seeing tends to come up in very small areas here and there, rarely in enough quantity to address directly, but it is actually something of note. There are definitely places in your drawings where your linework - especially your underlying construction - gets a little loose and explorative, as though you're putting them down without an intent to really commit. This generally goes hand-in-hand with the marks being fainter and not quite planned as keenly as they ought to be.

In particular, there is definitely a tendency to get just a little bit sketchier around your animals' eye sockets, not necessarily really pinning down a specific, planned, and carved footprint for the eye socket itself as we see in demos like the head construction notes in the informal demos page.

There are also more obvious signs that you're not adhering 100% to the principle of applying the ghosting method to every single mark, and ultimately executing one mark per line, such as the neck of this deer. It's really not that anything in your construction there is badly done, but just that instead of pulling yourself back and going through the steps of planning and preparing prior to the execution of your mark is at the very core of this course as a whole. When we get particularly enthusiastic about a particular subject matter, we can easily find ourselves inclined to jump in and really feel our way around - but in this course, you need to stop and think. No sketching - only drawing purposeful, planned marks to which you are wholly committed.

There are actually a lot of cases where in small ways, it's clear that you're laying down the earliest steps of construction (drawing the ribcage, pelvis, torso sausage, etc.) as though they're not actually solid forms, but rather loose plans around which you start fleshing out the "real" stuff. In this puppy drawing, we can actually see the ribcage and pelvis floating a little more loosely within the structure (mostly because they're drawn so much more faintly), and even the masses of the thighs visibly stick out from the "final" construction, running into the mistake of cutting back into the silhouette of a form.

Now, a pretty major cause for at least some of this tendency to be a little more loose and haphazard is the size at which you're drawing. This kangaroo is a particularly good example of why I push students to draw big, taking full advantage of the space they have available to them on the page. When we draw small, we tend to restrict our brain's capacity to think through spatial problems, while similarly limiting the ease with which we can execute marks with our whole arm. It becomes tempting to draw more loosely, and to do so from the wrist. With more room, there's less of an excuse to let things fall by the wayside.

All that said, your drawings are still among the better submissions I get for this lesson. Despite the tendency to get a little loose for your early steps, you still approach the rest of your constructions with a strong respect for each form's solidity and tangibility, and as a result your constructions still feel pretty solid. You're also generally showing a good grasp of how your additional masses wrap around one another, although there are some cases especially along the legs (specifically where we can get into those small, restrictive areas) where the silhouettes of your additional masses have a few small issues.

When thinking about additional forms, it helps to first consider how a mass might exist in its simplest form, in an empty void away from the rest of our construction. There it floats like a ball of soft meat, completely simple, consisting only of outward curves. When we bring it over to our structure, however, and press it against some part of it, we start introducing complexity into its silhouette. It takes on inward curves, and corners where those curves change, as shown here. The key to this is that every bit of complexity along the form's silhouette speaks to a specific contact with a physical form.

Looking at one of your deer drawings' legs, I see a number of places where you have the part of the silhouette of an additional mass continue to curve outwards, rather than curving inwards in response to that contact (as shown here). This is how we get the impression that they're more like stickers on the flat page, rather than an actual form wrapping around the 3D structure.

Similarly, we have to be careful when it comes to forms that curve inwards where there is nothing actually pressing into them. It can work, but we're putting ourselves in a tricky position that may make the form feel less solid as well.

Lastly, note how we don't necessarily just focus on the additional masses that impact the silhouette of a given leg, because these pieces all fit together like a puzzle. As shown with this ant leg, and this dog's leg, there can be a lot more going on internally that helps hold everything together.

At the end of the day, I know you're concerned with your proportions (they do sometimes get a little out of whack), but that really isn't at the core of this course. I fully accept that students' proportions may get out of hand, simply because it's not something we focus on very much. What is more important to me, however, is whether the resulting constructions still feel believable and plausible - whether the forms fit together in a manner that makes us assume that you were just drawing a really weird individual with a particularly big head, and that you captured the poor thing faithfully.

So, you do have things to work on, but I am still very pleased with your progress, and feel you are ready to move forwards. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Do note however - once you get into lessons 6 and 7, any kind of sketchiness or explorative markmaking will cause you a lot of trouble. Where organic subject matter is more forgiving, geometric is very much not.