Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along alright, though there is a tendency to have your forms flatten out quite a bit, instead of maintaining a generally rounded profile. Especially on this page, we can see the third form from the top essentially becomes pancaked, with no actual impact on how the one above it sits. We also see that the one on the top of this stack has its bottom edge curving around the underlying forms, without its top edge registering their presence at all. When doing this exercise in the future, think more about how each form has its own solid volume prior to actually putting them down on the page. These kinds of mistakes often occur when students jump in too quickly, and then realize their mistake after the fact, having to figure out how to salvage things.

For your animal constructions, I definitely see signs that you're getting your head around how to approach these constructions in a sound, structured manner. There are some issues that remain throughout, but all in all you're moving in the right direction and making considerable headway in your grasp of how to create solid, believable results.

In terms of overall concerns, I think the most general one I have is that in many of these drawings, you're riding along the edge of distraction when it comes to texture and detail. That is, while I wouldn't go so far as to say you're ignoring construction/structure in favour of detail, there are cases where it feels like you may jump into detail to soon, or have thoughts of it hanging around the back of your head while you should be entirely focused on the idea of placing forms within the world and establishing how they relate to one another in space.

Understanding your drawing as being 3D, not a series of lines on a page

This is an extension of an overall mentality where you are still in many ways seeing your drawings as collections of lines on a page. That is, as opposed to believing in the idea that what you're doing is constructing solid, 3D forms inside of a 3D world. The reason this is important is because if you perceive the forms you draw as being real and three dimensional, then we automatically put into place certain mental blocks that stop us from simply adjusting their shapes as they sit in two dimensions on the page.

If you look at this bird, you'll notice how I highlighted a section at its throat, where you'd initially blocked in a form coming down from its cranium and connecting to its torso, then cut back into it. The way you cut into it treated it like flat shapes on a page, rather than respecting the three dimensional nature of these forms. Being that we are in fact just drawing a bunch of lines and conjuring the illusion that the object itself is three dimensional, we have all the freedom in the world to put down whatever marks we choose - and many of these lines we may think to add will serve to reinforce this notion, that it's all just flat. In order to focus entirely on selling the lie that the object is 3D, we need to have artificial constraints on what kinds of marks we are allowing ourselves to put down. Once we are able to actually believe in the lie itself, it becomes much easier to abide by those limitations, because we don't even have to remind ourselves of them. Certain things, based on our beliefs regarding what we're drawing, become impossible.

For example, if I draw a circle on the page and I believe it is a sphere, I face immense mental resistance when trying to draw a straight line across the circle. My brain believes it to be a sphere, and so any line crossing along it will curve around its surface. That is the default mindset, and this is what we're trying to develop throughout all of Drawabox. It is not something you'll be able to do just by virtue of me explaining this, but by making you aware of it, you can move in that direction.

Additive vs. Subtractive Construction

This whole lecture leads directly into the concepts of additive and subtractive construction. Constructional drawing - or rather, the choices we make when drawing using this methodology - come in two flavours. We can either add another form to our drawing, exhibiting an awareness of how it wraps around the underlying structure, and how it exists in 3D space both on its own, and in relation to the forms already existing within the scene. This is what we do 90% of the time, and I encourage using additive construction whenever possible, as the process of it helps us further develop our grasp of space and emphasizes this whole belief-in-the-lie I explained earlier. It's basically the organic intersections exercise.

Subtractive construction, on the other hand, is what you attempted with this bird's neck - cutting away from the existing forms. The more we do additive construction (and thus the more we develop our overall belief that these forms are three dimensional), the better we actually get at subtractive construction. That said, I generally have students avoid working subtractively wherever possible, simply because it's a lot easier to approach it as you've done here, thinking in terms of cutting back into 2D shapes, without realizing it.

The correct way to approach subtractive construction is to think of your pen as a scalpel, cutting along the surface of a given form - like you're drawing a contour line. This line splits the form into two different sections - and you can ultimately choose to treat one as positive space (solid, existing form) or negative space (empty, a void). What's important is that regardless, they are clearly defined areas of space, and we can understand how they relate to the other defined three dimensional regions. The result is that our forms still remain solid and continue to appear 3D.

