As a whole you're doing pretty well here, although I do have a number of suggestions to offer. I am pleased with how your work has come out - you're demonstrating a clear grasp of how the forms you're working with sit in 3D space, showing that much of the time you are thinking about how they wrap around one another, and you are largely reinforcing that impression that we're looking at a solid, 3D structure the whole way through.

Before we get to that, let's look at your organic intersections. You're certainly drawing the sausage forms themselves effectively, keeping them simple (to help reinforce their solidity), and demonstrating both believable 3D relationships between them, as well as the active role played by gravity in determining how they slump and sag over one another. Your cast shadows are generally coming along decently as well, although I am noticing a tendency to put your light source straight above the pile, which inevitably minimizes those cast shadows and also minimizes the risk of casting shadows in the wrong direction. I would however recommend playing with that light source, and pushing it to one side or the other, just to ensure that you are given some practice in thinking more about how the cast shadows should be cast, rather than always falling back to the simplest option.

Here are some minor adjustments to your cast shadows. I caught a few places where you weren't quite following the surface of the form upon which the shadow was being cast (sausages are rounded after all, so the shadows should conform to that), as well as a gap in one of your cast shadows. Additionally, I added some subtle line weight in areas where overlaps between forms could stand to be further clarified.

To start, I've called out some issues here on your african wild dog:

• I caught an area on the dog's rump where you cut into the silhouette of its pelvis form. While you don't do this too much, I do see things like this every now and then in your work, so keep an eye on it. When it comes to ellipses, sometimes we do end up with a looser ellipse than we'd like - in such circumstances, treat the outermost perimeter of it as though it defines the silhouette of your resulting form, so that all of the rest of the linework remains contained within it.

• Finding opportunities to have your additional masses wrap around one another, or having them press up against other structures is a great way to further solidify the structure, and really just make these pieces feel more grounded.

• Also, keep an eye out for situations where you end up trying to accomplish too much with just one form, that would be better handled with separate pieces.

• When it comes to adding additional masses to your constructions, I did notice some areas where you tended to use more rounded, vaguer corners on your additional masses, where sharper corners were really needed. We tend to see this more when you're building upon the legs, and you're more willing to use the decisive sharper corners when building onto your torso. Just be sure to consider which is the better choice for a given job.

• Also don't be afraid to push more masses along your leg structures - I blocked out some more on the front leg, just to show how much farther that can be explored.

When it comes to drawing additional masses, there's a lot riding on the way in which its silhouette is designed. Or, to be more accurate, that silhouette is the only thing that determines whether the form feels solid and three dimensional, with clear relationships to the existing structure, or whether it reads more as a flat shape pasted on top of the structure. 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.

To that point, throughout your drawings I often see you trying to use contour lines - specifically the kind introduced in Lesson 2's organic forms with contour lines exercise - to go back in and make your additional forms more three dimensional. Unfortunately, this does not actually help. Often enough, you are actually designing your silhouettes decently, and achieving a fairly solid relationship with the existing structure (in which case the contour lines you're adding have no problem to solve), but in the cases where you've got more complex silhouettes, or areas where the inward/outward curves have been placed in the wrong spot, additional contour lines don't actually help at all. This is because they're not the tool for the job.

These kinds of contour lines, which sit on the surface of a single form (or in cases like this pass from the surface of one form to another), can be effective, but only in a very limited use case, to make a structure feel more solid and three dimensional on its own. Construction is about fitting different forms together, creating a collective, cohesive result out of many parts, and so it focuses very heavily on establishing relationships between those parts. There may well be use in adding one contour curve in the middle of the torso sausage, just to give it a touch more solidity, but by and large this way of thinking about contour lines is really useful for introducing the concept back in Lesson 2, and then far less so beyond that.

Conversely, the contour lines we learned about in the form intersections exercise are far more useful - while we don't use them when we have one mass wrapping around an existing structure, we do use them extensively when different forms interpenetrate one another (like defining the joints between segments of the sausage method). Reason being, like the additional masses' silhouette design, these contour line define a specific joint and relationship between different, solid, 3D forms, and in so doing, makes them feel more solid and three dimensional.

Continuing on, I did want to provide a quick reminder not to be too generous in your use of line weight. There are some drawings where you don't use it much (which is better), and some where you use it more gratuitously, like in this wildebeest where you've not only used it to reinforce the silhouettes of your forms throughout the animal's underbelly, you've also allowed that line weight to jump from one form to another - another way we easily end up working in 2D rather than 3D.

Instead, try to reserve your use of line weight only to help establish how different forms overlap one another, and limit its use to the specific, localized areas where those overlaps occur (and also be sure only to add line weight to the edge of a single form at a time). You can see this demonstrated with these two overlapping leaves. This will help you avoid the kinds of marks that flatten out your construction.

The last thing I wanted to address was how you approach 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.

As a whole I can see that you have held to a lot of the underlying elements of this approach (or really just in the application of construction in general, focusing on things as fairly simple forms, and building upon them), but when you go beyond the basic structure, you tend to build up additional elements as flat shapes, rather than continuing to build them up as yet more simple structures. For this, look at the rhino demo from the paragraph above - you'll note there how I've just kept building up yet more boxy forms at the end of the muzzle, ensuring that I'm always thinking about everything as it exists in 3D space, down to the distinction of front/side planes.

Now, while there are definitely points for you to address that I've raised here (including some issues I called out in Lesson 4, like you altering silhouettes of forms that had already been drawn), I do think that as long as you take care to read through this feedback several times (spread out over a few days at first, and then revisiting it periodically thereafter), you should be equipped to tackle these things on your own, in your own practice. I do not believe revisions are in order, due to the general understanding demonstrated throughout other aspects of the other drawings here.

So, I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.