Hello Melos, thank you for completing your revisions.

Scrolling through these pages, it does look like there may be some points from my initial critique which were not understood, as they are not being fully applied here.

One of the first points I discussed was that your constructions were a little oversimplified, and your use of additional masses was sparse. I can’t see much evidence of you attempting to address this in your revisions, and if we take a look at this hippo you don’t appear to have attempted to use any additional masses at all. I do see that you’ve added a bit of complexity under the neck, but you did so by altering the silhouette of the neck with flat partial shapes, instead of complete additional forms, ignoring this rule we introduced back in your lesson 4 feedback.

Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

Here I’ve marked with blue some places where you’d altered the silhouettes of existing forms by extending them with flat, partial shapes. As shown here we can build those flab rolls under the neck in 3D with additional masses.

For the feet, you’ll want to use these notes on foot construction which I shared with you previously, and for the head you need to pay much closer attention to the informal head demo which I asked you to follow as closely as possible.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eye sockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.

• This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.

• We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eye socket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

None of your constructions are using that first key point, those specific pentagonal shaped eye sockets, and you tend to use a rounder shape (or leave them incomplete) which is discussed as being less effective in the third key point. Here is a diagram of the eye socket in isolation, just in case you’re confused about what shape you should be aiming for. For your giraffe and hippo you’ll want to take another look at step 2 of the informal head demo, where a footprint is established on the surface of the cranial ball, prior to extruding the muzzle. In the summary of my initial critique I called out that you were skipping steps in your head constructions, so if something about the steps shown the demo is confusing to you, be sure to ask questions and we’ll try to explain them in a way that helps you to understand.

As so little of my initial feedback has been addressed here, I am going to have to ask you to do these revisions again. Be sure to reread the initial critique carefully, inspecting the various diagrams and demos that were shared with you. It may help you to take notes in your own words of specific points you need to address, and refer to them before beginning each construction, so they are fresh in your memory. Please continue to stick to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to observe your reference, construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

If something in particular about my previous explanations was unclear you are allowed to ask questions.