Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along well, in that they're capturing a good sense of how these forms stack up in three dimensions, and how they slump under the weight of gravity. There are two things to keep an eye on however when it comes to your cast shadows:
Firstly, cast shadows must abide by a consistent light source. On your first page, you appear to have shadows being cast to the left and to the right, which would be a mistake. Always decide on where your light source is going to be first, then stick to it.
A minor point, but try to be a little more bold with your cast shadows, allowing them to spill further than just at the base of the form itself. I marked in some quick adjustments here to your first page.
Now, continuing onto your animal constructions, I'll start by saying that what you've drawn here is lovely. It's all very pretty, and you've demonstrated strong observational skills. That said, in a lot of ways, you have deviated somewhat sharply from what the course itself asks of us, and in focusing quite as much as you have on detail, and on generally focusing on having a pretty picture at the end of each drawing, you have moved away from what the course itself asked.
Remember above all that the drawings we do in this course are, all of them, exercises - a means to an end. The actual result, of how the drawing turns out, is of little concern to us. Rather, it's the process we employ which allows us to further develop our skills. Each drawing is a puzzle - our reference image helps define the direction in which we wish to add, and every step thereafter focuses on the addition of a single new form, one at a time, defining the way in which they relate to the existing structure at every step, and gradually working towards something that is solid and believable. It's in manipulating these forms, and considering how they fit together in 3D space, and defining those relationships, that we push our brain's capacity for spatial reason further with every attempt.
In your drawings, it seems you've gotten somewhat derailed by the promise of the detail phase - both in terms of focusing most of your time there (and thus cutting some corners in the construction itself), and on what you ultimately did when you reached it. When we add detail, some students will take this as an opportunity to "decorate" their drawings (that is, doing whatever they can to add to it, to make it more visually pleasing, etc.), but unfortunately decoration is something of an arbitrary goal. After all, there's no specific point at which we've added "enough" decoration.
What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.
Admittedly, your drawings vary between arbitrary decoration, and actual purposeful texture, and as far as students who get lost in decoration go, your work is not the most derailed by it that I have seen. That said, through a lot of these drawings you are visibly changing your approach in order to favour a cleaner canvas for that later decoration. In order to achieve a prettier end result, you're altering the exercise.
Another quick point to remember is that as discussed here, form shading is not something we're incorporating into our drawings here. You do have a few places - like the underbelly of this stag, the underside and back leg of this elephant, and so on where you did delve into form shading. Try to limit your use of sold, filled black shapes for cast shadows only - meaning that each one should directly define the relationship between the form casting that shadow, and the surface receiving it. That applies both for constructed forms, as well as when drawing texture (for which our marks are better off first designed as intentional, outlined shapes, then filled in instead of painted on one arbitrary stroke at a time).
The last point on this topic I want to mention is that you have a tendency to draw that early construction more faintly, and then you go back in with either an entirely different pen (which would be breaking the rules of doing your linework only with a 0.5mm fineliner, though thicker pens and brush pens are allowed for filling predefined shapes you've already outlined), or by applying a ton more pressure - though if I had to judge my eye, I'd assume it was a different pen entirely. As a result, you end up tracking back over a lot of your existing marks, not to build on top of them but to "commit" to them in the same way we would if we were using a rough sketch and a clean-up pass, which as discussed here in Lesson 2 is not permitted for the work you do in this course.
You may be misunderstanding how line weight should be applied, and pushing its use far beyond what it should be. Instead of using line weight to effectively redraw your construction, line weight should be its own separate pass towards the end of a construction where we simply clarify how different forms overlap one another. We apply line weight in a subtle fashion (not to have it stand out, but rather more like a whisper to the viewer's subconscious), focusing it only in the localized areas where those overlaps occur (as demonstrated with these two overlapping leaves).
Remember above all that the way in which we make our marks - down to a specific use of the ghosting method to break each stroke into three distinct steps (planning/preparation/execution) so as to ensure that every mark is thought out - is critical to what we're doing here. So, you should work to avoid falling back into the pattern of sketching loosely. While these kinds of approaches are entirely appropriate for drawing in general, they will serve to make our work here far less effective.
