I think the best place to start with this critique is by outlining a few points about you, the advantages and disadvantages you're working with, as well as some concerns present in the lesson itself that are also factors at play.

The Lesson:

• As you've come to see from this course as a whole, the lessons are currently in an in-between state, where we're overhauling the material to eliminate contradictions, to improve how consistently the specific techniques we want you to use are shown in the demonstrations, and so on. But a lot of those inconsistencies are still present as of right now. There are, for example, several different approaches to head construction that are shared throughout the lesson (although we do mention here at the top of the tiger demo that students should do their best to employ the approach from the informal head construction demo to all of our constructions. Similarly, there are plenty of demos that don't use the sausage method for their leg construction (given that this technique was developed after many of those demos were produced).

• These contradictions and whatnot make the material a bit tricky for those who are not submitting for official critique especially, while those who are submitting for official critique tend to have much of this stuff called out to them - for example, how much we stress the use of the sausage method in Lesson 4.

You:

• We know that you have learning difficulties. While I don't know the full extent to what they are and how they affect you (and that's something I'm definitely not equipped to understand anyway), I have seen that they impact your memory at the very least.

• And of course, being as active as you are on Discord, you tend to get a lot of extra help - both from myself, and from other students in the community. I know a ways back (outside of the context of Drawabox, more because you were trying to draw bunny heads on your own time), I shared the informal head construction demo with you, and we talked about how it was a very effective approach to building up the basic structure.

• You definitely have struggled a great deal with observation in the past, and to try to help with this I have explained some techniques to help organize the information you're looking at in your reference, to better identify what needs your attention. We did this by discussing the use of negative shapes as shown here from one of the many rounds of feedback in your Lesson 4 work.

These are all things we are both aware of, as we've discussed them all before (sometimes several times). With that established, let's get into your homework.

Starting with your organic intersections, the actual images you've taken here are a little tricky to make out - the photos themselves aren't the best (they're somewhat blurry), and then the linework is rather chaotic as well. One issue I did notice - which I made a little more obvious by tracing over your sausages so we could see them more clearly - is that you're not necessarily drawing each form such that it believably wraps around the form beneath it. You've got their silhouettes' edges crossing where the upper sausage has a really significant outward curve - but what we want is for them to cross at the peak of an inward curve, as shown along the right side of the image I linked. You can even think about how the sausage wraps around the other, as though it follows the contour lines one could draw upon the lower sausage, as shown here.

When it comes to your cast shadows here, the ones you're drawing are kind of... random. It doesn't seem like you're considering each form individually, and what kind of shadow it would cast, and how that shadow would wrap along the surface beneath it. For the pile on the right side of this page, you just randomly cut straight across your forms as though they weren't there. To demonstrate just how much was missing, I tried tracing over as many sausages from the first page as I could make sense of, and establishing the shadows they would be casting, as shown here. As you can see, there's way more going on than you included, and the shadows you drew tended not to really match the forms that were casting them.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I'm going to try to lay out the main issues I'm seeing in point form - then we'll look at the ones that require more exploration individually. Before we get to that, however, there are some things you're doing well that I want to take a moment to call out.

• Your additional masses are an area where, while you are very inconsistent much of the time, you are definitely thinking about how your forms - mainly the ones you add along the animal's back/spine - wrap around the existing structure. Although usually this is only on one side of the additional mass, and you still need to include another inward curve along the other side as shown here (blue is the one you did well, red is where you need another inward curve).

• I can see that you're making a concerted effort to think about the main elements of your animals' heads - mainly the initial cranial ball and t he muzzle - as they exist in 3D space. We can see this here for example. There's a lot of ways in which this can be improved (and I'll expand on that later) but I wanted to acknowledge that you are putting effort into considering how these forms relate to one another in 3D space.

As for the major issues:

• Most noticeably, you continue to experience a lot of difficulty when laying out your sausage structures - more specifically in terms of making them the length you want. As a result, you have a ton of cases where as you build out the legs, they just get bigger and bigger. For example, if we look at this donkey demo drawing, the legs just get away from you, and it ends up way taller than it is in the demo.

• In addition to the previous point (and related to it), you definitely struggle when it comes to observation - which is something we did note before. This is easier to make sense of when it comes to looking at fully detailed reference images, as they're chalk full of visual information to parse through. But when we look at the demonstrations however, most of them are broken down quite a bit, with that donkey demo from the previous point being especially granular, often being broken down into like one or two marks. If we look at the actual donkey demo - specifically step 8 where we add a few lines to the donkey's head, As shown here, in that step we draw a line that stops just before the box at the end of the donkey's muzzle - but you drew it coming all the way down. That step, as most steps in that demo, have very few things going on, so the students don't have too many things to worry about, allowing them to execute each step more easily and accurately. Despite this, you still drew the mark very differently than shown. Now, this could be in some way due to the difficulties we outlined at the beginning of this critique - or you may simply not have taken enough time for each and every step.

