Alrighty, so I felt the best course of action here was to do the majority of the critique as a series of notes and demonstrations written directly on selected pieces of your work, which I have done here.
In addition to the points I raised there, here are some diagrams/notes that were either referenced or related in my hand-written critique:
The sausage method. Sometimes you were drawing stretched ellipses rather than sausages, and other times you'd forget to reinforce the joint between the sausage forms with a contour line. It's important you adhere to all the aspects of this technique as outlined in that diagram.
The sausage method is all about constructing an underlying armature or structure that captures both the solidity of the forms and the gestural flow of the limb. Once established, we can and should go back in and further build up additional masses as shown here to add bulk wherever it is needed.
How to tackle drawing fur - texture/fur is definitely difficult, so I don't necessarily expect students to be able to pull it off right now, nor is it a major focus for this course as a whole, but I did notice that your approach was pretty contrary to how we talk about texture back in Lesson 2.
One thing I noticed which I can't necessarily be sure of due to how the images were cropped, is that it feels that some of your drawings may be a bit small. This may not be the case, and it doesn't seem to be so for all of them, but if I look at drawings like the hartebeest and the bears, the thickness of your linework relative to the overall size of the drawing does make me suspect that they may not be drawn as large as they could have been. This in turn limits one's ability to think through spatial problems effectively.
Alternatively, these may be cases where you're applying too much pressure to your linework, causing you to draw more slowly and less confidently, and to generally make things feel clumsy.
In addition to the main demonstrations in the lesson, there are a number of informal demonstrations that you should definitely take a look at. They break down the drawing process into a fair bit of detail. Make a point of looking at the:
Tapir head construction
Donkey construction
Puma construction (pay special attention to how in this demo after laying down the core masses and construction, I go back in to build up the additional forms to establish the more nuanced, subtle forms that are present on the body, breaking things down and capturing more specific information without actually getting into texture.
Lastly, I think that there are definitely some cases where you may not be observing your reference as frequently as you ought to be. You may spend plenty of time studying the reference, but if you look away for too long to draw too many different marks, you will end up relying primarily on your memory, which is prone to oversimplifying and tossing information away.
So, I think I've laid out a great many things for you to tackle, so I'm going to assign some additional pages with a few added restrictions in how you are to approach them.
Next Steps:
I'd like you to do the following:
1 page practicing the sausage method - that is, by drawing chains of 3 sausages each, applying all the elements of the sausage method as shown in the diagram I linked above. Fill the page as much as you can, but don't draw them too small - give yourself plenty of room to engage both your shoulder as you draw, and your brain's spatial reasoning skills.
Draw along with the 3 informal demos I pointed out above (tapir head, donkey, puma). Follow each one's instructions as closely as you can.
5 animal constructions, with two additional restrictions. First, you may not employ any contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form. You are allowed, and encouraged, to draw the kinds of contour lines that define the relationship between two forms (like the intersections from lesson 2, which we use as part of the sausage method). Specifically this restriction is to force you to think about how you wrap your additional masses around the underlying structure while actually drawing its silhouette, rather than just drawing a shape and trying to correct it after the fact. Secondly, you must focus only on construction. No texture is allowed, but you should strive to take each construction as far as it can with form and construction alone to capture the nuanced elements of the animals you're drawing, as shown in the various informal demos. Construction is about approaching a drawing in successive phases, always building upon what you constructed previously and breaking forms down more and more.
Oh, and when you submit these requested pages, make sure your photos capture the whole page, not just an isolated crop, so I can get a sense of the scale at which you're drawing.
Happy weekend! Hope these new drawings are better.
These are definitely a big improvement. My only concern is that with your chains-of-sausages, the contour curves at the joints are drawn too shallowly, and don't wrap around the rounded surface of the forms. This issue is described here - make a point of the bit about "overshooting" your curves on the little diagram, as this will help you get the correct curvature.
Anyway, you are indeed doing much better, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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