Starting with your organic intersections, you're generally doing okay here, but I have a few quick things to call out:

• Make sure that you're drawing through all of the ellipses you freehand throughout this course, drawing around the shape two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1.

• Additionally, remember that the purpose of this exercise is to create a pile of forms that adheres believably to the laws of physics (including gravity), so that upright sausage on the second page probably isn't the best choice. It isn't technically wrong though - it actually does still manage to look somewhat stable, but it's not something I'd recommend for this exercise.

• When you've got a sausage going across a gap, be sure to emphasize how the cast shadow itself plunges into the gap. You're doing this to a point in cases like this, but it is definitely something that would benefit from a little further exaggeration as that cast shadow follows the surface upon which it's being cast.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, while I'm definitely seeing a lot of improvement over the set, there are some pretty significant aspects of this lesson and this course that are, at least partially, being missed in how you approach these constructions. Some of these were also called out and explained in the critique of your Lesson 4 work, which suggests that you may not be using the feedback you receive as effectively as you could.

When it comes to the issues I called out in Lesson 4, there are two main ones that are still quite prominently present here:

• In lesson 4's critique, we talked about the importance of not making marks that exist solely in 2D space, and ensuring that everything we build upon our constructions exists as its own fully self-enclosed silhouette, where the specific design of that silhouette is what establishes its relationship with the existing structure. You appear to have completely forgotten about this, especially in your tendency to slap individual lines or partial shapes onto your constructions, and by jumping ahead into forms that are way more complex than the existing structure can reasonably support. To make this point somewhat stronger, I've gone in with one of your rhino constructions and marked out every line/shape you put down that was not fully self-enclosed.

• While I can see you employing it in some of your horses/deer (although inconsistently), you appear to not have followed the points I raised about using the sausage method for constructing your leg structures. I'm not going to push into this much more, as I did explain it a fair bit in my critique of your Lesson 4 work, so I'll leave you to reread it.

Moving onto things that are more specific to what we're learning/working with in this lesson, there are a few other points I want to call out. The first of these is about how we work with our additional masses. Across the set, you've had varying degrees of success with this - from some masses falling entirely flat, and others coming along quite well. With this earlier bear, that mass along its back is way too complex, trying to accomplish far too many things all at once.

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.

Here's how it would look on that same bear, with the masses along the back broken up into separate pieces. Note also how I drew the torso sausage, which as explained here sags further down to capture the belly, rather than attempting to capture it with an additional mass afterwards. That is still a valid option (using an additional mass), but being that it'd have to work against gravity, it's not an ideal situation, and one we should avoid when we can.

When it comes to actually designing the shape of your additional masses, there are cases (like those on this cat's back where you're demonstrating an understanding of how to design them more intentionally. That said, I did notice that you were wrapping the silhouette around the pelvis mass, which is incorrect - that pelvis form became a smoothly integrated part of the overall torso sausage, and so it doesn't protrude at all, and doesn't provide us with anything to actually wrap around. Instead, we'd use the thigh mass as shown here (or the shoulder mass up front). For things like this, it's actually very beneficial to even stretch your masses further to make them press up against such existing structures (as I did for the shoulder). They're excellent opportunities to further ground our additional masses.

Now on the topic of additional masses, and of construction in general, I did want to point out the fact that you are severely overusing and over-relying on contour lines, specifically the kind introduced in Lesson 2's organic forms with contour lines exercise. You use them a lot to try and take the partial flat shapes you'd drawn and try to make them feel more 3D. These kinds of contour lines, which sit on the surface of a single form can be effective, but only in a very limited use case, to make a structure feel more solid and three dimensional on its own. Construction is about fitting different forms together, creating a collective, cohesive result out of many parts, and so it focuses very heavily on establishing relationships between those parts. There may well be use in adding one contour curve in the middle of the torso sausage, just to give it a touch more solidity, but by and large this way of thinking about contour lines is really useful for introducing the concept back in Lesson 2, and then far less so beyond that. It definitely will not fix mistakes that come from approaching other areas of construction carelessly.

Conversely, the contour lines we learned about in the form intersections exercise are far more useful - while we don't use them when we have one mass wrapping around an existing structure, we do use them extensively when different forms interpenetrate one another (like defining the joints between segments of the sausage method). Reason being, like the additional masses' silhouette design, these contour line define a specific joint and relationship between different, solid, 3D forms, and in so doing, makes them feel more solid and three dimensional.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos (although to be fair, it doesn't look like you really followed any of them). 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.

Now, this submission leaves me rather conflicted. It's very clear to me that it is not an absence of skill that has resulted in these issues - more that you did not invest the time you needed into ensuring that the feedback you'd already received, and the demonstrations shown in the lesson material, were followed to the letter. And so, in critiquing this, I've had to call out things that have already been pointed out to you. When students do this to such an extent, it's pretty much always a guaranteed full redo, to ensure that the student learns from their mistake, and avoids wasting their time and mine in the future.

But in your case, looking at your work I can see that you are not especially far off from doing a great job. Furtheremore, I don't think you actively sat down and decided not to follow the instructions. You received my last round of feedback in December, which was several months ago - so I assume you took a break, and simply didn't read through it before starting up again. Which is certainly something I hope you will not repeat in the future.

So, instead I am going to give you one more opportunity. I'm going to assign some revisions below, and if you're able to complete them while largely adhering to the points I've raised above, and not missing anything gratuitous, then we'll mark the lesson as complete. If however I'm seeing the same pattern of missed/ignored instructions, you will be sent for a full redo.