As a whole, I think this is a big step in the right direction.

Starting with your organic intersections, here you're doing a pretty good job of demonstrating how the forms slump and sag over one another, under the force of gravity. There are definitely areas where the cast shadows should wrap more aggressively over the forms beneath them (as shown here), and there is some slight inconsistency in some cases (where the shadows are being cast to the left in some, and to the right in others), but as a whole this is miles better than what you included in your last submission.

You've also done a great job of following along with the lobster and shrimp demonstrations, and did a great job there of wrapping the forms around the underlying structure as you built up your construction.

There are certainly still some issues that we'll want to address, and there may be some revisions assigned (I've only done an overall look at your work thus far - but don't worry, there won't be another full redo), but as a whole this is a big improvement and I'm glad you took my previous feedback to heart.

I'm going to list the main issues I'm seeing up-front, then address them each in turn:

• There are definitely areas where your linework gets more sketchy/haphazard.

• There are a lot of contour lines - these aren't actually all necessary.

• Not consistently using the sausage method for constructing legs

• The use of your additional masses

• Head construction

• Outlining your constructions/use of line weight

I may have addressed some of these in my last critique, but I understand that some things do get lost in the mix, especially when you have so many things to address. I will however point out that you submitted this 11 days after receiving my previous feedback, which is definitely rather quick. You may be underestimating just how long each drawing should be taking you, and may be rushing through them without actually realizing it.

Before we get started on the list, I wanted to remark that some of the drawings here demonstrate a very well developing overall grasp of 3D space and how your forms interact with one another. Your gators for instance clearly exist in 3D space in a believable manner, and the way their mouths/jaws open was captured very well in this regard. That's often a significant challenge. That isn't to say you applied all the techniques from the course in doing so - but that the level of skill you have in spatial reasoning helped you achieve that in a believable manner.

This also comes through in your hyrbids, where the different pieces fit quite well together.

Sketchiness/haphazardness

Remember above all else that Drawabox is not a sketching course - here, we're relying on very specific rules and processes to rewire how your brain works. Now, it's definitely true that if we have a habit of drawing a certain way, it has a tendency to leak in - you definitely are familiar with sketching more loosely, so it still does tend to sneak into your drawings (although much less than before).

It all comes down to mindfulness and awareness - to applying the steps from the ghosting method to ensure that every single mark you draw is the result of intent and planning, that no lines are drawn without thought.

So for example, the sitting groundhog on this page has a lot of arbitrary lines on its belly - they're not actually contributing to anything specific, and they definitely weren't planned out. The ghosting method, and its persistent use is basically to help train your brain to think before you draw, so that once you're through this whole course, you'll at least think for a split second before each mark, avoiding wasted lines and conserving overall line economy.

This also comes through in how some elements are drawn loosely, then left outside of your "final" construction. For example, the hammer head shark on the top of this page - you drew a very loose, sloppy ellipse near its tail. This should have defined a solid ball form, but you cut straight across it, opting to act like it wasn't there at all. In this course, every single mark we add defines a specific form that now exists in space, and they need to be respected as such. As shown here (I definitely shared this with you in my last critique), cutting back across the silhouette of a form you've already drawn, or modifying that silhouette at all, will flatten it out.

Drawing loosely in general can often result in these kinds of random marks or shapes that partially exist outside of a given drawing, so we need to be much more careful with how we invest our time in the execution of our marks, and how we ultimately treat what we're building up. We are not just drawing on a page - every mark we place on that page will either reinforce or undermine the illusion the idea that we're combining a bunch of solid forms in a 3D world.

Overuse of contour lines

This is, in a lot of ways, an extension of the previous point - you're drawing way too many contour lines, and the majority of them don't actually contribute to your drawings. This isn't entirely uncommon, and generally comes from students not thinking through the why behind each mark they're drawing, instead relying more on instincts. And of course, their instincts tell them "more contour lines = more better".

