Across your submission, I'm definitely seeing areas where you're demonstrating a well developing grasp of how the forms you're working with relate to one another, and how these complex animals can be built up through the combination of simple forms to achieve greater complexity. There are also certain key issues that I believe we will be able to address and clarify in order to show further improvement to your work.

To start, take a look at the notes I've drawn on one of your page of horses. Here I address a couple separate things:

• Along the top, the importance of drawing through your forms, ensuring that they are all complete and enclosed, rather than cutting each other off where they overlap. If we look at your organic intersections, we can also see some cases there where you didn't draw each sausage in its entirety. A form doesn't cease to exist where we cannot see it, and drawing them each in their entirety helps us to better grasp how they sit in space and how they relate to one another within that 3D space. Taking that a step further, when dealing with additional masses like these, it's all about figuring out we can take a new form and attach it to the structure that already exists. As soon as we attach a form to the structure, it becomes a part of it - and therefore the next mass must also now attempt to wrap around that first one, should they fall in the same location (as opposed to having them overlap or phase into one another). We'll touch on this a little more in a moment.

• You're piling on a lot of contour lines to those additional masses, and I understand why. As you add them, you're finding that they don't feel entirely 3D, not entirely convincing, and so you want to make them feel more 3D. The problem here isn't exactly that they're not 3D enough though - it's that they don't actually define a believable relationship with the rest of the existing structure. That is the problem we need to solve, and the kind of contour lines you've added here - those that sit on the surface of a single form - are great for adding volume to a single form in isolation, but they don't create these kinds of relationships. Those relationships can instead be created in one of two ways - by defining the intersection between two forms in 3D space (like in lesson 2's form intersections), or by defining how one form wraps around another through its silhouette, and without the use of any other contour lines. In this second case, you can kind of treat the mass itself functioning like a contour line, in how it wraps around the other structure.

The best way to think about these additional masses is first how they exist floating on their own, like a ball of soft meat or clay, in the void. Here they're not touching anything at all, and so they exist in their simplest possible state, with a circle for a silhouette, made up only of outward curves. Once we press that ball against an existing structure however, its silhouette starts to take on greater complexity, forming inward curves in direct response to whatever it presses up against, and corners to transition from the contour of one form to another. Here's what I mean.

The key takeaway here is that the silhouette of a given mass isn't something random we just slap down on the construction - it is specific, because every turn represents how it's interacting with some part of the structure to which it attaches. This also means that we need to be aware of the kinds of forms that are present. In my notes on your page of horses, you'll notice that on the right side horse, I first added the big mass of its shoulder (animals tend to have big shoulder muscles, the big engines that drive them as they walk and haul their body weight). Doing so gave me something specific around which to wrap the mass I then put up along its back. Every curve of that additional form's silhouette is specific, reflecting the presence and relationship with a particular existing structure.

Now I do see you doing this to an extent, in some places, but it's hit-and-miss. Sometimes you're thinking about how they wrap one around the other, sometimes you exaggerate that curvature nicely, and sometimes, like the humps of the camel on the right side of this page, they're just kind of plopped there, not really "gripping" the torso firmly.

It's worth noting that the way in which these additional masses can sometimes overlap and build upon one another creates some really nice "pinches" in the animal's own silhouette. It's this kind of feature that tends to imply musculature - so it's good to keep each mass as fulfilling a specific purpose, keeping them small, rather than stretching them across large distances and amalgamating them into singular forms.

Jumping down to your cheetahs, I am definitely noticing that you appear to be going through the steps of construction a little more quickly, resulting in linework that isn't quite as solidly built as the earlier drawings. This seems to go hand in hand with your confidence increasing - which is a good thing - but you need to slow yourself down ensure that you're planning and preparing adequately before every mark, and really thinking through each decision. I'm also noticing that you're not necessarily adhering to the sausage method completely - specifically that in a lot of cases you're skipping the important step of defining the joint between sausage segments with a contour line (I pointed this out on your horses as well).

The last two things I'm going to talk about is head construction, and a bit about fur. Your head construction is definitely something you're experimenting and playing with a great deal, and I think you're moving quite a bit in the right direction. In some places you're dealing more with floating pieces that don't quite fit together - the eye socket and the muzzle being loosely related, rather than firmly joined. In others, you snap them together more meaningfully, building stronger relationships and dividing the head into more significant groups of planes. There's definitely more success in your meerkats, for example, than some of your horses.

That said, I do want to make sure that you've gone through the notes here. It goes over the approach I want to incorporate into the main lesson, when I get a chance, but for now it'll have to stay as one of the informal demonstrations. Pay particular attention to how generous I am with drawing the eye sockets big, and being very purposeful in how they're shaped. Every edge is a cut, like with a knife, and the pentagon with the point facing downwards helps allow space for the muzzle, cheekbone and brow ridge to be built up around it. When it comes to drawing heads, if you want to get into more detail like eye lids and such, make sure you've given yourself plenty of room on the page. Otherwise, it's okay to leave them out.

About the fur, you are currently relying pretty heavily on fairly repetitive, auto-pilot marks. As explained here, you need to be designing your tufts of fur more meaningfully. Draw fewer, but make sure that they're shaped intentionally - not as random lines, but as logical extensions of the form's silhouette. Even where I leave gaps and openings, I'm still thinking about how I'm adding shapes to this silhouette, not that my strokes represent individual pieces of fur. Slow down, and take your time in planning that all out. Marks put down carelessly will generally not yield good results, especially in a course like this that demands your patience, specifically to help improve your instincts, and your ability to work quickly. We achieve that by being careful and meaningful with our decisions here. After all, you don't train instincts by using those same instincts.

You're definitely moving in the right direction, but I'm going to assign a few additional pages of animal drawings to see you apply what I've explained here. Take note - I want you to invest as much time as you reasonably can into each drawing. Don't feel compelled to work quickly, or meet any particular deadline. Many students have this misguided expectation that they need to finish a drawing in a single sitting as well, which is entirely untrue. If you need to stretch a drawing over several days, that's perfectly fine, and encouraged.