It may have taken a long time, but I think you've done a pretty good job. There are a few things I'll point out, but all in all you're demonstrating a good grasp of most of the principles covered in the lesson.

Starting with your organic intersections, these are fairly done well, in that you're capturing how they interact with one another in 3D space, but don't forget to think about how each form captures a sense of weight to it. Meaning, if there's nothing underneath supporting part of a sausage, consider whether it should actually be slumping down in response. The more gaps you leave (there are a couple in your second page), the more they feel like they're floating rather than properly grounded. Also, aside from this kind of slumping and sagging, try not to make the forms too malleable - like you did on the far right of the second page. Think of these more liked filled water balloons, not deflated ones.

Moving onto your animal constructions, there are a number of things I do want to point out. Your overall grasp of construction is still pretty good, but there are some things you're doing that undermine elements of what you already understand. At its core, construction is all about emphasizing above all the notion that what the viewer is looking at exists in 3D space, that it is made up of solid, 3D forms, and communicating what the viewer needs to know to understand how that object could ostensibly be manipulated in their hands.

To achieve this, we basically follow one rule above all else: every single addition, modification, subtraction, etc. we perform to our construction must be done in 3D space. More than that, remember that these drawings are all about construction - they're an exercise, so no choices should be made for the purpose of decorating a pretty drawing. Everything comes down to either the idea of communicating how the viewer might manipulate the object in their hands, or in the case of texture/detail, how it might feel to run one's fingers over different surfaces of the object.

So! With that in mind, let's look at your kestrel. There are a couple issues here, which I've outlined here:

• If you want to add to a construction, you do so with additional 3D masses. Don't just take the 2D silhouette of a form and extend it in two dimensions, this will only emphasize the idea that what we're looking at is a flat drawing.

• Don't fill things in with black just because they appear black in your reference image. We're not colouring things in of any other colour, so these should not be special cases.

• When constructing an animal's head, don't leave the different elements of the head (eye socket, muzzle/beak, etc.) floating loosely from one another. They're like a 3D puzzle, and should snap together tightly. You can see this demonstrated on this tapir.

As a side note, keep this in mind when drawing feathers, especially along wings.

Continuing on, another issue I notice pretty frequently throughout your drawings is the severe overuse of contour lines, especially when it comes to additional masses. This isn't an uncommon issue - it's pretty normal for students to just pile contour lines on because they feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing. What it shows however is that the student isn't actually thinking about the specific purpose or job of the line they're drawing. It's less about what that line is contributing to the drawing, and more about following certain memorized steps.

Contour lines suffer from diminishing returns. Adding one to a form will help establish the idea of how that form exists in 3D space as an individual entity. Adding another will add a little more, but not nearly as much as the first. The third, and onward, will contribute very little. On top of this, there are different kinds of contour lines - those we learn initially are the easiest to explain, but are also the least effective. They're the ones that sit along a single form's surface. We also have the ones that define the relationship and intersection between two forms (more like what we tackle in the form intersections and in the sausage method for drawing legs). They create a strong connection between forms and reinforces the notion that both of these forms exist in 3D space very strongly. These are by far more effective, and can make the first kind largely unnecessary, if you can find somewhere to work them in, specifically because of how they define the relationship between forms in 3D space.

That isn't restricted to contour lines either - when we draw an additional form and wrap its silhouette around the existing structure, we're establishing how that form exists in relation to the ones it's attaching to. For this reason, it's more important that when you draw those additional masses, you think about how you're drawing the silhouette itself, and how it wraps around everything else, instead of trying to make it feel 3D afterwards by adding contour lines.

I think you are definitely making a lot of progress in this regard, but the reliance on simple contour lines is what is holding you back. Also, similarly to how the head is a 3D puzzle where pieces snap and integrate into one another, the additional masses along the body are much the same - you can often find many more forms than what you've drawn on yours that can wrap along one another, as you can see in this puma demo. Each one captures the impression of a different muscle group, or a different growth or mass, and if you look closely at your reference images, you'll find a plethora.

The last thing I wanted to touch upon was the fact that you're pretty consistently not employing the sausage method introduced in Lesson 4. You may feel that the sausage method's strict limitations (using simple sausage forms with spherical ends of equal size which maintain a consistent width through their length) might not resemble the complex leg structures you find yourself having to draw here, but the technique is not about capturing those legs with just sausages. What we're doing is constructing an underlying armature that conveys both the solidity of the structure and the fluid gesture of that limb. Most approaches to constructing legs will focus too much on one or the other - either appearing solid but stiff, or fluid but flat. The sausage technique balances both effectively. Once in place, you can then go add bulk where necessary by adding additional forms as you would everywhere else (as shown here).

So! All in all, I think you're demonstrating a good use of form and construction, but I'm going to ask you for a couple additional drawings to demonstrate what I've covered here in this critique. Before doing them, I encourage you to take a look at the informal demos page.