Hello Tidesphere, thank you for replying with your revisions.

I'll go over the topics discussed in your initial critique, commend things that have improved, and offer additional advice if necessary.

Core Construction

You've done a good job of using ellipses to construct your major masses, and executing them smoothly to that they feel solid. Keep in mind that you can use a longer ellipse for the rib cage, so that it occupies roughly half the torso length, as discussed in this section.

Use of additional contour curves

Not much to say here. You've refrained from piling lots of extra contour curves on the surface of individual forms in an effort to make them feel more 3D, so that you can spend your time and energy on the design of those forms instead. Nice one.

Leg construction

You're applying the sausage method more consistently, sticking more closely to simple sausage forms and using a contour curve at the joints to show how they intersect in space. Good work. I can also see you've explored building onto your leg sausages with additional forms, which we'll talk about a bit more in the next section.

Additional masses

These are much better. I'm seeing that you're developing a feeling for how to wrap additional masses around your underlying construction with an understanding of how your forms exist in space, and they're starting to reinforce the 3D illusion we seek to create here. You're heading in the right direction, though I have some additional pointers for you, and I'll be using your antelope's legs as examples to illustrate these ideas.

• A, marked in blue, is a partial shape rather than a complete additional mass. Given that this seems to be adding uniform thickness along the whole length of the sausage form, it may have made sense to start with a wider sausage, like this, or if you realised the leg was too skinny after the sausage was already on the page, an additional mass would work too.

• B, highlighted in red, are some arbitrary sharp corners. We want all complexity in additional masses (including sharp corners) to occur as a result of interacting with existing structures. As the sausage forms are smooth and rounded in these locations, we'd want to move the corners over so they hook around leg sausages as shown here. these notes on another student's work provide another explanation from Uncomfortable.

• C is an example where it looks like you're deliberately avoiding having masses overlap, running them adjacent along the line I'd highlighted in purple defines a 2D relationship between these two masses rather than a 3D one. This example is pretty subtle, it is more obvious with the two masses under the belly of your cat. They overlap the main torso, but not one another, which suggests that to some extent you're still thinking of them as shapes on the 2D paper. Here is how I might handle the section I'd highlighted, wrapping the lower mass around the upper one.

• The spots marked D are places where there were what look like cracks or holes in the construction which I don't really see in the reference, here I've used masses to flesh them out.

Feet

These are looking quite solid on the first 3 pages. Looking at your lizard, the feet there are kinda sloppy, with the toes being sketched in as a series of mostly loose disconnected lines. Here I've rebuilt one of the feet with a more constructive approach, using the idea of boxy forms discussed previously. Sometimes when lines or forms get smaller, it can lead to students thinking of them as less important than the larger structures, and devoting less time into executing each mark. This approach is incorrect, as every mark we add to these constructions serves a purpose, and should be drawn to the best of our current ability.

Markmaking

Getting there. You've addressed the occasional scratchiness that I mentioned previously. You're getting a mixture of smooth confident lines, and lines with noticeable signs of hesitation. I know it is tough, keeping your lines confident when there is so much to think about. Remember to make use of the ghosting method for every line, and don't forget to rotate your page to give yourself the easiest angle for execution. For long curves such as the neck of this antelope you could make use of the "branches" method of construction from lesson 3, laying down some ellipses, then building the line in overlapping segments, and that may help you maintain confidence of each stroke.

Heads

I can see you've made a real effort to carve out the specific pentagonal shape of the eye sockets shown in the informal head demo, which is a good start. There's a tendency to draw the eye sockets really small, often even smaller than the size of the eyeballs in the reference. You are also, to varying degrees, having trouble constructing the boxy muzzle form and fitting it snugly against the edge of the eye sockets. Here I've highlighted the muzzle of the lizard in blue, showing that the form is incomplete, and that there is an arbitrary gap between the base of the muzzle and the edge of the eye socket. Here I've made the eye socket larger, and given the muzzle a complete silhouette that is wedged against a full edge of the eye socket.

All righty, these pages show a good bit of improvement in several key areas, so I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. I think you'll still continue to improve with practice, and suggest you either include these as part of your warm ups (splitting one construction up over several sittings) or set aside a session to work on animal constructions periodically, whichever works for you. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.