Starting with your organic intersections, you're largely handling this quite well, but I do have a couple suggestions to keep you on the right track here:

• First off, avoid the "big mothership with little babies" - it leads to some more awkward problems to solve that aren't particularly beneficial. Try to keep the sausages roughly the same size.

• If you can, look into getting a thicker fineliner or a brush pen to fill in those shadows, so they stay solid. Also, make sure that you design the outline of the cast shadow first with your usual 0.5mm fineliner, only using the others to fill it in. Having an outline will both let you design the shadow shape, while also giving you a cleaner edge. Right now your edges seem to be a bit ratty.

• Try to keep your sausages simple and firm - avoid having them fill out every crevasse beneath them - instead keep them bendable, but not soft or liquidy. Here's an example of what I mean - note how in yours, that sausage kind of filled in the gap beneath it, whereas mine actually goes over it, leaving a bit of a void (I didn't fill in the shadow I outlined beneath it so it'd be easier to see the difference).

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I think over the set you definitely show a good deal of improvement, but there are some points I can raise to help keep you on the right track here.

The first point I noticed is that your line quality varies a fair bit. I suspect this might be a matter of a pen behaving inconsistently, with fainter lines causing you to have to go back over them at times - but in such a case, grab another pen, and save that dying one for other projects (a pen that's low on ink can actually be quite handy for things outside of the scope of this course). Just make sure that you're not drawing in a sketchy manner, putting down marks multiple times. The ghosting method still reigns supreme here, so each mark should be thought through ahead of time.

That isn't to say you aren't thinking through your marks - it's just that you kind of bounce back and forth between marks with more forethought, planning, and a singular execution, and marks that are put down more frantically without as much consideration.

Secondly, keep in mind the proportions for the ribcage relative to the torso as a whole. As explained here, the ribcage should occupy half the length of the torso, with the pelvis taking up the last quarter, leaving only another quarter as a gap between them. If we look at your grizzly bear, we can see that you aren't really holding to that. We can also see this in a number of your other constructions, though there are others - like this deer where it is better.

Continuing on, another notable issue is that while we did discuss back in your Lesson 4 critique the importance of not cutting into the silhouettes of existing forms, there are a few places where you did so, as shown here. This is a little more understandable in cases like the open wings of the dove here, but I still would avoid approaching it this way as it makes the wings themselves feel very flat. Wings actually do have thickness and volume to them, so approaching them more like this (starting with a mass and then attaching wings to it, rather than cutting into its silhouette).

When it comes to the use of additional masses, I am seeing a lot of good here, but there are some adjustments I'd offer to help you get the most out of this important aspect of these kinds of constructional exercises. On the neck of this deer, I called out some areas where there are inward curves along the outside of those additional masses' silhouettes. Along the back legs, I redrew some of your masses with a bit more of a careful design, placing inward curves specifically where they help establish the way in which contact is made with the existing leg structure.

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.

Similarly, it is important exactly where we transition from inward curves to outward curves, or put more simply - where we place our corners. As shown here, your camel's hump had a transition from one curve to the other offset from the edge of the silhouette, which breaks the illusion that it's actually wrapping around the existing structure. It's also worth mentioning that it was more of a smoother, rounded corner - a sharper corner gives a stronger sense that it's actually continuing along the other side.

Another way we can see the usefulness of "designing" silhouettes rather than blocking them all in whilst relying primarily on blobbiness and curves, is to look at feet. Corners are useful here, because they can imply the presence of separate "planes" on a form - the front plane, the side plane, the top plane, etc. And so, making more of a "boxy" form can provide us with implied 3D form without ever adding additional internal edges to it. As shown here on another student's bear, we can even go on to add yet more boxy forms to it to flesh out the toes, rather than trying to tackle it all at once as you did with this wolf's feet.

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. 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. You actually do incorporate elements of it quite strongly in some drawings (again, your deer's a good example of this), but try your best to apply these specific principles 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, I have called out quite a few points for you to keep in mind, but I do feel that you are most of the way there. I am going to assign some revisions below, but the main reason for this is the inconsistency of your linework - it'll give you an opportunity to demonstrate working with a pen that isn't on its last legs, proper use of the planning/preparation phases of the ghosting method, as well as everything else I've explained here.