Hello I'll be handling the critique for your lesson 5 homework.

Organic Intersections

-Starting with the organic intersections these are turning out well, and they wrap around each other in a believable way. You have kept most of the sausage shapes simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to produce good results. The main thing you have to keep working on is the cast shadows, right now you are not pushing them far enough, keep in mind that they act like contour lines so you should extend them further. If you need a reminder take a look at this section of lesson 2.

Animals

-Moving on to the animal constructions, they are turning out well and I can see that you have stuck to the main principles of construction while breaking everything down into its simplest components.

-The first thing I want to call out is your use of contour curves, you seem to be using a lot of them on single masses, and for the most part they are turning out well. Just make sure you are using the ghosting method to think about each mark's purpose and how you are going to achieve it best, contour curves are a useful tool to describe how a form sits in 3D space but they can also work against us by flattening our drawings so you should use them very sparingly. You should avoid adding them to the additional masses, for these ones you want to focus on designing the silhouette.

One thing that can help with this is to imagine how each additional mass would exist by itself in 3D space. With nothing else to touch our mass would be a ball. Then, as it comes into contact with the preceding structure its silhouette starts to get more complex in response to the existing forms. This process is exemplified in this demo.

Your use of the additional masses is good, but you tend to add them very timidly and they could be better by taking more time to design the silhouette.

-Now I want to address the way you build your legs, I can see that you have used the sausage method in a way that captures both the flow and solidity of these limbs, it is kind of a hit and miss when it comes to adding masses, sometimes you chose to add them and sometimes you did not. The important thing to keep in mind is that the sausage method is not about capturing the shape of the legs precisely as they are, instead it is about laying down a very basic structure on top of which we will build any further complexity.

-I did notice that whenever you drew the shoulder and hips masses they turned out very small, try to give them more room, these masses tend to be quite big especially in quadrupeds as they have very large muscles. You can see more concrete examples on how to build legs in this dog's leg demo and this ant leg demo.

-Now let's move on to head construction, your work here is turning out well but you could benefit from taking more time to plan your marks. For example I can see that whenever you drew the eye sockets you were aware of the different planes existing in the cranium, but most of them ended up being pretty small, always drawing them big. The shape of the eye sockets is better off as a pentagon pointing downwards, this gives us a wedge to fit in the muzzle and a flat edge for the brow ridge and the forehead.

The eyeballs should be much bigger too, doing this will make it easier to wrap the eyelids as shown here.

Once all of these elements are in place we can start to build the facial features following the planes of the existing structure, the trick is to focus on one thing at a time and always trying to break everything down into its more primitive parts. You can see more concrete examples of this process in this camel's head demo and this rhino head demo.

-Lastly it is good to see that you are giving texture to your animals, take your time to design each individual tuft of fur, also keep in mind that it is better to add it to the silhouette. Just like the contour curves, this is another room that you should use very sparingly as shown here.

Okay, in general you are doing pretty well but I do want to see some of this issues addressed so I'll have you do some additional homework. Good luck