Additional Masses

Now, I've gone on a pretty big tangent with this, but I think I can swing it back around to touch upon another issue I was seeing in a number of your drawings. When adding additional masses to your constructions - like along the belly and back of this pig, you are again thinking in two dimensions, pasting flat 2D shapes on top of your construction. The actual silhouette itself doesn't tell us anything about how the forms wrap around the underlying torso. There are many cases - such as the pig-tiger hybrid where you attempt to fix this after the fact by adding contour lines along the surface of the additional mass, but unfortunately it's a lot like putting makeup on a pig. If the silhouette of the mass itself does not convincingly convey how it wraps around the underlying form, additional contour lines won't do much.

Contour Lines

This brings us around to contour lines - and your tendency to use a lot of them. Contour lines are an extremely helpful tool to be sure, but it's important to be aware of exactly what you're attempting to get out of every single one you put down on the page. Contour lines suffer from diminishing returns - that is, your first contour line may help a great deal, and the second may help a lot less. Further, the third, the fourth, and so on may ultimately contribute next to nothing to the construction.

Right now, I'm getting the impression that you add contour lines because you feel that you should - but you're not entirely sure of what you're trying to get out of them. If you're unsure of what you want them to do for you, then it becomes considerably more difficult to actually apply them in such a way that they do what you need. This goes for every mark you put down - you need to know exactly what job that line is going to perform, and prior to putting it down, think about how it can best accomplish this task for you, and whether there may be other options that might do it better.

To this point, there are in fact two flavours of contour lines. There are the ones we draw along the length of a single form, this is the category most of yours fall into (especially those along your additional masses). They're certainly helpful, but their usefulness is quite limited. There is a different kind, however - contour lines that define the relationship between forms in 3D space. These are usually seen as intersection lines, and sit on the surface of two forms simultaneously. These are immensely effective - and when used properly, they often make the need for the first kind of contour line irrelevant. In being so effective, they leave little left for further contour lines to accomplish.

The reason they're so effective is because they create a recursive relationship between those forms. Not only do they do exactly what the first kind of contour line do, but they also establish that if the first form feels 3D, then so too should the second form. And in turn, if the second form feels 3D, so too should the first form feel 3D once again. And on and on, in a continuous loop.

When drawing our additional masses, or approaching the organic intersections exercise, we need to treat the forms themselves as being, in a way, contour lines of themselves. Their silhouettes wrap around another form, just as a contour line does. In this way they behave like the first kind of contour line - but being whole 3D forms rather than just lines, they also bring in elements of the second kind. As such, you can absolutely take two sausage forms - silhouette only with no internal contour lines - and wrap one around the other to make them both feel reasonably 3D.

The Sausage Method

This critique has already gotten pretty long - three times longer than the average critique I write. But there's one last thing I want to touch upon, and that's drawing legs. I can see a lot of different approaches you've used across the set. Sometimes you use parts of the sausage method from lesson 4, other times you'll use entirely different approaches. You largely base it on how the legs themselves appear in your reference.

Moving forward, I want you to get used to using the sausage method for every leg, whether you feel the leg appears to be a chain of sausages or not. The technique is not meant for the leg as a whole, but rather to construct a solid underlying armature or structure that captures the illusion of solidity while also maintaining a gestural flow. You can always append further masses, building them up as shown here to bulk out areas where needed afterwards - but when it comes to putting down the base structure, this technique is important.

Keep in mind that there are specific requirements for this technique:

1. The forms must be simple sausages - that is, two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No stretched ellipses, no ends of different sizes, etc.

2. The forms must overlap/intersect a reasonable amount - don't have them just barely touch, or anything like that

3. You must place a single contour line at the joint between two sausage forms to establish the relationship in space between them. Don't place contour lines along their lengths, just focus on those at the joints.

Conclusion

Now, I have outlined a handful of pretty significant things to keep in mind, and I am going to have you do some additional work. That said, I actually think your work here is indeed quite well done. These underlying issues are just areas where your attention was not quite where it needed to be, and I feel that by being directed to pay attention to the right things, you'll be able to produce even better results.

Despite the issues I pointed out on that pig hybrid, I think it demonstrates that you do in fact largely have a good grasp of how to leverage constructional techniques. The resulting construction feels fairly believable, and it's clear that you do understand to a fair degree how the different parts of it exist in 3D space. Once those additional masses are made to properly wrap around the form, existing as 3D forms instead of just flat shapes pasted on top, I think you'll be better demonstrating what you're capable of.