Starting with your organic intersections, you're drawing the forms well, such that they slump and sag with a believable illusion of gravity. With the cast shadows, you're close, although I would make a few adjustments as I've marked out here. The blue is where you should be extending your shadows so they actually wrap along the surface they're cast upon and dipping into that gap - and in red is where I'd trim off a bit to show how the shadow is actually moving away from the form casting it, along the surface upon which it is cast. In essence, both the blue and red attempt to solve the same issue (that the shadows aren't separating enough from the forms casting them, as the surface receiving them kind of turns away). All in all, you're making good progress, but definitely need to consider how those shadows are representations of relationships in 3D space between these forms.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I'm definitely seeing a lot that is moving forward, and you're clearly making a concerted effort to apply the points from both my past critiques and from the lesson itself. There are definitely a few points I want to offer to call out, of course. They're going to fall into the following categories:

• Core construction

• Use of additional masses

• Use of contour lines

• Leg construction

For the core construction, I mostly just wanted to give a reminder that as explained here, your ribcage is meant to occupy a full half of the torso. The pelvis takes up the last quarter, and we leave a gap of another quarter between.

The only other point I wanted to call out is that there are some places where you're still working in 2D, although they're few and far between. There's on 6_wolf where you used a one-off stroke to extend the underbelly of the torso sausage, but didn't establish how this form was meant to connect to the existing structures. Similarly on 5_wolf, you've got the 3 bumps along its back - the center of which is another one-off stroke/partial shape.

Continuing onto your use of additional masses, the specific way in which you're designing the forms you add to your constructions are in need of some more refinement. It's the design of these masses' silhouettes that establishes the relationship between them and the existing 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.

Here's this concept in action on one of your pumas. Note the specific placement of each inward curve and each corner, and how they occur in direct response to other structures they're pressing up against. Furthermore, also note how I'm actively extending those masses further down along the puma's side to take any opportunity I can to press the masses against other structures - like the shoulder and hip masses. Of course we don't do this with everything, but there were definitely missed opportunities of that sort in your original drawing. Pressing things against one another gives us a lot more overall solidity, due to the relationships we're establishing between them in 3D space.

Now, when we don't take this kind of care with the specific design of these masses, we can feel like we need to somehow fix the result, to make those forms more solid. But in this kind of situation, the solidity comes entirely from the relationships we're establishing between the different forms. This is what leads us to the topic of your use of contour lines - specifically the fact that you (like many other students) are trying to use contour lines to regain some of that solidity.

Contour lines can only establish relationships between forms when they define intersections between them - but in this kind of situation, we're wrapping forms around one another, so no such intersections exist. When we add contour lines to the surface of a single form, it only makes that form feel more three dimensional on its own, in isolation. As such, it doesn't solve the issue of a silhouette not being drawn quite right - but it can give us the impression that we're fixing it, thus encouraging us to spend less time with the initial silhouette design. So while the contour lines themselves aren't doing any direct harm, they can change the way we engage with the construction. So, try not to use them on your additional masses.

In all fairness this is something I identified more recently as I've been critiquing students - so you actually do see me using contour lines in the intro video for this lesson, but that will be removed when my overhaul of the video content reaches this lesson.

Lastly, leg construction. To put it simply, you need to take more care in adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages, and of keeping your sausages consistent, avoiding weird overlaps like this one where the lower sausage kind of glances off the upper one (resulting in very little intersection to actually define). Part of that is also due to the upper sausage having an end that is more stretched out, rather than circular in shape. As a whole, be sure to review the sausage method diagram as well as the other diagrams I shared with you in my critique of your Lesson 4 work.

To that point, I did notice that you tend to focus your additional masses on the areas of the legs that'll impact your silhouette, but as a result you use them pretty sparingly. Instead, be sure to also consider the "inbetween" forms, which dictate how your different structures fit together, helping to make everything feel more solid as shown here on another student's work.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I do want to assign some limited revisions to see your use of those additional masses, and the more purposeful design of their silhouettes. You'll find them assigned below.