It always surprises me - despite being the purpose of the course - to see students who once struggled with making structures feel solid (as you mentioned in your submission), and then seeing what they are ultimately capable of. You've done a great job here, and you should be proud of yourself.

There are really just a couple issues I want to address, in order to help you continue to make the most out of these kinds of drawing exercises.

Getting into your organic intersections first, you've done a pretty great job of establishing forms that feel stable and solid within the same space, abiding logically by the pressures of gravity and largely appearing quite stable and realistic. One of the things we look for with this exercise is whether or not it seems any of the forms will roll away or if the pile will collapse at the next moment - and I'm pleased to say that yours here have no such issues. I'm also pleased to see that you're making good headway with dealing with cast shadows.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, as I stated above, by and large you've done a great job. There are really just two overall recommendations I have to offer, and we'll go through each one in turn.

Firstly, you're making a lot of great use of your additional masses here, and it's very clear that you're designing those individual forms with clear intent and purpose behind them, thinking about where to use inward curves, where to use outward curves, where to use sharp corners and where to use more gradual ones. But there is one last thing we can do to make these feel even more solid, and that comes down to sometimes stretching them further - physically stretching them that is - so they "grip" more solidly onto the structure they're attaching to. There are a couple contexts in which we can demonstrate this in a couple different ways.

The big one here comes down to making more use of the shoulder and hip masses where our legs connect to the torso. Here we will usually find larger groupings of muscles that let our quadrupeds walk and run - but it also means that if we know to look for it, there's something of a pre-baked mass that we can block in as simply as with an ellipse. You're already doing this, and that's great. But the next step involves making use of it, when adding masses to our animal's back.

So, as shown here, we can take the masses we place along the back ,and instead of having it just kind of sit gently atop the back, we can extend it down further so that it presses up against those shoulder/hip masses. This gives us a grounding point - another structure establishing a relationship with our mass in 3D space, making the whole structure feel more solid and put together.

The second context would be with your camels - specifically, their humps. While they don't really have anything obvious to come down and press against, we can still improve how much they "grip" the underlying structure by bringing them further down along the sides, as shown here. There I also altered the big mass they sit upon, bringing it down to press against the shoulder/hip masses, because the solidity we're trying to capture here is like electricity. All you need is a connection for it to flow from one thing to another. It we bring that big mass down to press against the shoulder/hip masses, it becomes more solid, and then the things gripping onto it in turn can feel more solid... at least by a bit. At the very least, we want to avoid the feeling that, like the organic intersections, when we jump forward one moment in time, we don't want those humps to just fall off the poor camel's back.

So, onto the next point I wanted to talk about - head construction. You mentioned yourself that it was something that you were struggling with, and fortunately it's an area I can offer a fair bit of advice on. 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.

So, that should hopefully help - specifically the point about having the different pieces fit together, like pieces of a puzzle. And with that, I will happily mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work!