Starting with your organic intersections, your work here is certainly improved over your attempts from Lesson 2. Where you were confusing the behaviours of line weight and cast shadow back then, now you're demonstrating a much clearer understanding of what constitutes a cast shadow, and how they should behave. My only concern is a fairly minor, momentary one - on the first page, you've got all of your forms casting shadows to the right, except for the farthest to the left, which is casting the shadows a little more to the left. It's a very minor issue, especially considering that you're otherwise much more consistent in the direction of your shadows, but still something to keep in mind.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, the first thing that jumps out at me here is the manner in which you're executing your marks. I'm seeing a ton of sketchiness behind your linework here, and a pretty significant shift away from the principles of markmaking from Lesson 1, toward more instinctual sketching, rather than conscious, fastidious use of the ghosting method and its underlying principles.

It is not entirely uncommon for students to, upon reaching a lesson whose subject matter they find particularly interesting, slip away from the painstaking habits we attempt to develop throughout this course, and instead lose themselves a little bit in the fun of sketching things out in a more organic fashion that jumps back and forth between actions taken in 2D space (putting arbitrary, individual marks or partial shapes down on the flat page) and actions taken in 3D space (constructing complete, self-enclosed forms, focusing on how they each individually exist in space, and how they relate to the existing structure within that 3D space) - as discussed in my critique of your Lesson 4 work.

Here, it very much seems that you fell into that, and ended up forgetting those points I stressed in my last critique of your work.

There are definitely areas where you lean more into thinking in 3D, but there's always inconsistency to it, with little areas where you allow yourself to take more liberties, rather than adhering back to the core purpose of this lesson, and the course as a whole. Remember - this lesson isn't about drawing animals in whatever fashion. Animals are merely yet another lens through which we look at the same constructional drawing exercises - the spatial puzzles that force our brains to consider the relationships between different forms, as we build up in the direction defined by our reference images.

One area where I definitely see a lot of this tendency - even in constructions where you otherwise are more focused on building up solid, three dimensional forms, instead of loosely related marks, is in your animals' legs. For example, here on your gazelle's legs there's a ton of different marks all suggesting different things and contradicting one another. A lot of separate one-off strokes (I think you're attempting to draw through these forms in the way that we draw through ellipses, which is an issue we'll talk about shortly), along with a number of places where you're cutting back into those forms and altering their silhouettes.

The segments of your legs, as per the sausage method, need to specifically adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages. As noted on the diagram, drawing ellipses is incorrect. Furthermore, we draw through our ellipses because it allows us to lean into the arm's natural desire to draw ellipsoid shapes - so if you end up drawing through them while intending to draw a different shape, it is naturally going to lean more towards an ellipse. So, for our sausages, we don't go around the shape multiple times.

And, of course, as with everything else we build upon those structures with additional masses, whose silhouettes are specifically designed to convey the manner in which they wrap around the existing structure as I mentioned and demonstrated here in my feedback on your Lesson 4 work:

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well).

Also, when building up masses along the legs, be sure to consider not only the silhouette of the form, but also the structures that sit inside of the structure's silhouette. This is what helps us to consider how all the pieces fit together, as shown here on another student's work.

When it comes to the way in which we draw those additional masses (wherever we add them, not just on the legs), 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.

Also, don't be afraid to really let your masses come down further along the sides of the animal's torso, or whatever structure it's attaching to. This can give us great opportunities to press up against other structures (like the masses at the hip and shoulder), and will generally help us achieve a more believable sense of the mass "gripping" the existing structure, as you can see shown here on your own work. Compare this to the original, and note the two masses you had sitting along the gazelle's spine, but leaving a fairly minimal footprint. I like to think of it in terms of considering whether it feels as though the masses I've added will really hold in place, or if they seem as though they'd slip off when the animal moves.

In regards to the horse you were asking about (which admittedly is definitely one of the looser constructions), it's a little tough to tell you how to approach the mane that was present in your reference image without actually seeing it, but you might consider constructing the mane as a box. Not everything we treat as a solid form needs to be water-tight. Manes themselves can be represented as simple forms despite the fact that they're made up of individual strands. They still produce a mass of their own.

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. 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 as a whole, in those two major areas - the general way in which you've employed your markmaking across many of these constructions, whether in part or in full, and the tendency towards modifying the silhouettes of your established forms - you've definitely taken a bit of a turn away from the prior feedback and the general concepts of the course. These things happen. I'll be assigning some revisions below so you can correct these issues and otherwise demonstrate your understanding of the points I've raised.