Alrighty! So let's jump right in. First, looking at your organic intersections, the page labelled P1 shows that you largely understand how to approach this exercise correctly. The other page goes a little bit far in terms of making the forms much more complex than is needed - so when doing this in the future, keeping the forms simple so you can focus entirely on how the sausages slump and sag over one another under the force of gravity.

Moving onto your animals, I'll break it down into a few different categories.

Overall construction

So there were a few issues that I saw come up on this front that are certainly worth mentioning, and I call them out here on your stag drawing.

• Firstly, you don't do this super often, but it does come up on occasion - do not cut into the silhouettes of your forms, once they've been constructed. In drawing the stag's ribcage, you ended up with a situation where your reference likely had a dip that you could no longer achieve while maintaining your desired proportions. Keep in mind that what we're doing here is just an exercise - it's a puzzle, where we start with a fairly consistent starting set of simple masses, and then figure out, step by step, how to build up in the direction of our reference image. If we deviate from that reference due to a choice we've made, that's fine - replicating it at all costs is not our goal here. At that point, you could choose to ignore the bumps in that area, or build them out on top of the structure you already have.

• Similar to the previous point, I pointed out an example where you drew a one-off individual line, rather than ensuring that every addition to your construction is its own separate, complete, solid form.

• You have a tendency to really overuse your contour lines - this most likely comes from a habit of using them reflexively, rather than thinking and considering before each individual one. The ghosting method is useful for this - its planning phase is the opportune moment to consider the mark you wish to make, ask yourself about what its purpose is meant to be, how it can achieve that goal best, and whether another one is already doing the same job. As shown on your work, where we place our contour lines matters a lot - focusing them on the joints between structures is usually the most effective. If after that some additional solidity is still required, we can add additional contour lines, one at a time, ensuring that each one is drawn as well as we can.

Use of additional masses

I am certainly pleased to see you using lots of additional masses in your constructions, though one issue I tend to spot is that you do struggle to draw those masses in such a way that they establish strong relationships with the existing structure to which they're attaching. You'll often draw a mass, find that it probably feels flat, like a sticker being added to the drawing, and then you add contour lines to make it feel more solid.

Contour lines are a very useful tool, but the task they accomplish is specific. Contour lines help make forms feel more solid and three dimensional, but they do this in isolation. With these additional masses, what we want to do above all else is establish how they relate to the existing structure, so everything can come together to create a sort of three dimensional puzzle. We achieve this, not through additional contour lines, but from the initial silhouette with which the mass is drawn. If we do it incorrectly, there is unfortunately not a lot we can do to fix it.

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.

As shown on this goat drawing, bringing your masses further down along the side will have the benefit of letting you then wrap it around the masses at the shoulder and hips. Also, don't just focus on what impacts the silhouette - thinking about the masses that sit within the silhouette also forces us to think about how all the different pieces fit together.

Leg construction

I can see that you're making a concerted effort to use the sausage method consistently throughout your constructions, and for the most part you're laying down those basic structures pretty well. There are a few cases where you drift away from the proper sausage shape (for example that same goat's back leg has ends that are more stretched out rather than entirely circular), and on this mountain goat you ended up loading up contour lines, though the sausage method diagram specifically says not to.

The points I mentioned about your additional masses certainly do apply here too, and as it stands I don't feel that you really did too much to apply the diagrams/notes I gave you in your Lesson 4 critique on the topic of building on top of your sausage structure. I can see you making attempts in a number of places, but I do suspect that since it wasn't working out (again, due to the way you were designing those silhouettes), you relied less and less on the idea. So - don't be afraid to delve into building on top of your sausage structures, but make sure that you work at how those additional masses' silhouettes are designed, and how they all fit together.

I can also see quite a few instances where the issues I raised in regards to the overall construction section of this critique also cause issues - for example, adding individual lines rather than complete forms, and cutting into/altering silhouettes.

Head construction

Here your results are somewhat varied, with some of your head constructions coming out quite well (like this sitting bear), and others less so like this ram whose eye socket is floating apart from everything else.

As far as head construction goes, the lesson is admittedly in a bit of a messy state, with there being multiple different approaches to head construction discussed, each having been added at a different point. This is simply a part of Drawabox having been developed over many years, and rewritten/updated frequently. Each approach has value to offer, but as discussed right at the top of the tiger head demo, the one that was produced most recently and thus reflects the core principles of the course in its current state best, is this one from the informal demos section. When my more general update of the drawabox content from start to finish reaches Lesson 5, this approach will definitely be integrated into the main material more thoroughly.

Conclusion

As a whole, I think there are a lot of things that can be improved upon, but at its core, you are moving in the right direction. I am going to assign revisions below, so you can try to address the issues I've called out here. One last thing that I'd recommend however is to give yourself more time for these drawings.

Currently you're not by any means rushing, or at least not that I can tell - but I can see a tendency to perhaps make decisions more quickly than you should, resulting in you making mistakes by trying to work around choices that were too swiftly made. Give yourself plenty of time for the execution of each mark, to the best of your ability, and for observing your reference frequently and consistently as well so you do not end up working from memory for some of the seemingly less important things.

One common thing students do, is that they feel compelled to complete a drawing in a single sitting - but there's nothing that actually states you should be done when you get up. Instead, you should feel welcome and encouraged to spread a single drawing across as many sittings and days as you need to accomplish your singular responsibility - to execute the work to the best of your current ability.