Alrighty - before we get started, there are a few things we need to discuss. And before that, I do have to acknowledge one thing: you have put a lot of work and time into the work you've done for this lesson. That is undeniable, and it bears mentioning. By my count, there's 48 pages of animal drawings here - some of them are not complete, but regardless it's quite a few pages.

That said, the instructions for the lesson assigned a specific number of pages of work - 13 pages of animal constructions in total.

It may seem that what you did was above and beyond, far more than what was asked for, and in a sense that is true, but it is also true that you did not follow the instructions you were given. As discussed back in Lesson 0, following the instructions to the letter is a required part of this course, because you are simply not in a position to know nor understand how even a seemingly "positive" change such as doing more pages than was asked can impact what you gain from having done that work.

There are a few significant downsides to the choice you'd made:

• First and foremost, the amount of time we have to commit to a task is finite. Sure, Drawabox has no deadlines, and so you could always choose to commit additional hours, days, weeks, and months to the task, but that quantity of time could also be spread out amongst the pages that were assigned, giving you more to each and every form you construct, every mark you make, as well as to observing your references with more care, and more patience. I do not know how much time you spent on this work, or on each individual drawing, but if we were to throw some arbitrary numbers out there for the sake of making a point - maybe 20 hours - that divided amongst each page would come to an average of 25 minutes per page. All of a sudden that enormous amount of time doesn't actually seem like all that much. Conversely, if it were spread out across the 13 pages that were assigned, we'd be looking at a solid hour and a half per page - that's 200% more time per page, on average. This course doesn't ask students for perfect work - but it does ask them to spend as much time as they need to do the work to the best of their current ability. We'll get into this more later, but it's quite likely that simply taking more time with each drawing will help you apply what you've learned more effectively (and more consciously - that's an important distinction to make), meaning that in truth, it's unlikely that what you've done here was the best of your ability. Rather, all of that time and effort you put in was spread very thin.

• Secondly, if the work you submitted here was done to the best of your current ability (my calculations there are largely hypothetical after all), then doing so much more of it than assigned would mean that you could have gotten feedback much sooner. Grinding away on your own really isn't useful, as discussed back in Lesson 0. Even when it comes to working through the provided demonstrations, those are allowed to be included in the assigned pages (as long as they constitute less than half of the total pages, as has been the rule for the last two lessons as well). Delaying getting feedback would not be beneficial, as we'd otherwise be able to identify and address any issues together and have you working on revisions with concrete directions.

• Thirdly, 13 pages of work is vastly more straightforward to critique than 48. Neither situation would have me commenting on each and every individual drawing - I go through and find individual drawings that demonstrate the major issues that come up frequently, and use them to demonstrate concerns that may be present across many others. Sometimes I'll just focus my critique on a single drawing. But either way, the amount of time required to parse through 48 pages is a lot more than 13.

So, in the future, know that the choice you've made here was not the correct one, and it has made things needlessly less efficient on multiple fronts.

Anyway, jumping into your organic intersections, these are generally drawn well, doing a good job of capturing how the forms slump and sag over one another under the force of gravity. I have a few quick recommendations before we move on, however:

• Remember that for every ellipse you draw freehand in this course, you are required to draw through them two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1.

• It appears you haven't done any exploration with cast shadows, so I do recommend that you include them when practicing this exercise as part of your own warmups. Cast shadows are a very useful tool for establishing the relationships between forms - so they can be helpful as such for the relationships between your organic forms, as well as the relationships between those forms and the ground itself.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I'm going to address a number of different categories one at a time, but before that, I want to stress one extremely important point, which is relevant to the majority of the pages of this submission. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time.

Currently, you're drawing very small - something you noted yourself on this page. This is a common thing students do when they lack confidence - they'll draw smaller because they feel like it makes things easier. But in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

To that point, along with drawing small, you're also leaving vast swathes of your pages empty and unused. This also speaks to issues with confidence (which are entirely normal) - some students are worried about "ruining" an existing drawing by risking working on another beside it. This of course doesn't matter - none of these drawings are done for the end result, with each one instead being an exercise in spatial reasoning. Each one is just a 3D spatial puzzle, and it's the process of starting with simple forms, and adding new forms one at a time, defining the manner in which they relate to the existing structure, that actually helps rewire the way in which our brain understands the space in which these objects exist. It shifts us from viewing it as though they're just lines on a flat page, meant to trick others, to actually understanding the page as a window, and the drawing as existing in a vast, limitless three dimensional world.