The ghosting method starts with the planning phase - that's where we ask ourselves, what is the purpose of this line, what goal is it meant to achieve, what is it meant to contribute to the drawing, to the my understanding of the forms at play, and how can I execute this mark so it will achieve that goal best?

Contour lines - specifically those that sit along the surface of a single form - suffer from diminishing returns. Meaning, the first one you add may have more of an impact (assuming it's executed well, and not haphazardly), but the second will have less of an impact, and the third even less so. Quickly you get into the territory of these additional marks serving no purpose, but when we don't take the moment to gauge what that purpose was supposed to be in the first place, we end up piling them on.

The other kind of contour line - that is, the one introduced in the form intersections, which defines how different forms relate to one another in 3D space, don't have this problem simply because you can only draw one line to define an intersection. They also happen to be vastly more impactful, so always aim to rely on that kind first, and only use the other kind (the ones introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, which sits on the surface of a given form), sparingly when you really need it.

So, to put it simply:

• First make sure that every contour line you draw is executed with care. Looking at these rhinos, you've got a lot of contour lines that are drawn very sloppily, and given more time and forethought, they would have individually done their jobs better.

• Secondly, make sure that you actually need to draw more contour lines before you do, and think about what purpose they're meant to serve. Only draw the marks you need, don't draw automatically without thinking.

Not using the sausage method for your legs

Throughout most of these, you haven't been using the sausage method when constructing your animals' legs. This was introduced back in Lesson 4, and we use this approach because it allows us to create a solid underlying structure that captures a strong sense of solidity while also maintaining a sense of fluidity/gesture, without leaning too far towards one or the other. Once in place, we can build upon it by introducing further additional forms, as shown here and here. You can see this at play in this ant leg demonstration and in this dog leg demonstration.

I shared these with you back in my critique of your Lesson 4 work.

Use of additional masses

In some cases, you're definitely thinking about how the silhouette of your additional masses actually helps describe how that form wraps around the structure it's being added to, but in some others like these cows, you're ending up with silhouettes for these forms with a lot of additional complexity to them.

Part of this is because you're trying to rely on those extra contour lines - they don't actually help in this regard because a complex silhouette will usually still feel very flat even with lots of contour lines, but students will often try to use them quite desperately if they're not actively thinking about what those contour lines are meant to achieve.

When thinking about additional masses, they rely really heavily on how their silhouettes are drawn. When floating in the void, we can think of them like soft balls of meat, with nothing but simple, outward curves the whole way through (looking kind of like a sphere). Once they press up against a structure however, the part that makes contact will curve inward in response, and corners will form where these curvatures change. You can see this demonstrated here. These inward curves and corners introduce complexity to our silhouette, and so in order for the form to continue to feel solid and three dimensional, it is critical that every bit of complexity corresponds to a specific defined stimulus. There should be no such complexity without a clear form-interaction to cause it.

As you can see here, each mass has inward curves only when they're actually responding to a specific other form/structure that already exists. Also, note how I brought the mass above the shoulders down so it would actually wrap around that mass you constructed for the shoulder.

Also, remember that all your additional masses should be drawn as fully enclosed forms - that is, they should be closed silhouettes on their own. if you look at the mass in the middle of the top ibex's back on this page, you'll notice that it is open on one side, and so it reads more as a flat shape.

Head Construction

All the construction we're dealing with involves establishing specific relationships between forms, working with simple elements, and effectively building up a three dimensional puzzle where all the pieces wedge together. Head construction is no different, and as demonstrated here in the demo I provided in my previous critique, it's critical that we ensure that all the elements of the head - specifically the eye socket, the muzzle, etc. fit together rather than floating loosely and independently of one another.

While you did do this in some cases, you were fairly inconsistent in this regard and the approaches you used didn't really demonstrate that you followed that demonstration/explanation.

