Every course has its own area of focus, and its own priorities. In Drawabox, proportions aren't particularly high up on the list. After all, the course as a whole is not focused on producing individual, nice, pretty drawings. The end results aren't important. The course is focused on developing a student's understanding of 3D space, and their capacity to manipulate forms and combine them within it to create more complex objects. Each drawing is an exercise to help develop those skills. We certainly could achieve stronger and more accurate proportions by sketching lightly ahead of time, and you may opt to do that in your own drawings outside of this course, but here we must commit to every form we construct, regardless of whether they come out too short or too long.

So, long story short - what we're doing here isn't a "method" for drawing. It's an exercise, nothing more. It will develop your underlying skills, which will then influence how you approach drawing with other methods that do help achieve more accurate proportions.

So, onto the critique! Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing a good job of establishing how these forms slump and sag over one another under gravity. One thing I want you to avoid doing with this exercise is making your individual sausage forms so... wiggly. Each form should be like a balloon filled with water - willing to bend, but not around every little bump. As you can see in the example, we're still sticking pretty closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, avoiding all kinds of pinches/bends throughout the forms' lengths.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, the first thing I want to stress is the importance of giving each drawing as much room as it requires on the page. In some of these pages, you've definitely made an effort to cram several drawings in there - which is admirable, but not necessarily in your best interest. Forcing your drawing into a smaller space will limit your brain's capacity to think through those spatial problems (the main focus of this course), while also making it harder for you to engage your whole arm while drawing. So instead, first focus on giving the first drawing of a page as much room as it requires. Once you're done with that drawing, you can assess whether there is enough room for a second. If there is, go ahead and add it. If there isn't, it's okay to have a page with just one drawing on it.

As I scroll through your work, I can clearly see that early on you were definitely more focused on creating pretty drawings - you were sketching more faintly, allowing yourself to cut back into your earlier forms' silhouettes (something I addressed specifically in my critique of your lesson 4 work - though that was definitely in part because of the head construction video, which was produced long before I started stressing this rule). As you moved through the set however, your focus shifted. You started focusing much more on the construction of solid forms, on committing to the lines and structures you'd built up. We can see this in how clean and more purposeful this horse construction is. As a whole, you're doing a pretty great job.

That said, there are some things I want to suggest as you continue to move forwards.

• Contour lines are a tool - with every tool, we need to think critically about how and where we use them. It's very easy for students to just pile the contour lines on without really thinking about it, with the mindset that more is always better. But this is not the case. For every mark you add to a drawing, consider what its job is meant to be, how it ought to be drawn to achieve that goal as effectively as possible, and finally, whether another mark is already accomplishing that task. Contour lines - specifically those that sit on the surface of a single form (as introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise) quickly suffer from diminishing returns. The first you add will have a lot of impact, the second less so, and the third even less. It's easy to end up in the situation where you've piled them on, but they're not really making much of a difference. Rather than worrying about piling on a bunch of these contour lines, the kind introduced in the form intersections exercise - those that define the relationship between forms - are vastly more effective and useful. That's why we stress their use in the sausage method (to define the joint between sausage segments). Those are the ones you want to focus on - and with them, there's no need to worry about adding too many, since you can only define one per pair of forms.

• As you probably noticed with the animal head construction video, Drawabox is a course that is continually evolving and improving. As I do hundreds of these critiques, my approach for teaching the material evolves and changes. Those who receive the official critiques will generally get the most up-to-date information in them, and gradually it trickles down into the lesson material itself. I produce "informal" demos most quickly (usually as part of a critique), and add them to the lesson, but the main lesson demos and the videos are slower to update. Because of this, you'll find that at the top of the tiger head demo, I actually explain this and link to this more recent explanation of how to approach head construction. Based on the way you were approaching the construction of your animals' heads, I don't think you had the chance to go through it, so I highly suggest that you do. While your approach is generally coming along well, this approach of having all the different components of the head (eye sockets, brow ridge, muzzle, etc.) wedge together like pieces of a three dimensional puzzle will help you build these structures in a more reliable, repeatable fashion. Where right now you're kind of having to figure out each new head construction individually, this provides a clearer basis that all heads can be built from.

• When using the additional masses on your animals' torsos - like on this camel - you're doing a pretty good job of designing those masses' silhouettes to convey how they wrap around the existing structure. When dealing with the legs, however, you deviate from these principles in a number of places. In general, I can see that you're not using the sausage method for constructing your animals' legs (again, something I stressed in my critique of your lesson 4 work). The sausage method, as I explained there, is extremely useful - where most other approaches for constructing legs will lean too far towards making a leg feel solid (and as a result, stiff), or fluid and gestural (but flat as well), the sausage method allows us to achieve both in balance. Once in place, we build upon the sausage structure by introducing new forms one at a time - but we still have to consider how the silhouette of those forms establishes the relationship between the new mass and the structure it's wrapping around. So in the case of your horse drawing, here's how it should be approached. There you were just drawing ellipses to establish more arbitrary blobs, trying to meld them into the structure after the fact. You have to establish how it wraps around while drawing it.

• While I have talked about this plenty already, I do want to stress that none of your drawings in this course should be focused on creating a pretty, detailed result as you did here. It's all about construction. When you do add details on top, they should be added on top of a solid, complete construction. With these dogs, you definitely skipped a bunch of steps to have a clearer canvas for your details, which defeats the purpose of this course.

While I've outlined a number of areas that could be improved, as a whole you're still doing well and are demonstrating a solid grasp of space and form - and I think you're proving that with your pugmeleon, which came out fantastically. Just make sure that you adhere to the points I raised in my previous critiques - specifically, using the sausage method more consistently.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.