Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are generally well done, as most of the forms interact with one another in a believable, convincing fashion, but I do have two things to point out:

• Firstly, when doing this exercise, build up. That is to say, don't try to sneak another form underneath ones that have already been drawn, because there's no logical way to get them to behave in a manner that takes the one below into consideration. It's inevitable that the lower one would end up feeling wrong, as this one does. Since we need to make sure that each form we draw conforms to the one(s) beneath it, it's just something to avoid altogether.

• Your cast shadows are mostly looking good (although this one doesn't wrap around the surface upon which it is being cast), but if you're going to add cast shadows, it's a good idea to also build up a little more line weight to help provide a little more variety in the thicknesses just to bridge the gap between the uniform basic linework and the big bold cast shadows.

Moving onto your animal constructions, what I'm seeing here is that you kind of understand the core principles of the lesson, but a number of very important issues are keeping you from actually applying them successfully. These issues are as follows:

• Most of all, you're not putting nearly enough time into each drawing. It's not uncommon for students to have an arbitrary idea of how long they're "supposed" to spend on a given drawing, but whatever it may be, it's always wrong. The only thing that matters is that you invest as much time as is required to execute the drawing to the best of your ability. What that really means though is that you need to put as much time as you need into every single mark. Now, that definitely comes off as tedious and slow to most people, but that kind of patience and care is necessary. Beyond that, taking the time to really study and observe your references, to identify the forms that are present there and how they ought to connect to one another is critical. All of this takes an enormous amount of time, and they won't be solved by relying on instincts and hoping for the best. What we're doing here, by taking our time and thinking through these spatial problems, is what trains and develops our instincts - if we try to rely on them to work more quickly right now, all we'll end up with is a bit of a mess.

• I mentioned this in the previous point, but it really deserves its own. Taking the time to study our references is extremely important. Not just to look at the references, then to go to town on drawing, but to look almost constantly at the reference, only looking away long enough to make one or two specific marks, to draw one specific form, etc. before looking back. This is what makes the difference between a drawing that actually looks believable, and one that looks visibly oversimplified. Don't get me wrong - our goal here isn't to create a perfect reproduction of the reference image, and it never has been. It's simply to draw something, using the information available in the reference, that is believably solid and three dimensional. This is technically something that can still be achieved even when the proportions are wrong. What matters however is that we study the reference enough to understand what forms are present, and how they fit together in 3D space. Some drawings where this definitely fell apart include your wolf, bear, and badger, and I believe observing more carefully would have helped a great deal there. Your overall observational skills did improve somewhat in the later drawings, so that is worth noting.

I'm going to take a bit of a break here and point out that there are many aspects of this drawing that are very well done, and worthy of praise. I think here you showed a lot more patience and care, and that you structured your approach in a way that applied more of what you've learned. There are issues with it, and I'll address them, but at its core it is far better than the rest of your drawings.

Now, let's talk about three specific issues I'm seeing in your drawings, rather than general ones.

Additional masses

This issue is normal, and something I expect to explain in my critiques for this lesson. You've experimented with building up additional masses in your constructions, and that's great. There are however some things we should be thinking about when drawing these that can help them to feel more believable in how they interact with the structure to which they're attaching.

It helps to think about these as they exist on their own - the additional masses, floating in the void, are like soft balls of meat. They're in their simplest state here, made up only of outward curves with no corners whatsoever, because there's nothing else pressing in on them. When we change that by pushing the form against some existing structure, that's when the additional mass starts to acquire some more complexity, with inward curves and corners forming where it makes contact with the more solid structure. Here's a demonstration of this concept.

What this means is that when we draw these additional masses, we cannot simply draw their silhouettes in an arbitrary fashion. We have to be conscious and aware of the specific structure it's pressing up against, to know exactly what forms are pushing into it to create certain curvature. For example, if we look at this camel, the big mass on its back still has an outward curve where it presses against the torso, making it appear to be more of an arbitrary shape pasted on top of the drawing. This one on the other hand has some inward curves that integrate a bit better with the torso, but we still don't fully understand what specific forms are pressing up against the form.

This would be better. Notice how the inward curves come from it wrapping around the base of the neck at the front, then wrapping around the big shoulder mass, and lastly wrapping around the big hip mass. You'll also notice that instead of drawing a single form, I broke it into three masses - one on each end, then a third piled on top of the other two. In general, try not to draw additional masses that try and accomplish too much all at once. Breaking them up into separate forms and having them wrap around one another can help introduce more subtlety and complexity to your construction.

The sausage method

This one's going to be short - you've pretty consistently decided not to employ the sausage method, as stressed back in my original critique of your lesson 4 work. There I shared a bunch of demos, including one of a dog's leg where I showed how the method should be used for all the legs you draw. You need to take more care in following the instructions you're given - even if that means reading through lesson material and past critiques multiple times to avoid forgetting them.

Head construction

This will be another short one. Give this section a read, including the accompanying text. It explains how to think about approaching head construction.

Now, I'm going to assign a number of revisions below. I want you to do them to the absolute best of your ability - that means investing as much time as you reasonably can into every mark, every form, every thought, and every choice you make. Observe your reference constantly, and ensure that every mark is informed by what is present in your reference.

One last thing - I don't want you to work on more than one drawing per day. If you want to take more than one day for a drawing, you are welcome to, but you should absolutely not try to get more than one done in a sitting, as this will likely result in you rushing through.