This is... a rather interesting homework submission. There's a good deal of improvement here, but there's also a number of areas where you're straying from aspects of the instructions, or concepts covered in the lesson. Reading your comments, the reason for this becomes clear pretty quickly. You mention that you decided to look up the skeletons of these animals and then build them up from there. While that's an interesting idea, it does very much ignore one of the high rules of Drawabox: follow the instructions to the letter. Approach the drawings the way the demonstrations do. If I use a certain strategy when showing you how to approach these exercises, then that's what you should be doing.

It's not that your approach is wrong - if our focus was actually on animals and their anatomy, this would be extremely valuable. It's that it's incorrect for the purposes of this course, for two reasons:

• Firstly, this lesson isn't about teaching you how to draw animals. It, like every other lesson from 3-7, is about tackling the same problem, using different topics as lenses through which to view that problem. It's about learning how to understand the spatial relationships between forms. For this reason, we're focusing primarily on what we can actually see in these animals. There are a few overarching clues - the proportion of the ribcage to the pelvis, for example. But for the most part, we're still employing our ability to analyze our reference object, and to break it down into major forms.

• Secondly, this course is structured in order to be easier to critique. The further you stray from the intended instructions, the more I have to adapt, and the more time consuming it becomes. So please, in the future, stick to the script.

So at first glance, it seemed to me that where you were drawing those bones, you were actually drawing additional masses like in the dog leg I shared in my critique of your lesson 4 work. They didn't look correct to be additional masses though, simply because their silhouettes didn't denote any actual relationship with the existing structure in three dimensions. They read as flat shapes pasted on top.

If we look at the back leg of your cat, specifically the actual mass you stretched across from the heel to the hip, we see a similar issue. As you can see here, it's important that you consider how the silhouette of that form actually gives the impression that it's really "gripping" the sausage structure. The way you drew the original silhouette for that form did appear to have some random waviness to it, but the key problem is that it was indeed random.

The best way to think about these additional masses is to first think about how they'd exist on their own in the void, free from contact with any other forms. There, they'd exist in their simplest possible state, with a circular silhouette made up entirely of outward curves. It isn't until the mass is pressed against some existing structure that it starts to take on more complexity, with the silhouette developing more inward curves and corners, all in response to specific forms in that structure. What matters is that the silhouette's shape is specific. Not random or arbitrary, but directly responding to the forms it's touching. Conversely, the outer side of that form, where it touches nothing, has to remain simple. No inward curves or corners, simply because there's nothing to produce them. That's how we develop a believable relationship between these additional masses and the existing structure. Here's what I mean.

Now, compared to the dog leg demo I provided previously, you didn't really dig much into the use of additional masses on your leg structures. You added them primarily where there was a huge missing chunk you had to resolve, but when it came to capturing more nuanced musculature, you seem to have left that out. It is still a relevant part of the construction, so you should definitely be thinking about it in the future, once your construction gets pushed far enough along.

So what we've said here is that the silhouette of the additional masses is what's particularly important. There are other cases - like this horse's belly mass - where you tried to integrate the additional mass with the torso by adding a bunch of contour lines. It's certainly not a bad tactic, but the problem here is that the contour lines that sit on the surface of a single form don't actually help establish the relationship between forms. It only makes the one form feel more three dimensional, on its own. As you can see here, you don't need those additional contour lines (and adding them in this case doesn't actually solve the problem at hand). It's all about how the silhouette wraps around the existing structure. Where possible, try to break those masses down into individual pieces as well. We get a lot of the nuance of musculature from how different forms overlap one another.

Also, as I pointed out in that same image, you appeared to be neglecting to place contour lines at the joints between your sausage forms.

Now, as you continue moving through the homework, you honestly do improve. You show a developing grasp of how these constructions are composed of separate forms that fit together, but because you went on a little detour with your own strategy, you ended up missing some important points that were available to you in the lesson. One of these is this explanation of how to think about head construction. As I do my many critiques of students' work, my approach to teaching certain concepts evolves over time. Before I have the chance to integrate it into the main content (with videos and all that), I'll often place that stuff under the informal demos, just so it's still available in some form. Give that explanation a read - it goes over how you should think about the relationship between the eye socket and the other components of the head. It's something you do correctly in a few spots, though more frequently you tend to draw the eye socket as a free-floating element.

As to your question about fur, I noticed that you tended to rely on very repetitive "spikes" rather than more purposefully designing your tufts as shown here. Don't just go on auto-pilot, focusing on the presence of "fur". Think about how you're actually designing each individual shape, and how you're effectively extending out that silhouette. At no point should you be allowing yourself to just draw repeating marks, everything should be intentional.

When it comes to the difference between longer fur and shorter fur, here's a quick demonstration. With short fur, there's just less to communicate. You don't need to go crazy with it and cover the whole animal or anything like that. just little suggestions, like on the highest point of a given form, can be enough to give the impression. Don't forget - our focus here is on communication, not on decoration. Doesn't take that much to get an idea across.

So, while you are in many ways moving in the right direction, sticking to the instructions and following the methodology of the demonstrations is what I need from you for now. I'm going to assign some additional pages below.