• It does appear that though I'd point it out to you previously (though this was a while ago), and it is mentioned here at the top of the tiger head demo page, you haven't really applied that approach to your head constructions. You are probably applying elements of it based on what you remember from before, but you're not following that process step by step, as it's shown here. I can say that fairly confidently because the approach shown there contains very specific elements - most notably, you don't generally define the forehead, or the cheeks. Your focus is completely limited to the eye sockets and the muzzle, and there are plenty of cases - like this drawing where you end up with a floating eye socket (and in this case, no discernible muzzle at all). It very much seems that you're jumping around between using some of the techniques/tools you've encountered in this course, and just putting random lines down with minimal direction.

• There are definitely places where you use the sausage method, and there are loads of places where you don't. I keep coming back to this deer, because it's a good example of both areas of strength and areas of weakness. In this case, you haven't used the sausage method for the legs at all.

• There are also places where you'll use the sausage method, but where you're having trouble controlling it. I did mention this in the first point in this list, in the context of drawing the sausage forms themselves, but as shown here there are still spots where you're not putting any contour curves to define the joints between your sausages, as well as one case I pointed out there where you placed the contour curve on only one of the two sausages for some reason.

• You also tend to hit points where you, for whatever reason, decide to break away from the principles of construction (that is, always building everything up from simple to complex). We can see this in some of the feet of your animals, like this duck's feet as well as this lizard's feet. We can also see this in your moose antlers here. This is one of the core, driving principles of this course, and it's not something you can easily allow yourself to jump back and forth between. Everything develops from simple to complex, and you cannot allow yourself to skip steps.

The main thing I wanted to expand upon was head construction, simply because it's one of those things that we do have a sort of recipe for - which as I mentioned above, sometimes you follow pieces of, and sometimes you scrap altogether.

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.

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.

As with all of the more recent demonstrations (including the shrimp and lobster demos from the last lesson), you can see here that I'm not just putting random lines down and trying to "explore" as I go. This is at the heart of Drawabox in general, and you can see this in all of the demonstrations, but all the more in the recent ones where I'm also focusing on how every mark is part of a three dimensional form that I'm introducing to the world.

If we compare this to how you're approaching your drawings, I see a lot of panicking. I see you putting down marks individually, not necessarily considering how they create a complete form, or how those forms press up against others - you have a lot of gaps in silhouettes, areas where you just kind of forget to close things off, or where you forget to define the clear relationship between forms (like those missing contour lines in the sausage method I pointed out earlier).

As a whole, taking everything into consideration - your learning struggles, the lesson's issues, and the work I'm seeing here, I certainly don't expect you to have an easy time with this lesson, but I also get the feeling that knowing that it's going to be hard is causing you to, subconsciously, invest less time than you require. That goes both for when you're drawing your own constructions from your own reference (which I'd expect to take many hours, across multiple days for each individual one) and when you're following the provided demonstrations - where we've noted specific areas where you've applied fairly clear steps incorrectly (as I pointed out in the donkey demo drawing).

Where previously I had you submit work in successive rounds of revisions, gradually working on one issue at a time, unfortunately doing so that way was very time consuming. While I'm not against doing that again in the future, I don't think that would be suitable right now. Instead, I think it would be best for you to do a full redo of the lesson (which upon submitting will cost you an additional 2 credits). In doing so, I want you to hold to the following points:

• Do your warmups. This is non-negotiable, as it has always been. You mentioned that you'd only stopped doing warmups recently, and that this was not the case when working on previous homework submissions, so I will take you at your word with that. That said, there is nothing in the course that says warmups are optional. Their purpose is to allow students to continue working on the skills they've started developing in the earlier lessons, so they can continue to improve them as they move through the course. Given the extra difficulties you've got on your plate, this only makes warmups that much more important for you.

• Keep your mind on the task at hand. Your work really does give the impression that while you're putting one line down, you're thinking ahead several steps to a mark you'll put down later. I've seen this a lot from students in the past, where they're just so full of anxiety that their minds are full of noise, and they have trouble focusing. This kind of thing definitely explains drawings like this (especially the head) where you put down tons of little haphazard marks. For every mark you draw, identify the nature of that mark first - that's what the planning stage of the ghosting method is for, though I do get the impression that you're not consistently using the ghosting method (which would also explain all of the short chicken scratchy marks we see around the eye socket and elsewhere).

• Expect to spend multiple days on one drawing. You talked about before not having a ton of time before you'd lose focus/get tired/etc. Do not push yourself to draw when you know you're not up to it. Take as much time, as many days as you need.

Best of luck.