Hello Mike! I'll be reviewing your homework. Let's see:

Organic Intersections: Both pages look good overall. On the first page though, the long sausage across feels like it's floating instead of falling onto the other sausages. That may be because in the middle, the sausage is arching, but it is not sustained by anything. If you think of them as balloons filled with sand, that section of the sausage would definitely sag and fall over the rest of sausages. Right now it's like there's another, invisible sausage on the empty space in the middle, that keeps the long sausage from falling. Try to imagine them as they fall and draw them when they've already landed; I think that's a good mental image to have.

On the second page, something similar happens with the top left sausage, and the solitary one on the right. The one on the right has a weird angle, but it does feel solid. The main thing here I think is that the shadows tell confusing stories. For example, on the top left sausage, its cast shadow prolongs on its right side, which contradicts the information given by the contour curves, which suggest that the form is facing away, and so, it shouldn't cast such a big shadow unless it has like a protuberance, which we know it doesn't have. The shadow on the lower right one is also awkward, which doesn't help with the feeling of solidness.

The shadows are also really thick, lacking some transition between the zones where the form hangs the most to the zones that the light doesn't affect that much. They do follow the contour of the form they're sitting on though, which is great.

Lastly, try to make those inner curves on the sausages flow more confidently, as they sometimes get wobbly trying to fit them in and give them the required degree. But again, overall, your forms feel solid and well made.

Animal Drawings:

In general, you're doing what you're supposed to do: start from basic forms and build masses around them. Your intersections between forms start really weird, mostly because on your first drawings, you didn't draw through your forms, for example, on the bears, the legs aren't constructed with sausages and added forms; instead, you tried to get the whole, visible form in one or two chunks, and didn't draw the intersection with the thorax either, so the solidity and three dimensionality of those legs really suffers. Something similar happens with the bird's feets and legs; at times the feet stops being constructed with simple forms, and just becomes a 2D replica of what you're seeing.

That being said, starting from the zebras onwards, that aspect gets a lot better. You started to construct the legs with simple sausages, adding extra forms to them to replicate what you saw, and the result is much better. You also added the intersections with the body and between forms, which is great. Sadly, you didn't apply the same principle to the legs on the background. I know that some of the insect demos made the legs in the same way (I also fell into that), but they're old demos, and so, we're supposed to draw the legs on the back just as we did the front legs.

At times, it would've been useful to use some contour curves to enhance some sections, on the baby zebra's tail, for example. Be careful with your observation too; on the second beaver's tail, the contour curve doesn't really describe what the surface of that tail is like; something similar to the cactus contour line on Lesson 3 would've been closer, in my opinion. But overall, I really admire what you did, making the drawings feel 3D with little to no contour lines.

The added masses start really messy, filled with corners instead of having soft borders, but they improve dramatically as the drawings go on, and by the hybrid one, they look much better. Always be careful with corners; they suggest the presence of something else besides them. Unless there's actually something there, the soft borders on the masses (like the ones on your zebra's legs) are better for these purposes.

Your hybrid looks really cool. But it made me realize that you have something of an issue with heads. On your hybrid, for example, you're lacking some planes on the jaw; you could've used a couple of contour lines to best define the form of the horns, and your ears are rather flat. Try to think of them in the same way we did with the leaves, and I think you'll have a better result. But looking back, almost all of the animals have some issues with their heads: they lack definition on their planes, there are parts not very well defined, and the ears are a bit wonky in a lot of them.

Summarizing: you're doing great, especially on those last drawings. But your heads need to be addressed. So, I'll ask that you make 1 drawing of an animal head. Any animal, but try to apply what we talked about here. Make it big and well defined. It doesn't have to have detail, but it has to be as well constructed as you can.

That's it. Keep it up! I'll be around if you have any questions.