Now we're already well past the 1000 word mark, and I haven't really talked much about your actual construction. I'm going to try to address it in point form, in hopes of being somewhat more brief:
As shown here, you're still cutting into the silhouettes of some of your constructed forms. This is something I emphasized in my critique of your lesson 4 work, and is definitely one of the casualties of the looser, sketchier approach you've employed.
This head construction explanation/demo is currently the most up-to-date approach, and it's linked from the top of the tiger head demo page. While eventually I have plans to incorporate it into the main lesson material (as obviously right now this can be kind of confusing, with different explanations of varying usefulness being available), but I simply haven't had the time to do so just yet. This approach is the one you should be applying as closely as you can, to all of your head constructions. As shown here it focuses on a specific pentagon shape for the eye socket, defining how the muzzle actually connects to the cranial ball, and ultimately keeping everything wedged together, so each piece is grounded against another, helping to make them all feel solid and 3D. Now, all of the available explanations/demos do at least stress some parts of this (which is why they're still present in the lesson material) - especially the importance of grounding the eye socket against the muzzle in some fashion, and generally having the pieces fit together like those of a 3D puzzle. Many of your drawings however do have the eye socket floating independently, so keep an eye on that.
Additionally, when it comes to constructing your eyelids, it can help immensely to draw them as shown here. This is especially useful when figuring out how to wrap our eyelids around the sphere of the eyeball.
You're somewhat inconsistent in adhering to the principles of the sausage method here - not always sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages (you do a decent job of this in many cases, but it's kind of mixed, with a lot of the upper-leg segments having one end bigger than the other), not consistently defining the joint between segments with a contour line (and using those contour lines elsewhere along the sausage's lengths instead). Be sure to review the specific elements of the sausage method, as well as the additional diagrams I shared with you in my critique of your Lesson 4 work, which show how to build on top of the sausage structure once it's in place.
This is a minor point - when constructing wings with visible feathers coming off them, right now you're starting with a larger structure, then drawing the feathers inside of its bounds (like here). This results in you having to cut back into the silhouette of that earlier mass. Instead, try to treat the initial structure as a solid mass, and then add feathers to it as shown here. This isn't strictly the only way to go about it, but as we work on organic constructions, I find it best to limit students to working additively whenever possible.
When building up additional masses on your animals, you have a tendency to try and have one mass accomplish way too much (like here). Don't be afraid to break them up into separate forms, focusing each one on being as simple as possible (and focusing its complexity only where the silhouette's design helps to define the relationship between that form and the existing structure). 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.
In that same drawing of yours, I also saw an attempt at using contour lines to counteract the fact that the mass's complexity made it very flat. Ultimately contour lines like these (that sit on the surface of a single form) only serve to make a form feel 3D in isolation, rather than define their relationship with other forms. For that, we must use either a intersectional contour line (like those introduced in Lesson 2's form intersections, as well as in the sausage method) in the cases where our forms interpenetrate, or if they wrap around one another (as these additional masses do), then it's all on the design of that form's silhouette. On top of that, the contour lines you drew here are obviously drawn very quickly and somewhat haphazardly, which also undermined their effectiveness.
Now, I've obviously given you a ton to consider here. I'm a little split between asking for a full redo of the lesson (given that you didn't actually apply its principles as closely as you should have), or just asking for revisions. Normally when I end up having to put a lot of time into a critique (I'm just about hitting an hour now), I'll lean on a full redo - that said, your later drawings do show much stronger regard for spatial reasoning (even if they don't apply all the specific methodologies of the course), and so I'm going to go for revisions this time around.
Keep in mind however - if your revisions do not address all of the points I've raised here (note that there are things I mentioned in my lesson 4 critique that have needed to be repeated, so that's not an unreasonable possibility to suggest), I will ask for a full redo at that point.
Next Steps:
Please submit 5 additional pages of animal constructions - for these, please do not add any texture or detail and focus only on construction.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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