Hi Cynsh! I'm gonna go over your lesson.

Starting out by your organic intersections, I'm seeing that you had trouble with it, so I'm going to do my best to help you out on this one. First of all, a foundation of this exercise are the sausages alone, you need to feel comfortable moving them around in 3d to do a good job on then showing how they relate with others of their kind, so the first two things are sausage related: 1- Remember that they are cylindrical, if you look closely to the contour curves you are adding, in a lot of cases they are too flat, try to push them a little more to show the cylindrical contour of the sausage. 2- Remember to vary the degrees of the sausages, I know you are doing it, though it's still too shy, don't feel afraid to experiment by changing the degrees drastically on one same sausage. Remember that each of this contour curve represent how that cross section is facing the viewer, so if it gets wider it means it's facing more towards the viewer, and if it get narrower it means it's facing away from the viewer- See this diagram!.

Now, after making sure we are making solid and believable sausages, check again the exercise demo.

Moving on to your constructions, I agree with you in the sense that it's a clear big jump between the foxes and the rest of the constructions, though I'm noticing a number of issues to which I can give you advice on so you can move on the right direction.

One thing that is calling my attention is how you are adding extra mass to your animals. Now, it really looks like you've improved since last lesson where this was a major issue, so good job on making the effort, though I will ask you to push a little further! So, as you may already know, every time we are adding mass to our construction they are meant to feel solid and 3d on their own, almost like a ball of clay floating in space, and then as we squized them towards the forms we've already laid down, they start getting more complex, but not random, they are still following the surface they are falling on, wrapping around them. See this diagram as a visual representation. See this deer back while you are going towards the right direction, you are still showing how they wrap around very shyly and a little 2d. Here is something that I saw that happened in quite a few of your constructions, where the form you are adding falls short from reaching the contour of the construction and ends up affecting the solidity of the construction.

On the same note, remember that you can add contour curves to this extra masses to show how they sit in 3d and how they face the viewer (just as we talked in the organic intersections), for example on the back of your komodo dragon when I saw that looong line connecting the hip and the neck it looked like you were just changing the silhouette and I almost fainted, though looking more closely I understood that i was just a large form that you added. While sometimes students tend to add way too much contour curves, you are almost not adding any, and remember that it's a tool we use to communicate things to the viewer that we may assume it's obvious but it's that way just because we did it!

Now, I wanna quickly move on to your legs, while they are not bad and they have both some gesture and solidity, instead of using the average sausge method for the legs you are using more like streched balls, which make the legs look stiff.

Another quick thing I've noticed is that in a lot of your animals they are looking a little stiff on their poses because of the way you are putting down the hip and the thorax, remember that they are a little tilted, like in this demo instead of just on straight to each other. This is not a big deal, but it will help give your animals a more natural look.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on head construction, while this is a section that Uncomfy wants to update on the future, he is going to take a while, even though he is doing a lot of work to get the earlier lessons updated. However, we have a lot of things to work with, first of all, check this demo, this is how you should be aproaching head construction from now on.

Basically what you need to take into account is that whenever you are building a head, you should look for this key element (eye sockets, muzzle, ect) and try to fit them all together like a 3d puzzle, don't let them float freely on the cranial mass since balls are really tough shapes to deal in 3d since they look exactly like their evil 2d cousins the circles.

So, I can clearly see that you put a lot fo effort in here, though it seems like the main issue is adding that extra mass and showing how it relates to the other forms. So, I've though of a way in which we can try to get step up your sausages, first, I'm gonna ask you to do for revision one page of just sausages, like the exercise you did in the last lesson and lesson 2. Now, this may look like a step back, and I don't want you to lie you and say you it's not, but I feel that you need more practice on them alone, without relating to other masses. Here, try to take into account the two corrections I made at te beginning of the critique, remember the roundness of the sausage and really experiment with the degrees of the contour curves.

After you are done with that page, you are going to watch again the demo on organic intersections I've linked you and do one page of that, I want you to focus on those relationships and how they wrap with each other.

For a start focus on that, and after you are done with them we are going to try to move on and apply all of this on a construction!