Starting with your organic intersections, overall you've done a pretty good job respecting the core focus of this exercise, and have demonstrated believable interactions between these forms. For the future though, I do encourage you to keep your sausage forms roughly the same size (definitely avoid the tiny ones), and try not to make them overly long. Also, on the first page there were definitely a few that you didn't draw in their entirety.

As a whole, I am quite pleased with your animal constructions, in that you've demonstrated a pretty solid grasp of the forms you're working with and how they can be combined to create believable, complex results. There are some things I'd like to point out, of course, but you've made some nice progress throughout.

The first thing I want to call out is simply that many of your drawings were definitely quite small. The biggest issue that arises from this is that drawing small can really get in the way of our brain's spatial reasoning skills, and can interfere with how easy it is to draw with our whole arm in order to maintain the flow and fluidity of our strokes. It basically results in an unnecessary limitation that keeps us from performing at our best. It is always best to focus on giving each drawing as much room as it requires - don't go out of your way to think, "okay I'm going to fit 3 drawings on this page" and giving each its set space. Draw your first as big as it needs to be, then assess whether there's enough room for another. If there is, draw it in, and if there isn't, that's okay too.

Next is a tendency to add a lot of contour lines that don't necessarily contribute much to the drawing itself. You do this here and there - it's not a consistent problem, but it does come up quite a bit when drawing additional masses. For example, if we look at the two horses on this page, we can see that once you've drawn your additional mass, you have a tendency to reinforce them with additional contour lines, but these aren't actually having much of an impact. From what I can see, it seems to be more of a reflex - that you feel they need to be reinforced without actually considering whether or not they do.

It is extremely important whenever putting any mark on the page, that we assess what exactly it is meant to contribute to the drawing, how it is to accomplish that task, how we can draw it such that it does the job as well as possible, and whether any other existing mark is doing it already. With contour lines, there are a couple things to consider. First off, the contour lines that sit on the surface of a single given form are subject to diminishing returns - meaning the second will be less impactful than the first, and the third will be even less notable than that. Secondly, some contour lines are simply more effective than others. The contour lines that sit at the intersection between forms, defining their relationships to one another in 3D space, are extremely effective, and can make the first type of contour line pointless.

Thirdly, contour lines only make a form feel solid and three dimensional on their own. When it comes to additional masses, the focus is on establishing how they relate to the existing structure. That can only be achieved through the silhouette we draw right from the beginning, and how we wrap it around the first that are already present. Now, in this regard you're doing this decently throughout your constructions, but there are ways that it can be improved.

Let's take a look at this. I actually quite liked the way you'd drawn the masses on the deer's back (contour lines aside), but they were definitely very firm, heavy, almost pseudo-geometric forms and while they did wrap around some of the structure beneath them, there was definitely a rigidity to them. The way I drew the forms on top, however, are more organic - rather than being something like "soft boxes" as you approached them, they start off as a sort of soft ball of meat. When they float in the void, they're as simple as possible, literally a ball with only outward curves. As we press them down into another structure however, they start to curve inwards in the areas making contact, creating corners and developing greater complexity to the form's silhouette. Here's what I mean.

The idea here is that these forms can only develop complexity when they're pressing against some other form. In order to determine the specific nature of that complexity, we need to understand the nature of the form pressing against it . In the deer example I drew on top of, the forms are pushing up against other additional masses, and those big hip/shoulder masses. Everywhere they're not touching anything, they're still dead-simple outward curves.

As a side note, I also went in and drew on top of your deer's head. This was to demonstrate how head construction is all about building these components that all fit up against one another. The eye socket, the brow ridge, the cheekbones, the muzzle - they all fit together like a three dimensional puzzle. You can see a more in-depth explanation of how to think of the head in this demonstration. Be sure to read the text that comes along with it.

Getting back to the additional masses, they're also relevant to the leg construction as well. You may remember that back in lesson 4's critique, I showed you this ant leg example and this dog leg example. Each additional mass wrapping around the sausage structure is pressing up against forms that are clearly defined. While we don't necessarily need to draw each one, if we're uncertain about what forms actually exist there, it is worth drawing them all. Compare that to the deer on the top of this page, where you added forms around the joints to make them a little more "knobby" but the silhouette of those additional forms don't actually imply the presence of specific forms they're being pressed up against. Instead, they don't really seem to imply anything specific, it's just vague and general. Always think about each additional mass in the context in which it exists.

Now, it is worth mentioning that you didn't really incorporate the points I raised about your leg construction from the previous critique much here. There are small attempts here and there, but there is definitely a lot more complexity you could be capturing from your reference images. That, I'll leave you to work on your own.

As a whole I'm fairly pleased with your work here, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There is still plenty of room for growth, so be sure to keep working on the points I've raised.