Starting with the organic intersects, there are a number of issues that stand out to me:

• You're not drawing each sausage in its entirety, instead opting to draw each one only as far as it is visible. Drawing each one fully is important to grasp how they each sit in 3D space, which in turn is integral to understanding how they relate to one another in 3D space. Every single form needs to be understood in more than just being lines or shapes on a page, and these steps help us achieve that understanding.

• You are definitely making interesting steps forward with the cast shadows, but take a look at these corrections. While I put more of a focus on a consistent light source (casting all the shadows strongly to the right), also note how the shadow shapes themselves taper to a point, whereas yours tend to end in a rather thick shape that suddenly stops towards the left side of your shadows. Using an amount of line weight on the edges of your sausage forms before actually getting into cast shadows will also help clarify how these forms overlap one another.

• Your contour lines aren't always consistent. Sometimes they'll imply one end of the sausage is pointing away from the viewer, but you'll place a contour ellipse at that end which suggests the opposite. Here's the kind of consistency I'm talking about.

Moving onto your animal constructions, there is one drawing here that I do want to congratulate you on. This fawn has its issues, but overall it shows far more careful attention to detail than the rest, and there are significant ways in which it is moving in the right direction.

Here are some notes about your fawn. I outlined the major strengths along the bottom, and a number of areas where things could be improved. One major thing I noticed was missing (which I'm admittedly not really concerned about because it's best to really solidify the core structural elements first) is that you didn't add any additional forms to build out some of the greater complexity of the structure - like the hump along the back, or the knobby-joints of the fawn's legs. Again - not worried about that, better that you establish the basic structure first.

The other point worth mentioning is that your head construction is lacking, in that you tend to have the various components (eye socket, cheekbone, muzzle, brow ridge, etc.) floating relative to one another. What we want to see is all of these things fitting together like a 3D puzzle. You can see examples of this in this tapir head demo and in this moose head demo.

Now, I do want to focus my critique primarily on the strongest example, but it's worth mentioning that the majority of your work here really does not compare to this fawn. If we were to look at one of the weakest examples, we can take a look at this wolf. I won't dwell on it too long, but just as a general overview:

• Muzzle is drawn as a flat shape

• No real thought put into the shape of the eye socket (you didn't draw it as an ellipse, so that's good, but looking at any of my demonstrations will show a very different general shape to the eye sockets

• Ribcage is way too small, should be half the length of the torso

• While the front legs are indeed straight in the reference, it's important never to oversimplify things like this. We know that legs have joints, so you should construct them as such. Your fawn's legs were also quite straight, but you handled those correctly.

The most critical issue with this wolf, and in general, is that you struggle most of all with really observing your reference. Whenever something is oversimplified, it's because you're drawing it based on memory, not on direct observation. I'm picking on the wolf because it's the most significant culprit of this, but it comes up in various was throughout the set.

Now I understand that you drew each of these many, many times, and picked the best ones - but I have to ask, just how long did you put into each individual drawing? There is nothing wrong with every single one taking an entire sitting, spanning over an hour, two hours, and more. Whatever it takes for you to really look at your reference, analyze the forms that are present, and then take care in drawing them using the techniques we've covered before.

I do want to say that throughout this lesson you have shown a far greater adherence to the sausage method than I expected. Your trend is usually to demonstrate a better grasp of a concept, and then forget about it moving forward. While your use of the sausage method here isn't perfect, it's certainly held fairly solid to where it was before. I can even see it being used quite well in this horse, which arguably is also one of your stronger ones (not as good as the fawn, but the leg construction is really good).

When it comes to your additional masses though, you tend to still draw those as simple, flat shapes. You can read up on how you should be thinking about them here, but the key is that the silhouette is what shows us how that form wraps around the structure beneath it. Just stamping down an arbitrary flat shape won't really accomplish much, because it's just going to feel like a flat shape.

Now, here's what I want you to do. It's a big change from the usual, and we are going to go through a more significant redo of the lesson later, but first let's start small:

I want you to do one animal construction drawing, but it's going to adhere to a number of very specific restrictions:

• You are going to take this one drawing, and you are going to separate it across at least 3 days.

• On each sitting, you're going to spend at least 30 minutes on the drawing.

• You're going to focus only on construction. No detail, no texture, no fur, none of that. Everything you draw is going to add a concrete form to the construction.

Based on how you've been approaching things in the past, this may be relatively normal for you, or it may seem like an extremely long period of time to spend on a single drawing. Most of this time will be spent on observing your reference, on planning out each and every single stroke you draw, on thinking about the principles covered in previous lessons about construction, and the basic mechanics of drawing forms.

As you draw this animal, you may want to refer to different demonstrations (especially those on the informal demo page - the ones towards the top are generally newer than the official demos, though I plan on overhauling all of the video content for the lessons in the coming months).