Jumping right in with your organic intersections, these are by and large looking good. You've got these large, simple sausage structures, and they're piling atop one another to create a believable illusion of not only 3D form, but also gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. The one thing I do want you to keep an eye on however is where your line weight gets a little thicker than it really should - for example, along the far left and far right of this sausage. There your line weight is just getting way beyond the thickness where it will continue to be interpreted as line weight.

Line weight as a rule should be kept subtle - like a whisper to a viewer's subconscious, rather than a very obvious shout. Beyond that, it starts to get visually confusing, in terms of whether we're looking at line weight or a cast shadow. When it's as thick as this, cast shadow is usually the correct assumption, except for the fact that it's still clinging to the silhouette of the form.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, there are a number of things that you're doing quite well here, along with a number of points I want to address to ensure that you are focusing your efforts in the most effective places.

What stands out most to me is a point I raised back in Lesson 4's critique. I stressed the importance of always ensuring that the actions you take occur in 3D space, and that you avoid the temptation to make marks that exist only in 2D space, of altering the silhouettes of forms that have already been constructed, and so on. As I've marked out here on one of your wolves, you've definitely got a number of places where you're still taking those liberties, and in so doing, reminding the viewer and reminding yourself that you are in fact just working on a drawing on a flat page.

Much of these were primarily concentrated on the legs. There you are generally doing a good job employing the sausage method (with a few hiccups I'll call out in a moment), but keep in mind the diagrams I shared with you in my previous critique, which demonstrated how we can build upon our sausage structures to add bulk where it's needed, specifically from this paragraph:

Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well).

While your use of the sausage method is largely coming along well, there are a couple things to keep an eye on:

• Remember that contour lines are placed at the joint between the sausage segments, and only there. Avoid placing them elsewhere along their lengths, as noted on the sausage method diagram.

• Also noted on the diagram, avoid drawing ellipses for any of your segments. You generally don't, but there are a few places where it occurs and I'm also noticing some tendencies towards drawing "through" your sausages at times as we do for ellipses. The thing is, we do it for our ellipses because it leans into our natural desire to draw elliptical shapes. Since sausages are not ellipses, this is not something you should be doing when drawing them.

One quick point about feet - I'm seeing you putting a lot of consideration towards how to build up your feet, which I'm very pleased to see. One thing I find to be especially useful is the use of "boxy" forms - that is, forms with specifically placed corners that help to imply the presence of internal edges/distinctions between front/side/top planes, even without those internal edges being drawn. This forces us to think about each structure as a more specific, three dimensional structure, whereas it's easy to devolve into flat shapes when we use blobbier structures for our feet and toes. You can see this concept demonstrated at the bottom of this other student's work.

I did find that the majority of those spots where you cut into your forms' silhouettes were often because you'd put down fainter marks earlier. Remember that every mark you put on the page must be drawn confidently, and every form you draw must be treated as though it is solid and tangible - not just marks on a flat page that can be modified freely.

Along with the areas where you've been cutting into those existing forms, I also noticed quite a few areas, as marked out in blue on this tiger where you were adding to your construction with individual marks, enclosing partial shapes against the existing structure, rather than being fully self-enclosed on their own. These of course read as being flat, and do not establish enough information for you or the viewer to understand how they're meant to relate to the existing, 3D structure.

When it comes to adding actual complete, self-enclosed additional masses however (which you did along the back over the pelvis and shoulder), you're doing quite well. I'm very pleased to see that you're wrapping those structures around the shoulder and hip masses, taking advantage of opportunities to allow your masses to feel more grounded by establishing their relationships with everything you can. I did mark out a small correct on both those forms though - there was some complexity along the top edge of the forms, which should really be reserved only for cases where another specific, defined form presses in on the mass as explained here. Anywhere we don't have another specific structure to press up against, we should stick to outward curves, in the interest of maintaining the solidity of those new forms. If you do need an inward curve along that kind of a situation, you'll want to break the single mass into several separate ones, achieving the inward curve by piling them together.

The last thing I wanted to talk about for the time being 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.

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.

So! I think in a lot of ways you are very much headed in the right direction, but I am going to assign some revisions below, so you have a chance to demonstrate your understanding of the following concepts:

• Avoiding working in 2D with individual marks, always building up your construction through the addition of fully self-enclosed forms and establishing their spatial relationship with the existing structure.

• Correct and consistent use of the sausage method and all of its specific elements.

• Head construction