Normally I have cut-offs for when I deal with critiques or revisions depending on when they come in. I work Monday, Wednesday, Friday, with the cut-off being midnight that morning in my timezone, and so for Friday, your revision came in well after the cut-off, and I've just finished about 10 critiques so I am admittedly exhausted. But your wall of text there is important, and I think this is best not left for Monday. Really, I just don't want you to stew in this more than you have - at least not without me adding ingredients to the pot.

So here's the thing. There are some... misconceptions in your statements that I'd definitely like to explain, but just so you don't lose hope as I clarify those points, I do have some responses to your actual work that hopefully will help target the issues you've identified, or at least give you some more direction on that front. You also won't be given a full redo, just some more revisions as we work through the main concerns.

I can't stand the fact that I'm two years into a professional-level drawing course and have made less progress than most beginner artists do in just as much time, without any courses

Setting aside the fact that no two people progress at the same pace, and no two people can be easily compared to one another because you have no real idea of what experience the "beginners" you look at may have, Drawabox is not a professional level drawing course. While you have generously supported us at the highest tier for a long time, I would hate for you to have the wrong impression here.

I am a self-taught instructor. I started teaching this stuff only as an attempt to share what I'd learned - which was more sharing the fact that certain concepts exist, rather than to actually explain how they work. But, over the course of years and explaining these things to the best of my very flawed ability, I did get better at it. I rewrote, reassessed, revisited the tactics I employed, and I still continue to do so. Drawabox is an imperfect resource, and that is reflected in every aspect of how we function - from the incredibly price of entry/participation for critique, to the fact that all of the material is free.

I have no credentials in teaching, and I have not even really attended art school. I attended what is effectively a night school - with excellent instructors, sure, and I learned a ton while I was there - but as an illustrator. Not as an instructor. So, to put it simply, you should not put Drawabox on a pedestal, nor should you think that what you get here is the best you can get anywhere. It's probably by far the best value proposition for the things we do cover, but that does not mean that there are not vastly more experienced instructors out there. If I fail you, that's on me. And I am entirely capable of it.

Of course we cannot deny the fact that you do have more trouble with this than others who come through here, but learning/teaching is a cooperative game. One teacher may not be able to provide a given student with all they need to reach their goals - but another may be able to help them towards that far more effectively.

this is easily the most important lesson for me, as 'living creatures that look belivable in 3D space' is the one thing I always want to draw more than anything else

Technically every lesson from 3-5 has the exact same focus. The subject matter merely serves to give us a different lens through which to look at that problem, and here that focus is on the "drawing things that look believably 3D". Whether they're animals, plants, insects, etc. is not something we're actually teaching here. Even if you look at the kinds of courses that are offered at New Masters Academy (there's a list of them on the first page of Lesson 5 for those who want to learn more about animals specifically), they go into so much more depth about what animals are, and all the things that are specific to them.

Again - I would be unreasonable to wholly discount what you were saying, because there is merit there. But it speaks to Drawabox as a whole, because that focus on spatial reasoning, on drawing things that are believably 3D, is something we tackle right from Lesson 1 all the way to the end of Lesson 7. We just take swings at it from many different angles. That also means that what you achieve here in this lesson is not the totality of what you will achieve in this regard. Even the things we explore in Lessons 6 and 7, which look at hard surfaced subject matter, work overtime to develop your spatial reasoning skills, just from a very different angle of attack.

Now, looking at your actual work, I think you are very correct in terms of identifying the core things you're struggling with, and while I usually bop people on the nose for offering self critique, you are right on the money here. You do not understand how to go about drawing the part of a form's silhouette to make it appear as though it is wrapping around that existing structure in a believable fashion.

In other words, you do not know how to draw this line that I've highlighted in red. You have drawn something there, but if I had to guess, I'd say you weren't sure what to focus on, or what should be considered when making that decision, and so you just drew an arbitrary line.

If that's not the case - if you based that line on something specific, then I would certainly like to know what it was, but I do suspect that I'm right. It happens often - when we're faced with something we don't grasp, that our brain refuses to contend with, it shuts down and we just put something down. But that's not a useful response. Sure, it gets the thing done, but it's not a conscious decision or choice being made.

Instead, when you run into this kind of a situation, do not put down a mark. Take a step back, and assess the situation. Take stock of what the different elements you're dealing with. Ultimately, if you put a mark down, if you make a choice, that choice doesn't need to be correct - but it does need to be specific. The result of intent, even if that intent is wrong. It is better to be wrong in a specific fashion, than it is to be correct by a fluke. It's the specificity of the incorrect choice that makes it something we can actually deal with.

At its core, we're really just dealing with the mass we're adding, and the torso sausage I've highlighted here. This sausage can be understood in a couple ways, with the main one we've dealt with thus far being with a series of contour lines, but perhaps for what we're doing here it's not the most useful way to think about this form.

Instead, we can also think about it in "boxier" terms. That doesn't mean we draw a box instead of a sausage, but rather we think about it in terms of there being top, side, front, etc. planes to the form, as shown here. This takes our rounded form, and starts breaking it into individual pieces. Now, instead of wrapping your mass around "big curving surface", you can consider each plane individually.

First we want our mass to wrap along the top, so as shown here we're effectively just drawing a contour line that runs along that surface. Then we come down along the side - extending it down, because this is where we're really "gripping" the torso. Think of it like giving a hug - you don't give a hug with just your hands sticking out from your chest, you wrap your whole arms around the person. Otherwise they might get away!

Then we come back along the top, although due to the orientation of the form, we can't actually see how the mass is wrapping along the top at the wolf's rear, so instead we're really just focusing on that outward curve along the top where nothing is pressing into the mass, as shown here.

But of course, most problems like this don't just involve one form - what happens if we block in a ball structure at the hip to start out the wolf's back leg? Well, then when our mass's silhouette hits that ball form, it stops and then runs along that form's edge, because they're pressing up against one another, as we see here. It's very formulaic, and it actually resembles the form intersections in a lot of ways. I think that's going to be our next avenue of attack to try and solidify this concept for you, but in a way that might be a little... hardcore.

I'm going to have you do some pages of the form intersections exercise from Lesson 2. While students are expected to do this for their warmups, it's always been with minimal focus on the intersections themselves until we hit around Lesson 6, at which point they get assigned again. But in your case, I think it might be best to tackle this once more, with a little additional help.

I want you to take a look at this diagram, which breaks down how we can think about the intersections - specifically the more complicated round-on-flat intersections, and then the even more complicated round-on-round intersections. Like the mass wrapping around the torso I broke down for you above, this diagram attempts to break thinking the intersection through in stages as well, and you may find that the kind of thinking this requires lines up between the two.

Before I call this feedback finished, there are a couple other things I want you to keep in mind:

• You're not drawing through a lot of your ellipses (like the wolf's ribcage and pelvis)

• You are putting way more marks down, sometimes chicken scratching, in other areas. This falls similarly into the issue of panicking and just putting marks down, rather than falling back to the principles from Lesson 1, where we use the ghosting method for every mark, thinking about its purpose, and how it needs to be executed, to the best of our ability. Commit to one stroke for every line, and do not allow yourself to act without being aware of each action taken.