In regards to time, sometimes students make the mistake of thinking that there are somehow limitations placed on how long they can spend on a drawing. For example, some students will feel that once they get up from a drawing session, their drawing is finished, and cannot be touched again. Of course, if you really think about it, there's no reason for that - of course you're welcome, and encouraged to spend as many sittings, as many days, as you need to execute each individual construction to the absolute best of your ability, to explore how those forms relate to one another and think about how they can be combined to create more complex objects.

Both of these concerns, regarding space and time, are matters of choice and control. We have to actively make the choice to draw bigger, to give ourselves more time, and to push back against the lack of confidence that causes us to do otherwise. It's when we don't take the reins and steer that our base instincts take over.

Alright, with that established, let's look at the individual categories relating to our animal constructions.

Core Construction

When it comes to your initial structural build-up - that is, establishing the head/ribcage/pelvic masses, the torso sausage, and connecting them all together, you're largely doing decently. The markmaking behind them is often a little hesitant, though this largely comes back to the issues that arise from drawing small - it makes it harder to engage our whole arm while drawing, resulting in more irregularities and less overall confidence in the execution.

Again - draw big, engage your whole arm, and of course employ the ghosting method to every structural mark. That means going through the three stages - planning and preparation are where your time is mostly invested, followed by a confident execution free from hesitation.

Leg Construction

Your use of the sausage method - which should be used for all of our leg structures - is inconsistent. There are some drawings were you employ it pretty well - for example, this horse's back legs. There are others, like this horse, your hybrid, and others where we can see you drawing more partial shapes rather than fully enclosed sausage forms. This speaks back to what we discussed in Lesson 4, in regards to ensuring that every form we add to the construction is complete and enclosed. Without doing so, there's no way to actually define a three dimensional relationship between the new addition and the structure that already exists - instead, it just becomes an extension of the flat drawing, reminding the viewer that they're just looking at a flat drawing.

Remember - even as we draw things, we ourselves are also the viewer. Things like this will remind us as we draw that we're just drawing something flat, and thus our subsequent marks to follow will reinforce this impression.

In addition to ensuring every form is a complete, enclosed structure, another point of inconsistency stems from the sausage segments forms themselves. Many are well drawn, while others don't entirely maintain the characteristics of simple sausages. So for example, watch out for the back legs on this one. This dog's front legs also tend to have ends that are overly elongated - stick to circular ends of equal size, and avoid any widening/narrowing through the midsection.

Lastly, you are pretty good about defining the joints between the sausages, though there are a couple spots where you forget, like the front paw of this tiger.

Use of Additional Masses

When it comes to the additional masses we use to build upon the initial masses, you generally handle them well (especially towards the end of your submission) - that is, when you draw them as complete forms (you've added a number of complex structures to this cow's underside as partial/flat shapes, for example). When you do draw them as complete forms however, you do appear to be putting a lot of thought into how you design their silhouettes, considering the placement of inward curves and corners (which are different forms of complexity), as well as the outward curves.

This can be refined a little further however. Here are some notes on the cow construction. Most of these are pertaining to other things I've mentioned already, but the main point to pay attention to in regards to this topic is the note about the inward curve you used at the top edge of the mass near the cow's rear end. Complexity in our additional mass' silhouettes conveys the contact being made between different forms. Where a mass presses into another (as shown here), it introduces an inward curve into the mass's silhouette. If there is no such contact being made, then we have to stick to simple masses. To achieve greater complexity and match the reference a little better, we can always combine multiple additional masses, as shown here.

