Starting with your organic intersections, I have a hunch. Given that your first page is exceptionally well done, and your second page is much less so, and that the second page was done on the same day you submitted your work... I really can't help but think that maybe you rushed through that second page and didn't give it the attention it really deserved. Fortunately because the first page was done quite well, and I can at least rationalize that the second was just a sloppy attempt. That said, I'll go ahead and point out a couple reasons this one didn't turn out all that well:

  • You're not really sticking to simple sausage forms - some are, but most don't maintain the characteristics outlined here back in lesson 2. As a result, they don't really feel entirely solid and believable, especially those like the top left form.

  • As a whole, a lot of these forms just feel like you've taken them as flat shapes on the page, stamped them down on top of one another, and then added shadows. Where in the first page the actual silhouettes of these forms strongly convey how they're wrapping around one another, here they're just... independent. They don't mix.

Anyway, I'll leave it to you to analyze the difference between the two. I do largely feel that the first one was very successful and well done, but the second leaves me with concerns.

Moving onto your animal constructions, there's a lot here for you to be proud of. That's not to say there aren't issues, but I am seeing big moves in the right direction in terms of how you understand your constructions, and how they're made up of solid, 3D form that all fit together, with clearly defined relationships between them. For the interest of time (as you're critique 10 of 23 today), I am of course going to focus primarily on the areas of weakness, but I do find that most of those weaknesses are more a matter of forgetting certain concepts, rather than not knowing how to use them.

Looking at the birds first, the first drawing a student does usually isn't a good focus for a critique simply because it's where the student's getting used to how they need to be thinking about constructing these kinds of creatures. As such, I'll look at this one first. The head construction's pretty solid, and I really like how you've defined the relationship between the beak and the cranial ball. One thing that stands out however is how you approach drawing the wings - you appear to think a lot about how the wing actually exists anatomically - how there's a bone structure, and the muscle/feathers/etc are all laid out on top of it.

When I draw wings, I honestly don't bother with any of that. All I'm concerned with are the forms I can see, and the forms I know to be there. As such, I'll literally just build it out as a simple form like this. Don't concern yourself with bones - just major masses.

Additionally, for the torso of the bird, you blocked in a ball form, which is fine, but this ball form ended up being pretty loose. While more practice with drawing your ellipses from your shoulder will certainly help with this, when such a situation occurs, always treat the outermost perimeter of your resulting ellipse as being the whole of the ball form. Here you treated it more as being one of the internal loops, and as a result you've got parts of your construction ignoring the additional loops that extend further out. This results in visual contradictions, where viewers may interpret the torso as being larger than you intended, and throwing off the rest of the construction.

Moving onto your cats, I noticed that when adding additional forms to your constructions, you were at times gently piling those additional masses on top, rather than really binding them to the existing structure. As shown here, you need to think about how those forms actually wrap around the structure that already exists, thinking about how the surface of this additional form actually runs along the surface of the form underneath it. You can also see how I've built out the legs there - I start out with a simple chain of sausages (mine was actually quite a bit skinner at the thigh, since I had to maintain a consistent width through its length). Then I used the additional masses to add bulk wherever I needed it. Did so quite heavily around the thigh, and then around the joints too. Remember that the original sausage structure only represents an underlying armature - we are still expected to build it out as needed in successive steps.

Continuing on, I'm noticing that you appear to be somewhat inconsistent in your use of the sausage method. You're not always sticking to simple sausage forms (two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width), and you appear to forget to reinforce the joint between them with a single contour line quite often. This method is not a suggestion, or something you can follow as little or as much as it suits your purposes - it is a technique that should be followed completely, without exception.

Continuing on, here are some notes on your rhino - basically they're much the same thing. When drawing additional masses, always focus on how they wrap around the underlying structure. Also, adhere to the sausage method. Honestly, there is a lot I do like about your rhinos - especially those on this page. As a whole while there are plenty of things you forget about how to employ these exercises (after all that's what the sausage method and construction in general is, an exercise), it is clear that it is all developing your understanding of how forms fit together and how they exist in 3D space. So your rhinos are still conveying a strong sense of how these structures exist in 3D space.

The primary issue I find is that you just seem compelled to go and do things in your own fashion, rather than adhering to the techniques and methodologies that are outlined in the lesson. Looking at your seal, for instance, you start out with the main masses (although your ribcage comes out way too small - remember that it's going to be about half the length of the torso). When it comes to the head construction though, you're mostly just figuring things out for yourself, instead of adhering to the kinds of processes laid out in the tapir head construction demo, the moose head demo, this gazelle demo and even this demo I did for you 2 years ago. The resources are all there, so you don't need to feel the need to go and figure this stuff out yourself. There's no reason the same principles can't also apply to drawings of seals, for example.

All in all I am pretty pleased with how your work is coming out, but I have pointed out a number of issues that I would like to see at least improved upon. As such, I'm going to assign a few more drawings, along with a couple of those organic intersections for you to help demonstrate your understanding on.