As a whole, you're moving in the right direction when it comes to how your spatial reasoning skills have been developing thus far, and how they've been used here, but when it comes to the specific way in which you've approached these drawing exercises, there are quite a few areas in which you're being perhaps a little too relaxed, and thus a bit sloppy, some of which were certainly addressed in the feedback I provided in Lesson 4. Given that it was back in September, you may have forgotten those points - but it certainly was and continues to be your individual responsibility to ensure that you revisit previous feedback to at the very least do what you can to ensure that the same issues do not come up again in your next submission. It's pretty normal for issues to come up here and there, in small ways, but here there are going to be a lot of things I'll have to repeat.

In the future, you may consider:

• Rereading the feedback you've received previously immediately before jumping into the next lesson's homework

• Taking notes on the major issues you need to be keeping in mind, so you can review those notes at the beginning of each session of working on the next lesson's work

I'm going to list the issues we'll look at in brief first, then we'll expand upon the ones that need it:

• This doesn't happen super often, but it does come up enough to be something you're not as conscious of as you should be - you're still at times allowing yourself to modify the silhouettes of masses you've already put down, especially the early ones. Here on your tortoises I've marked out in red where you've cut into the silhouettes of forms, and in blue where you've extended them out, attempting to build on top of them in 2D space rather than through the addition of complete, fully self-enclosed forms. A big part of this comes from the fact that you're drawing your initial masses more faintly, and then increasing the thickness of your lines in each successive step. This encourages you to redraw things (which is how we end up with alterations to those forms' silhouettes). Instead, stick to the same general thickness for your lines, and only add line weight in specific, localized areas where overlaps occur, in order to clarify those overlaps as shown here.

• As an extension of the previous point, the way in which you draw your fur does suffer from this somewhat, mainly in cases where you, as shown here, tend to take a lot more liberty when drawing your fur, establishing many separate tufts across a pretty large span before returning to that existing edge. This is similar to the issue explained here in Lesson 3, in regards to zigzagging, and breaks this principle of markmaking from Lesson 1. We definitely have some latitude when it comes to designing more complex tufts (and even in the fact that adding fur naturally requires us to alter the silhouette of the form, something we wouldn't do when approaching standard construction), but we still need to take our time with these, and build them out one by one. I also noticed a general tendency towards falling into auto-pilot when it comes to drawing the fur pattern at times, resulting in some oversimplified areas. Be sure to take all the time that is required to design the tufts you want to draw. You don't have to cover everything with fur in order to convey to the viewer that the animal is furry - but if you do decide to do more than is necessary, you still need to give it the time it requires. Otherwise, you can also choose to leave the fur out for the purposes of these exercises.

• While I can see that you are attempting to use the sausage method when constructing your legs, you are not adhering to the elements of the sausage method (as shown on this diagram) consistently. There are quite a few places where you use ellipses rather than sausages, or otherwise drift away from the characteristics of simple sausages, and you also neglect to define the joint between the sausages with a contour line. Additionally, I provided you with some additional diagrams showing how to build onto your sausage structures without modifying them on a 2D level, so you'll want to go back and review those.

• Another point that I raised in my previous critique was towards your tendency towards packing the pages full, resulting in your drawings being smaller than strictly necessary, and more importantly, leading you to pre-allocating spaces on your page evenly ahead of time. While you don't do this to such a degree that it's a huge problem, it is something I called out before and that is still more or less the same.

• I'm going to expand upon this below, but there are ways in which your use of additional masses can be improved upon, both in the design of the silhouettes, and considering how they would interact with one another to feel more "grounded" as a solid structure, rather than independent pieces floating amongst one another.

• I'll also take a moment to talk a bit about head construction.

So, with those all listed, first let's take a look at additional masses. Right now you run into a few issues:

• The design of many of your additional masses comes out somewhat "blobby" - that is, relying very heavily on outward curves, and generally avoiding inward curves and sharp corners. There are definitely places where you'll use inward curves, and it helps a fair bit, although you do still tend to be kind of hesitant to use really sharp corners, and tend to round them out, leading to an amount of blobbiness.

• While I'm pleased t osee that there are cases where you identified the need to solve a problem with multiple masses rather than trying to have one mass do all the work and become way too complex as a result, you generally draw them such that they overlap in 2D space, and often allow them to just cut off where they're overlapped by another, as we see here. Of course, as per the previous points I outlined above and in Lesson 4's critique, it is important that we introduce each new form as a complete, fully self-enclosed silhouette, and that we design them such that they convey how they wrap around the existing structure. If you add one mass to an animal's back, and then seek to add another, that first mass becomes part of the existing structure, and so your next mass has to wrap around it as well.

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.

You can see this in action here. You'll also note that I blocked in the shoulder/hip masses (basically the area where all quadrupeds inevitably have an amount of muscle to help them walk and run) with simple ball forms. This then gives me something for my additional masses to press up against, so I've stretched them down further along the animal's side. In effect, by establishing more, clearer relationships between the different forms (by having them press up against one another), we create a stronger, more grounded overall structure, making the while thing feel much more solid and three dimensional.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, and how I'm finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here on the informal demos page.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eyesockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.

• This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.

• We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eyesocket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but with a bit of finagling it can still apply pretty well. To demonstrate this for another student, I found the most banana-headed rhinoceros I could, and threw together this demo.

Overall I can see you applying elements of this approach in your drawings, but how closely you follow it varies quite a bit, so make a conscious effort to apply them more directly.

As I said towards the beginning, you are as a whole demonstrating well developing spatial reasoning skills, but the purpose of these lessons is not to demonstrate what you already know, but rather to ensure that you understand how to use these kinds of drawings as an exercise to help you continue to build upon what you know, and improve those underlying skills further. The way in which you've drawn here throughout the lesson is fine outside of this course, but for what we're doing here, you're undermining the effectiveness of those exercises in a number of ways.

I'm going to assign some revisions below, in order to allow you to demonstrate your understanding of each of these points.