To start, your organic intersections are looking pretty good, although I did notice that you're not maintaining a consistent light source. Some of your forms cast shadows to the left, others to the right. This generally happens when we don't actually think about light is casting those shadows, so make sure you keep that consistent in the future. Always tell yourself where the light is supposed to be, and determine the nature of your shadows from that.

Looking over your animal constructions, there are a number of areas in which I think we can retarget your focus and attention, to improve your overall results and your understanding of how to tackle these kinds of beasts. First and foremost though, I do need to stress the importance of observing your reference almost constantly, only looking away long enough to draw a specific mark before looking again.

While I definitely think you're putting effort into pushing your observational skills, especially when it comes to the major structures, it does vary from drawing to drawing, and overall when you get into a lot of the smaller elements - especially head construction, I think you end up relying more on your memory than you should. Just as a refresher, I recommend that you read through these notes on observation from Lesson 2.

Moving onto your actual drawings, let's look at this one first. Your overall approach is good, but there are a number of things to draw your attention to:

• You're using the sausage method for some of the legs, which is good, though the actual adherence to the characteristics of simple sausages isn't the best, with some getting wider through the midsection, others with ends that are a bit flat, etc. Also, and perhaps more importantly, the contour lines at the joints are not wrapping around the form properly. They're quite shallow, and don't appear to have been drawn with enough care - perhaps you treated them more like an afterthought. We end up running into the issue described here.

• If you can see part of a leg, you should construct the whole thing - that one leg you kind of tried to half-do obviously did not turn out well, because you didn't employ the techniques we've been learning to use. Everything you add to a construction must be a 3D form - you should not be adding anything as a 2D shape. That also applies to that front foot.

• The additional masses along the bear's backside and upon its shoulder are a good start, but it's important that when you actually draw those form's initial silhouettes, that you're thinking about how those forms are actually meant to wrap around the underlying structure, so that it really "grips" and holds onto it. Right now it appears that you've kind of drawn flat shapes on top, and just left them there. They don't really have enough of a believable relationship with the rest of the construction. Here are some notes on how to think about those additional forms while adding them to a construction.

• Your bear's head construction is made up of a bunch of separate pieces that are floating relative to one another. As shown in this informal demo of a tapir's head, and this demo of a moose head, the head must be treated as a 3D puzzle. That is, a series of pieces that all fit together to create the whole - not stickers we place on the surface of a large sphere with no actual relationships to one another.

Here are some notes directly on your bear pointing out the issues listed above.

Jumping further down in the set, this camel is also a good example of where the additional masses didn't work out so well, because they give the impression that if the camel were to move, those parts would all fall over. The masses need to hold onto the structure much more firmly than that. Students will often draw their additional form as an arbitrary shape, not necessarily thinking about how it's meant to exist in three dimensions until they start adding their contour lines - but unfortunately those contour lines only serve to make the form feel 3D-ish in isolation. They don't build relationships between it and the forms underneath.

That said, I think the legs on this camel are definitely showing overall improvement, and the fact that you're delving into a little more complexity by adding forms along them on top of the base sausage structure is definitely promising. This is something we can continue to push farther as shown here with a dog's leg. This sort of thing can definitely be pushed more on most of your other constructions.

Overall I think you are definitely moving in the right direction, and the shark especially does show the fact that you're able to leverage a general grasp of 3D space and how your forms exist within it to figure out something quite different from the demos provided in the lesson. That said, there is a ways to go, and I want to make sure we hammer out the points I raised above, so I'll be assigning some additional pages below.