Hahaha, the point you raised about the sketchbook section made me chuckle. Reason being, that section largely exists because we needed somewhere to stuff the partial submissions where they wouldn't draw attention from the completed work, and reduce the chances of the folks who actually put all the time in to get things finished getting feedback on their hard work. To that point, I certainly agree that those posts can be quite annoying to have to dodge around. I do have plans to add filtering to the completed homework section, and I will certainly do the same to the sketchbook section. I'm not currently adding new features to the website and won't be for a bit yet (still thoroughly burnt out from the many months I spent getting it ready for release), but filters are on the to-do list for when I get back on that.

I am glad you were able to find something to push you into drawing for fun more. At the end of the day, that feeling of being too amateurish is exactly why we need to do it. I flipped through your exercises as well, and I especially liked the side-profile portraits.

About proportion - we do actually introduce proportional studies (quick drawings on the side that break up an object in orthographic views) when we get into vehicles, as they tend to be quite important there. With organic subject matter however, I generally let proportion slide. In fact, I often celebrate when students manage to pull off a drawing with proportions that are off, but where the construction is so strong that it makes it seem as though the fault is with whatever the student was drawing. Basically that the subject was a freak of nature, and the drawing was accurate. It's a sign of very strong constructional skills. Proportion itself is as such not a huge priority for me, as I know it develops steadily as one continues to do drawing studies from photographs and from life.

Anyway! Onto the work for this exercise. You're my last critique of 8 today - it seems a lot of people submitted as soon as they had the credits to do so.

Starting with your organic intersections, you're largely doing a pretty good job with these, and you're successfully conveying the sense that these forms are each three dimensional, and that they're interacting in 3D space, slumping and sagging against one another without sacrificing the illusion of their solidity and volume. One point about the second page though - it seems your bottom sausage isn't casting any shadows, which seems a bit jarring. Remember to be consistent with your cast shadows.

Moving onto your animal constructions, overall you're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of the material, specifically in how you leverage your forms and focus heavily on establishing the relationships between those forms in order to create more solid, cohesive constructions. There are however some issues I'd like to point out that should help you as you continue to move forwards.

First off, you have a pretty strong tendency to use a lot of contour lines. Contour lines are great, and effective tools, but that effectiveness only tends to go so far, as they suffer from diminishing returns. One contour line can certainly help quite a bit - the one to follow might help less so, and the third even less than that. Eventually we end up with a lot of lines where most of them are not really contributing. This comes back to the importance of the ghosting method, where our first step (planning) involves determining the nature of the line we want to draw, and with it deciding what its job is to be and whether or not that line will be the best one for the given task.

There are in fact different kinds of contour lines. There are the ones we're very familiar with - those that sit along the surface of a single form and help describe how that one form exists in 3D space on its own. Because they focus on the form in isolation, their actual usefulness is somewhat limited. But there is another, more effective type when it comes to construction, and you've already used this several times. Back in Lesson 4, we introduced the sausage method. This second type of contour line is what we use to reinforce the joint between two sausage forms - it's a contour line that establishes the relationship between two forms in 3D space, and in doing so, it creates a cyclic connection between them. In our brains, we see this and understand that if one form is three dimensional, then so too is the other one. But in turn, if that second form is 3D, then so too is the first. On and on, it creates a loop that perpetually reinforces itself.

This kinds of contour lines are extremely effective, and we can see them in how your head constructions generally do a good job of establishing how the muzzle connects to the cranial sphere. This reinforces both forms as being three dimensional, eliminating any benefit of further contour lines on those forms.

This leads to our second point, however - there are a number of cases where you attempt to add additional masses, but when drawing them you largely focus on how that mass itself is to be made three dimensional, and neglect to think about how it relates to the underlying structure to which it is being added. For example, we see this on the egret, specifically up along the peak of its back, and to an extent along its head above the beak. Here you use the first kind of contour line a great deal, but when actually drawing these forms, you did not consider how its silhouette would integrate with that underlying structure.

You did a somewhat better job of this for the additional forms on this squirrel's back and chest. That said, these additional forms can be pushed much further, as you can see in this drawing demo where I use them all over to capture the nuance of a puma's musculature.

Lastly, I want to circle back to that sausage method. Currently you're somewhat haphazard in terms of what elements of this method you apply, and more often than not you tackle each animal's legs on a case-by-case basis. This is likely because you don't necessarily see these animals' legs as matching the appearance of a chain of sausages. The thing to keep in mind is that the sausage method is not about drawing a specific kind of leg - it's about creating an underlying structure or armature that maintains an illusion both of solidity and of fluidity. Generally the approaches we use when drawing legs will either focus on making things feel solid (but stiff), or fluid/gestural (but flat). The sausage method achieves both. Once this armature is established, we can then add bulk to it the same way we always do - by wrapping additional masses to that structure.

So! I've outlined a number of areas where we can definitely achieve some further growth. I think you are doing a pretty good job as it is, but before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to ensure that these points are taken to heart. As such, I'll be assigning just a few more pages of animal drawings.