Starting with your organic intersections, overall you're headed in the right direction here - I can see that you're thinking about how those forms pile upon one another, and how the shadows can be cast from one form onto the surfaces around it. there are a couple things I want to call out however to ensure that you continue learning more from this exercise:

• Firstly, be careful with those ellipses at the ends of your sausage forms. These are contour lines just like the more partial curves - it's just that when the sausage is facing the viewer, we're able to see the ellipse all the way around. This does however mean that this does need to match the contour curves preceding it, in terms of degree, as shown here.

• Also as mentioned in the top right, with the shifting of the degree, remember that as we slide away from the viewer along the length of a given sausage form, the degree generally gets wider. It also takes into account how the given sausage form is turning in space, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb. You can review the lesson 1 ellipses video if you're unsure of why that is.

• When drawing your cast shadows, consider both a single consistent light source, and every form individually, as well as the surfaces receiving them - including the ground plane. Right now you've got shadows being cast in a few different directions (they'd all be cast in roughly the same direction if they were coming from the same light source), and they do seem to fall upon the ground in a way that suggests an inconsistent surface, rather than a simple flat one. Also, there are definitely plenty of spots that the forms should be casting shadows (albeit small, narrow ones). I added a couple extra ones here and also corrected how that upper form flows over the form beneath it, in order to more properly convey how it wraps around the structure below.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I can see that in large part, you have attempted to address a number of the points I raised in my critique of your Lesson 4 work - most notably in that you're definitely making a major effort to build upon your constructions with complete forms that have their own self-enclosed silhouettes. This is a step in the right direction, although there are ways in which this can be improved upon further.

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.

You can also see this in action here on top of one of your rhinos. There are a couple specific things to note here:

• How every inward curve is placed specifically (I've marked most of them out with light red arrows). It you were to ask me about why I used inward curves in any of those places, I would be able to tell you the specific reason - you should be able to do the same if someone pointed at any inward curve on the masses you've drawn.

• When we add a mass, it becomes part of the "existing structure" - and if we add another piled on top of the previous one, it wraps around it in 3D space, rather than overlapping it in 2D. The way you were drawing it in yours generally ignored the presence of any other masses, making them feel more like flat shapes pasted on top of the drawing.

• I blocked on some simple big masses at the hip and shoulder, to basically block in the large muscles that tend to exist there, as they help quadrupeds walk around. I'm not worrying about specific anatomy - but if you know to look for them, it can usually be pretty easy to drop a simple mass in like that. From there, we have something that we can actually press our additional masses against, giving us both a reason to incorporate more inward curves, and a way to "ground" and interlock the pieces together, making it all feel much more solid and cohesive.

• And of course, continue to push yourself to draw each individual addition as its own complete, fully self-enclosed silhouette. There are definitely places where you're still drawing one-off individual lines to enclose an area against other existing forms, but without introducing a new, complete form, as I've highlighted here.

As a side note, while you did generally employ the sausage method in some cases to varying degrees (something I applauded you for in Lesson 4), you appeared to be far less consistent in that here, often working with connected cylinders instead. You should still be employing the sausage method consistently here for all of your leg structures. Even if your reference may not particularly match - and I actually did mention this in your previous critique - the key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat.

Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms - again, something I provided demos/examples of before. I saw you doing this a bit in your llama's back leg for instance, but as a whole it seems like you kinda tossed the technique aside. When you did use the sausage method, you'd usually stick with the basic sausage structure, rather than building on top of it to further build up complexity in the direction defined by your reference. You may not have noticed the additional complexity in the reference, but that comes from two things:

• Being sure to always go back and look for those elements, see if there's little things that you can build up by adding yet more additional forms

• And experience - knowing what to look for. That just comes from spending a lot of time looking.

While I did provide examples in the insects critique, you can also see how we can ostensibly build up masses on an animal's leg on the bottom section of this image from another student's critique. Note how we're not only focusing on the masses that impact the silhouette of the leg - we're also concerned with the ones inside of the silhouette, because they help determine how they're all going to fit together.

As a side note, it's best that you not add contour lines to your additional masses - while it feels like this can make a form feel more solid, it really just distracts us from the focus being on the design of its silhouette, and having that do all of the heavy lifting. It's easy to slip into the thinking that we've "fixed" an incorrect silhouette by adding contour lines. Fortunately you don't do this much right now, but I wanted to get ahead of it just in case.

Continuing on, the last thing I wanted to discuss for now is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, and how I'm finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here on the informal demos page.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eyesockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.

• This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.

• We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eyesocket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

I see you employing elements close to this (or at least this way of thinking) in one or two spots - like the dog head on the bottom of this page, which was very well done, but overall this can definitely be pushed farther, especially when it comes to all the pieces fitting snugly together, and you'll get much better results.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but with a bit of finagling it can still apply pretty well. To demonstrate this for another student, I found the most banana-headed rhinoceros I could, and threw together this demo.

And that about covers it. I've definitely shared quite a few things with you, and I would not expect you to fully absorb it entirely in just one read-through. So, now that you've reached the end, give yourself a bit of a break, then come back and read through the feedback again. Then you can start on the revisions I've assigned below, to demonstrate your understanding.

I'd also recommend that you only work on one animal drawing in a given day. If you need to (and you probably will), it's perfectly okay to spend multiple sittings and multiple days on a single drawing, but I think it's best that if you worked on a different drawing that day, that you not move onto the next until the following. This will ensure that you're in the right frame to give each individual drawing as much time as it requires - to execute your marks to the best of your ability, to observe your reference as frequently and as carefully as is needed, and to think through how your different forms fit together in 3D space.