Also note how when redrawing the bottom part of that same mass, I ensured that it wrapped around the section of the back leg that connects to the hip. Here (as well as at the shoulder) pretty much all quadrupedal animals have a lot more muscle built up, giving us something to wrap our masses around, which helps create a more integrated, grounded, three dimensional impression. The more we can interlock our masses without arbitrary gaps, the more solid everything will feel.

Head Construction

As a result of the course being developed over the course of many years, with different parts being updated at different times, there are at least three different approaches for head construction present in the lesson material:

In order of oldest to newest:

• The animal head construction video

• The tiger head demo

• The informal head construction demo

Each of these have something of value to offer (which is why they haven't been outright removed), though as a result of it being the newest, the informal head construction demo is by far the most thorough, and will (once I have the time) be reintegrated more meaningfully into the existing lesson content (as explained here at the top of the tiger head demo).

That said, all three of the techniques emphasize one key concept: in head construction, and really in any kind of construction, keeping the elements at play (in this case the eye sockets, muzzle, etc.) wedged against one another is critical in order to ensure that they each reinforce each others' impression of solidity. Having those pieces float more loosely apart from one another, as we can see in this hybrid steps back towards reminding the viewer that they're just look at lines and flat shapes on a page, not 3D forms that interact with one another in a 3D world.

• From now on, whenever you do an animal construction as an exercise, try to apply the specific approach shown here to every single one, as closely as you can. There will be animals where those specific steps need to be stretched a little to fit, but try your best to apply the methodology, down to the specific pentagonal shape for the eye sockets. The pentagon shape, specifically with the point facing downwards, gives us a nice wedge in between the eye sockets where the muzzle can fit in, and a flat surface along the top for the forehead to rest upon, keeping everything feeling nice and snug, like a solid 3D puzzle.

• Avoid drawing your eye sockets as rounded ellipses - constructing them with individual strokes (like the pentagonal shapes from the previous point) will help you consider how each one is a cut or mark along the surface of the existing structure. When we draw ellipses, we do so with a motion that prioritizes the specific, even elliptical shape - it's great for capturing entire ball structures in 3D space, but when it comes to drawing something that rests against an existing surface, it entirely ignores that surface and fails to establish a believable relationship.

• Draw your eye balls larger - keep in mind that the visible portion of the eye is quite small compared to the entirety of the eyeball. Furthermore, try to draw the upper and lower eyelids separately, as their own independent, complete masses, as shown here. This will help you focus more on how those eyelids wrap around the larger eye ball, creating that classic eye shape as a side-effect of how those upper and lower lids wrap around the underlying structure, rather than just focusing on drawing the iconic shape.

Conclusion

I can see a lot of individual pieces that show how concepts are sinking in, but they're very much scattered across the set, amongst many examples of those principles being skipped or forgotten. Also, the fact that many of your drawings are quite small, and that your markmaking often still tends to be hesitant also gets in the way. Lastly - I think in the way you've managed your time, you're not giving yourself nearly enough to properly observe your references.

Our goal here isn't to reproduce our references perfectly, but it's through the frequent and consistent observation of our references (not just at the beginning, but throughout the process, between every mark we put down) that we pull out each and every specific form that we need to build up our construction. Many of your drawings - less so in the more recent ones, but still noticeably there - have subtle signs that suggest you're working a fair bit more from memory.

Proper observation takes time - it's unavoidable. And so, every single drawing throughout this lesson becomes very time consuming. That circles back to the point about giving yourself as much time as you need, not as much time as you have.

At this point I'm well over an hour into this critique, and I've surpassed 3000 words. I do not believe you need a full redo by any stretch, but it would not be unreasonable for me to take additional credits to cover further revisions. For now, I will not do that. I'm going to assign some revisions below for you to address what I've said here - if further revisions beyond that are required, I will take two additional credits to cover that at that time.

To that point - this critique is incredibly long, and contains a lot of different pieces of information. This is well beyond what one can absorb in one read-through, so expect to have to reread this critique several times - not all at once, but over a span of time. I'd recommend taking some time to let what I've said here sink in, then after a couple days, read through it again, before starting your work on the revisions assigned below. Then, periodically as you work through them, I would recommend reading through it once more, or at least skimming it a few times.