There's definitely a lot of strong points here, and signs that you're gradually absorbing the information from the lesson. There are some issues that we'll address, and some things we may want to dig in a little more, but all in all you're definitely moving in the right direction.

To start, your organic intersections are looking quite well done. The second page is visibly stronger, primarily because it's actually grounded against a surface, whereas the first step felt more like it was floating somewhat more arbitrarily.

Moving onto your animal constructions, I'm seeing a lot of signs that you're doing a good job of understanding how different forms connect to one another and relate to each other in 3D space. You're definitely thinking in terms of the forms existing in three dimensions, and I can see y ou making clear attempts to apply the various techniques and methodologies - like the sausage technique and the additional masses - even if at times you forget or miss elements of them.

There are two main issues that jump out at me that I want to address specifically. First off, there are some places where you tend to draw a lot of contour lines on specific forms. The thing about contour lines is that they suffer from diminishing returns. The first contour line that sits along the surface of a form will do a great deal to help describe how that surface flows through space. The next one you add, however, is going to contribute much less - and the one to follow that, will do even less. You very quickly end up in a situation where you're drawing lines that aren't necessarily contributing to our drawing, and we want to make sure that we're aware of the specific job we need a given mark to accomplish, to understand how it's going to contribute to the drawing, and how to get it to best complete that task. That's essentially what we need to be thinking about during the initial planning phase of the ghosting method.

If you end up going to draw a mark that is ultimately not going to do much for your drawing, it's best to hold off and avoid adding further clutter. We're not against drawings with a lot of lines, as long as those lines each are doing something concrete.

In addition to this, it's worth mentioning that not all contour lines are equal. There are a couple kinds - the ones that sit along the surface of a single form as we've explored through the Lesson 2 contour lines exercise, as well as the ones that define the relationship between two forms, how they connect and intersect in the world, as explored through the form intersections exercise. This second kind is incredibly impactful - and in most cases, you can probably get away with just using them. Reason being, these contour lines create a connection - a link between two forms that establishes that if one of these feels three dimensional, if it can be understood as existing in 3D space, then the one it connects to must also be three dimensional.

To this point, always try and focus on ways to define the connections between your forms, and only use the other kind of contour line if you really feel it is required. Often we'll feel compelled to add more contour lines simply because it's what we think we're supposed to be doing, without thinking about exactly why.

As you can see here, you're already using a lot of these kinds of contour lines that define connections between forms (we especially stress their use in the sausage method), though there are a few additional ones that could have been added.

The other thing I wanted to dig into was your use of additional masses. Usually this is where you place a lot of your extra contour curves - so I'd strongly recommend always holding yourself back and really thinking about whether or not an additional contour line is needed. But more than that, one aspect of the additional masses is that the form itself, the way its silhouette is drawn behaves very similarly to contour lines - specifically, we're trying to wrap those forms around the underlying structure, just like how we wrap a line along the surface of a form. This really needs to be exaggerated, and it can be very easy to just place a form independently on top, and then go on to add contour lines to make it feel more three dimensional, but end up with two separate forms that don't really firmly integrate with one another.

As shown here, you've got forms that didn't quite feel 3D on their own, and didn't integrate strongly into the existing structure. Pushing and exaggerating how those sections wrap around what's already there can really help to continue building up a single cohesive construction.

I also noticed that in several cases, you'd tend to build up really large additional forms, especially along the back, as here where a mass stretches all the way across from shoulder to rump. The issue there is that you're trying to get one form to do too much. Instead, think of those additional masses as generally representing a single muscle group. Those muscle groups are generally quite small, focused on controlling certain kinds of movements. As such, we also want to keep our additional masses more focused. We can always combine many different masses together, piling them on top of each other, but in combining them we get all the little pinches where one form rises and another one falls, which leads to the kind of nuanced features of musculature that we're trying to capture.

To that end, take a look at this demo, along with some of the others around it. You can see how under the "Building up more specific forms" section I start adding little masses everywhere. Building up the shoulders, the chest, etc. and I'm watching how they're all fitting together like a puzzle. This is where you get a lot of the complex nuance of an animal's body.

So! Those are the main elements that I think you need to continue working on. You are showing considerable progress, and I think this should bump you up to the next level. So before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see a few pages (which I'll assign below) to show that you understand what I've explained here.