DIO will be around to look at your revisions as per usual but I wanted to address what you mentioned at the end. If you have tendonitis - and by that I mean are in the process of recovering from it - you really shouldn't be continuing to aggravated the issue by continuing to practice drawing until it has had adequate time to heal, otherwise you risk making it worse.

If you have consulted over this with a physician - specifically continuing to draw and the grips you're using, and they confirmed that it's okay to continue, then that's fine, but if this is an adjustment you made on your own to keep going in the interim, that could be quite risky.

As to having to restart due to changing your grip, no that's not an issue, and you do not need to restart. But please, allow your arm to heal properly before continuing with the course, unless you've specifically discussed this with a doctor.

Hello Hancollinsart, thank you for completing the additional pages.

For your question about how much detail to add, this seems to have been a bit of a distraction for you as you worked on these pages. I'm seeing a general trend for you to get to a certain point in your drawing (usually once you've constructed the torso sausage and basic leg armatures) and jump into texture and detail without fully constructing the forms - skipping over additional masses, and a few steps of head construction. Your application of fur isn't bad- I can see you've focused on adding tufts of fur where it breaks the silhouette and has the most impact, but for the purpose of getting you through this lesson I'd like you to focus on construction only for the next batch of pages.

I was pleased to see that you actually did take notes, including actionable steps with what to work on, and these pages are definitely an improvement. You're giving your constructions more space, and it looks like you're taking more time to think through what you're doing too. I'm happy to see that you're respecting the solidity of your forms, and have largely avoided cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn. I'm happy to see that you've resisted the temptation to pile extra contour lines onto the surface of your forms, and have focused on using contour lines where your forms intersect instead, good work. You're making good progress here, though there are a few things which look like they require further clarification.

Core Construction

Your major masses are generally more correctly proportioned, and this is helping you to construct more convincing torso sausages.

When we're looking at an animal from the side like this giraffe there should be a space between the ribcage and pelvis mass as shown here.

I can't see any core neck construction on your lion or your rhino.

Leg Construction

I can see you've avoided making your leg forms elliptical, nice work. Try to stick to simple sausage forms as closely as you can. There are still some places such as here where you're deviating from sausage forms in an effort to draw the whole leg in one go. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms, here is how we could do this on your giraffe.

When attaching the legs to the body, I find that rather than drawing small ellipses like holes to plug the leg into, it helps to treat these as simplifications of some of the areas of bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, using much larger ellipses. I've shown this in blue on the same giraffe image. These protruding shoulder and thigh masses are very useful for helping to anchor additional masses to the construction later.

Your lion seems to have had his feet amputated. I'm guessing what happened here is that the feet were obscured by long grass in the reference. If you encounter a similar situation in the future I recommend finding a second reference of the same species where the feet are visible, and use that information to help you to construct the feet. I'd also like to share these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between the different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define those edges themselves - to lay down a structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

Additional Masses

Your use of additional masses is still very sparse. Additional masses are an important tool for developing your constructions beyond the simple, generic, balls and sausages that we use to create a solid foundation.

As well as using additional masses on the leg of the giraffe, we could also use them on the torso as seen here. (I'd also re-positioned the pelvis mass in red, and simplified the torso sausage in green, allowing it to sag slightly as discussed on the lesson intro page.

Head Construction

Here I do feel you could have paid more attention to the information presented to you. I'd like you to reread my initial critique where I went over some of the key points of the informal head demo, and asked you to follow the method for constructing heads, as closely as you can.

On your meerkat you clearly attempted to construct large angular eye sockets (though you could be paying more attention to the specific pentagonal shape) and wedge the muzzle snugly against them. On some of your other pages you seem to be largely doing your own thing with the head constructions.

On some of your pages I can't tell if you skipped over drawing eye sockets altogether, or drew them way too small and covered them with the eyeball.

A quick recap on applying the informal head demo method your lion.

1- Large, pentagonal (5 sided, with a point facing down) eye sockets. (red)

2- Wedge the base of the muzzle snugly along a full edge of each eye socket, minding the curvature of the cranial ball as we draw these lines. (blue)

3- Extrude a simple boxy muzzle form- you did this well. Construct the plane of the brow ridge/forehead area. (green)

4- Ears should attach to the head. Don't draw them as lines floating in a mass of fur. (purple)

I actually shared this rhino head demo with you previously and you don't appear to be using it to help with your own rhino head construction.

Other notes

I've also rebuilt a significant portion of your rhino construction here, to show a few of the things we've talked about in action.

1- I've shrunk down the huge ribcage. Remember it is only half the length of the torso, the rib cage is not the tummy.

2- Join the ribcage and pelvis masses together into a torso sausage, without cutting inside the pelvis mass. Construct the neck.

3- The big shoulder and thigh masses I discussed in the leg section.

4- Simple overlapping sausage forms. Make sure your lines are continuous and unbroken and don't introduce sharp corners to the sausages.

5- Contour lines at the joints. As these are intersections they occur where the forms connect together. For this to happen both forms must be present, so the contour curve stays within the region where the forms overlap. If you're not sure why that is, review this section where intersections are introduced. I also added simple forms as a base for the feet.

6- Additional masses (and toes) each with their own complete silhouette. I did see you drew some additional masses above the shoulder and neck of your your construction, though you cut them off where they passed behind the head and eachother, so they become flat partial shapes.

Okay, that should cover it. These are heading in the right direction but there are a few issues to clear up. I'll be assigning another round of revisions. As Uncomfortable discussed, please allow yourself time to heal if needed.

I'd like you to stick to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Stick to one construction per page, making every effort to use as much of the space available as you can.

• Focus on construction only, with no texture. I believe worrying about texture is distracting you from employing the constructional techniques that I'm trying to get you to put into practice.

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 5 pages of animal constructions.