https://imgur.com/gallery/wkqNT75
The last drawing in the gallery is an extra. After drawing it I realized I was probably mostly drawing the volume of the wool as opposed to the lamp's body. I added it to the gallery for extra feedback
A number of these are looking quite solid. Just a couple things to keep in mind:
When adding additional forms, try to integrate them into one another, like a three dimensional puzzle. So looking at cases like the belly and hip and rump here, you've got little gaps between them. Try and think about how they're all representing muscle groups, and how they'd fit together. You're doing a good job of this with many of your heads, so apply the same principle here.
I really love the additional mass you drew just at the base of the neck (along the spine) of this horse. It captures exactly how these masses ought to carry a sense of thickness and mass. This is missing towards the rump, where you've smoothly integrated the addition there into the profile of the rest of the torso. I've demonstrated this concept in this quick demo for another student.
In this chicken and in a few other cases, you've put down an underlying construction, and then wrapped the whole construction (or in other cases, part of the construction) in a sort of enveloping 2D shape. This is absolutely not how you should be approaching situations where you want to add bulk or volume - you do this by adding additional forms, wrapping them around the underlying construction, and ensuring that every component has a clear relationship with its surrounding forms in 3D space. The moment you treat your drawing as a flat collection of lines and shapes, you sacrifice the illusion that what you're drawing is 3D. Here's an example of the difference in the approaches.
Anyway, all in all I think you've got a lot of big successes. I especially liked your horse, your gazelle, and the frog was an excellent example of the use of the sausage method. There is of course room for growth and improvement, but you're headed in the right direction, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
With regard to the chicken. The 2D envelope I drew represents the feathers of the chicken. I read somewhere in the notes that since fur and feathers aren't solid forms that we don't have to give them too much solidity when we add them to our drawing. Since I have seen plenty of featherless birds, I knew a lot of the chicken's volume was feathers. But I think I went a little too far with that.
Anyways, I assume the next step is the cylinder challenge, Right?
Could you point me to where you read that? I do sometimes change my view on things as my own understanding of the material develops, but based on how I've approached this stuff for some time now, feathers are absolutely still solid masses and should be drawn as I explained in my critique. Nothing should be drawn as flat shapes.
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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