Starting with your organic intersections, I can see that you're putting a fair bit of thought into how the sausages pile upon one another, and how they slump and sag under the weight of gravity. There are three things I do want to shine some light on though:

• For this big sausage at the bottom of your first page, you placed an ellipse on the far left side of the sausage. Problem is, while we certainly can (and should) place ellipses on the tips of the sausages that are facing towards the viewer, this sausage has both ends facing away. So we would not see the whole ellipse all the way around. Take a look at this diagram of different ways in which we can use contour lines to imply different arrangements of our sausages. Note how both the contour curves and ellipses need to agree about which side is facing the viewer and which side is facing away.

• Be sure to draw each sausage form in its entirety - avoid cutting them off where they're overlapped by another, as this is going to cause you to focus more on how that sausage sits as a flat shape on the page, rather than as a solid, three dimensional structure in a 3D world.

• And lastly, it's important to always keep a single consistent light source in your mind - make sure that you're always casting shadows in the same direction, according to a consistent light source. Here you've got shadows being cast to the left and to the right, which would not be achievable through a single light source.

As a side note, be sure to draw through all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, there are indeed a number of areas where I feel like I can pinpoint some issues that are giving you an amount of trouble, and overall help you get more out of these exercises and push you in the right direction.

The first of these is that the drawings we do throughout this course - especially as we push further into it - really end up demanding more and more time of us. Not just time in terms of the execution of each individual mark, but also time to go through the instructions, to reflect upon the feedback we've already received in previous lessons' critiques, and to observe our references closely, carefully, and frequently.

It's quite easy to get into the habit of deciding how long a drawing is going to take you before you've even started. Sometimes we do this based on the time we have available to us in a given setting, or a sense of how "advanced" we feel ourselves to be (so for example, someone might feel like they're supposed to be able to finish a given drawing more quickly). But ultimately, each drawing takes as long as it needs, and so our focus should only be on taking our time as we go through these various steps.

Looking at your work here, I do feel like you're working under either the sense that you should be finishing your drawings in a certain amount of time, or that you're simply underestimating how much more you can get out of a drawing if you provide it with more time. If we look at drawings like this one, I can see elements of what was no doubt present in your reference, but what I'm seeing here is also extremely oversimplified - something that occurs when we allow ourselves to spend the majority of our time looking at our drawing, instead of the reference. We end up working from what we remember, but our memories are not developed enough to hold onto all of the complex visual information that is present. For that reason, students need to make a consistent habit of looking at their reference almost constantly, looking away only for long enough to draw a specific mark or form.

You can read more about this in these notes from Lesson 2, but ultimately this is one of the bigger points that are holding you back. It really is not abnormal for these kinds of constructions to take students an hour, two hours, or even more - so don't feel like you need to rush, and cut out important steps in the process.

Continuing on from there, let's look at a couple things that I raised in my critique of your Lesson 4 work that aren't entirely being followed here. I do think that you've made some effort in addressing them, but that there are things that still do require your attention:

• In the previous critique, I stressed the importance of distinguishing between actions you take in 2D space, versus actions you take in 3D space, and the general importance of building upon your construction entirely through the addition of new, complete forms, rather than individual marks or partial/flat shapes. We need to be aware of how everything we add on the page corresponds to actual 3D information, and 3D spatial relationships between forms. You have improved upon this in some ways, but there is still some carelessness that results in 2D elements being added to your constructions, and flattening them out. Here are some examples of this - in red I've marked out where you've cut into the silhouette of an existing form, in blue there are the one-off lines you've added that ended up enclosing partial/flat shapes (which do not give us enough information to understand how they're meant to exist in 3 dimensions), and in purple I highlighted some of the forms where you jumped way too far ahead in complexity. Remember that construction is all about starting simple and building up complexity in stages. Try to capture too much complexity all at once, and the form is going to fall flat.

• Now I definitely saw a lot of effort being put into sticking to the sausage method here, although I do want to stress the importance of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. You tend to have quite a few cases where you end up drawing an ellipse rather than a sausage, or where you end up changing the nature of the sausage segments in other ways (like making one end larger than the other).

• As an extension of the previous point, remember the demonstrations I provided in your Lesson 4 critique that demonstrate how we can build on top of the sausage structure to add bulk where it's needed. So we stick to those characteristics of simple sausages, and then add yet more additional masses to flesh things out. This goes both for cases where the thigh gets larger where it meets the hip joint, as well as cases where we want to incorporate little additional bumps or areas where a muscle might become more visible. I'm not actually seeing any use of this in your work here, so I strongly encourage you to back to my Lesson 4 feedback and actually look at the diagrams I provided there about how we can build upon our sausage structure.

The next thing I wanted to talk about has to do with your use of your additional masses. There is some interesting progress on this front, and I can see in particular that you're trying to think about how those additional masses should be shaped based on the forms they're pressing up against, but there are definitely things that can be improved.

The first way in which these can be improved is by simply avoiding putting down contour lines on those additional masses, because right the way you're using them here is getting you into some trouble. Basically you seem to be using a lot of contour lines, but without specifically thinking about what it is you're trying to achieve with each one. That's important - every technique we use is just a tool, and whether or not it's the right tool for the job depends on what that job is.

For every mark we put down, we have to ask ourselves, "what is this mark meant to achieve," "how can I draw it such that it achieves that goal as effectively as possible," and "are there any other marks that are already accomplishing this task". The ghosting method - which should be applied to every structural mark we put down, from straight lines, to curves, to ellipses - gives us an opportunity to go through each of these questions, in its planning phase.

Getting back to whether or not the contour curves are an important tool to use here, these contour lines help to make a form feel three dimensional, but only on its own, in isolation. What it doesn't do is establish how different forms relate to one another in 3D space, which unfortunately is what we're really trying to do here as we build up these forms. There are two main ways in which we can establish the relationship between different forms that exist together as part of the same construction:

• In the case that they interpenetrate one another (like the sausage forms for the legs), we can define the connection between them using a contour line - but not like those from the organic forms with contour lines, but rather like the form intersections exercise instead. This defines how those two forms actually intersect and connect together.

• In the case that one mass wraps around another (like our general use of additional masses here), it all falls to the specific way in which the additional masses are shaped and designed. That is, their actual silhouette.

One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.

Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.

Now I do see some elements of this at play in how you're approaching the design of each additional mass, but this definitely can be improved. You can see these concepts in action here on one of your wolves - note how I've specifically placed each individual inward curve, or sharp corner in specific places based on how these different masses are pressing up against existing structures. Even when a mass has been added to the structure, it becomes part of it - so anything that is placed atop it is going to have to wrap around it as well.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos - although in all fairness, most of your constructions here, aside from one or two, don't really apply the methodology from the demos when constructing heads. That aside, given how the course has developed, and how I'm finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here on the informal demos page.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eyesockets - 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 eyesocket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but with a bit of finagling it can still apply pretty well. To demonstrate this for another student, I found the most banana-headed rhinoceros I could, and threw together this demo.

Now, unfortunately given the nature of the feedback you've received and the issues that are present here - especially with the focus being primarily on how you've decided to allocate your time in these drawings (and the fact that you definitely have underestimated how much time was required), I am going to ask you to redo this lesson in full. When you're done, you will submit it as a fresh submission, which will cost you an additional 2 credits, and in return you'll receive a full critique of your new work. You are certainly not the first to be asked for this, and you will certainly not be the last - I find that something about getting into the topic of animals has a tendency to cause students to take a wrong turn sometimes, and some rather firm reminders (like a full redo) is sometimes necessary.