Starting with your organic intersections, these are generally coming along pretty nicely. I did notice a few where you only drew partial forms, and allowed them to get cut off (generally this happens when you add additional ones to the base of the pile, instead of always building from bottom up), but as a whole you're doing a good job of capturing how these forms slump and sag over one another under the weight of gravity.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I do think that there are some aspects to how you're approaching things that are definitely making them somewhat more difficult for you, and are contributing to the challenges you're facing.

Before I get into talking about some of the issues, I did want to point out that the horse drawings in particular were quite successful, and demonstrated a good understanding of how these structures you're drawing on a flat page do indeed exist in three dimensions. There are also notable aspects of your hybrid which came along quite well, in terms of its core structure and believability. That's definitely a good sign, and suggests that you are beginning to grasp some of the underlying principles.

Now, overall I think the biggest factor that is making this more difficult than it needs to be is that in a lot of these drawings, you're getting distracted by the desire to make your drawings detailed. This is a common issue students have, and it basically causes students not to focus on what they're doing right at this moment, but rather to look ahead to how they're going to approach adding lots of detail and texture to really make their drawing pop and stand out.

Unfortunately, detail is for the most part, irrelevant. It is the core construction - the things that we focus on in this course - which help a drawing to feel believable. In order to do that, it requires us to focus on what we're doing in the moment, on what forms we're building up right now, and how they relate to one another in space.

If you take a look at the wolf drawing on the right side of this page, and look past the fur, the markmaking here is often kind of sloppy. The sausages you drew for the lower part of the legs are actually pretty good, but the rest tends to be quite loose, and you haven't really taken the time with each individual form that you're constructing to ensure that they feel solid and real. Most of the early masses are actually quite loose and don't quite capture the impression that they represent solid, three dimensional forms. With a loose base structure, it's easy to slip into somewhat sloppier markmaking as you progress, so the marks defining the facial construction are pretty imprecise. Lots of gaps, a bit of chicken scratching, etc.

Now, one factor is definitely that you weren't giving yourself the time you needed to execute each and every mark to the best of your ability, using the ghosting method and all - but there's another factor that made things much more difficult for you than it needed to be: you were drawing pretty small.

Drawing small makes it harder for our brains to think through spatial problems, and also makes it harder for us to engage our whole arm while drawing. Both of these lead to sloppier linework and construction, and can make us feel a little more despondent about what we're drawing right now, in turn making us look ahead for something better and more fun.

Back in my critique of your Lesson 4 work, I shared with you the shrimp and lobster informal demos. There I encouraged you to pay attention to how each mark was drawn, how every single one had its own individual job, and how I took the time to define every such form to the best of my ability, rather than sketching them loosely or haphazardly. I wasn't just putting lines on a flat page - I was creating solid forms in a three dimensional world. That is what makes our drawings feel solid and believable - not the decoration we add on top afterwards.

Taking things further, I also feel that when you have difficulty with a particular approach - like the use of the sausage method, which as discussed back in Lesson 4 follows very specific requirements (sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages to build up a base structure, then building on top of it to add bulk wherever it's required) - you tend to try to avoid it altogether, opting to use alternative approaches. So for example, in this puma drawing, you completely threw the sausage method aside, even though I stressed its importance in my last critique.

Moving on, I wanted to talk a little about your use of additional masses. Looking at your horses, I can see that you're clearly thinking to a point about how those masses' silhouttes can be designed to establish how they wrap around the existing structure. We can do a little better as shown here (note how I defined the shoulder/hip masses, because we can define how the back masses wrap around them as well), but this is definitely a good start.

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.

Where you definitely went pretty far off base is with the camel, with its humps. Here there are two main issues:

• These forms have a lot of gaps, and are generally not drawn with a strong impression of solidity to begin with.

• They do not establish a clear relationship with the existing structure - they're not wrapping around it or gripping it in any real fashion, so they feel at best as though they'd fall off the second the camel twitched. This breaks their believability.

So, approaching them similarly to the additional masses shown on the horse, we'd get something like this. I threw in an additional mass in between just to show that these are all individual components that we can build up bit by bit - so if we need to have that midsection be a bit higher, we just throw another mass in there, and establish how it wraps around the other two humps.

Anyway, this critique's already gotten pretty lengthy, and I've given you a number of things to work on. I'm going to assign some revisions below. When tackling them, I want you to leave all detail/texture/decoration out entirely. Focus only on drawing the core constructions, and study the approach for every step in the shrimp and lobster demos. Yes, you're obviously having trouble with drawing sausage forms, and whatnot - but the only way to improve on that front is to tackle it head-on, and not to avoid it.