One easy example to study are the rhinos, because I have a demonstration I'd done in the past of how one might tackle this kind of problem. Note how all the pieces fit together, whereas in your drawing, the eye socket floats independently from everything else, and you jumped quite a few steps in defining a much more complex silhouette for the overall head, instead of building out from the cranial ball.

One last point on this topic - when drawing eyes, remember that the ball we establish there is the eyeball - the eyelids themselves wrap around it, covering the majority of it. It may help to simply draw the eyelids themselves as separate masses, one for the upper lid and one for the bottom lid as shown here, focusing on how they wrap around.

Outlining/use of line weight

I noticed that you pretty liberally use line weight to reinforce the whole outline of your constructed object in a lot of places. We can see this very prominently, for instance, in your sharks.

As discussed in my previous critique, line weight serves a specific purposes in the drawings we do in this course - it clarifies the overlaps in specific areas between particular forms. This means two things:

• Firstly, it means we limit that line weight to where the overlaps occur, not running it along long lengths of a form's silhouette where there are no such overlaps to clarify

• Secondly, it doesn't jump from one form to another. In those shark drawings, you're effectively outlining the silhouette of the shark itself, jumping from one constructed element to another, enveloping the whole animal in one big "sock" and blending everything together. Don't do this - it flattens everything out. Do not think of any of your animals as a single entity - they are collections of separate, interacting forms, but they are still separate from one another.

When you end up applying line weight too liberally, you fall into the trap of effectively tracing back over the existing form's silhouette (in the case where you're just doing it to a single form), where the hesitation and wobbling of your stroke redefines and alters that silhouette (as we discussed before, this flattens it out), and when you do it to multiple forms all together, you end up turning them into a singular graphic shape.

To put it simply - don't use line weight so liberally. Use it only in those limited, localized areas, to clarify specific overlaps one at a time. So for example, here's how one might apply line weight to two overlapping leaves.

Conclusion

Your work is definitely vastly improved over what you submitted earlier in the month, but there are definitely a number of areas that you have yet to address. We'll be doing that through the revisions you'll find assigned below, but the key point here is that you need to be investing more time into each individual drawing. There are plenty of signs here that you're rushing through - not intentionally, but that you likely have a habit of drawing in a particular fashion, and that there's a lot of underlying resistance to taking more time and thinking through each and every stroke.

One recommendation I have on that front is to simply avoid working on more than one drawing in a given day. If we know we're going to be tearing through several drawings in a sitting, it's easy to end up rushing through them, and a lot of students seem to have this misguided notion that they're expected to complete a certain amount of work in a set amount of time.

The truth is, every single drawing can, and should take as much time as it individually requires to be completed to the absolute best of your current ability. If that means spending a whole day on one drawing, that's perfectly fine. And if that means spending several days, across several sittings, on a single drawing, then it is your responsibility to do so.

Of course, it also takes time to read and review these critiques and the material I've shared with you here. This critique is already 2700 words and by the time I'm done, it will yet be longer. That takes time to absorb, and you are not a robot. You'll probably have to go through it a few times, throughout the process, for it all to sink in.

Another point to keep in mind is that when we draw smaller, we do predispose ourselves to drawing more clumsily. Drawing smaller limits our brain's ability to think through spatial reasoning problems, while also making it more difficult to engage our whole arm while drawing. So while some of these drawings did appear to be drawn with the confidence and comfort that comes from being given more space, the ibex on the top of this page and the donkeys on this page definitely felt like they were being squeezed into far too little space.

You don't have to fit a specific number of drawings in a given page - instead, you draw your first object, giving it as much room as it requires from you, and then when you're done, you assess whether a new one will fit in the space that is left over. If one won't fit, it's okay to have just one drawing on the page. If one will fit, then you should go ahead and add it.

Of course, not leaving loads of empty space throughout the page will also help you maximize that space. On both those pages I highlighted, there was definitely ample room to draw all of them larger, but it simply wasn't used in that manner.

So- you've got a lot to work on here, so I'll leave you to it. You'll find your revisions listed below. Just remember, above all else: take your time.