Starting with your organic intersections, there's one main point of which I'd like to remind you - what we're doing in this exercise is basically building up a pile, where all the individual components are dropped on top, one at a time, and where their relationship with those already present is established, in terms of how gravity causes them to slump and sag over one another. On the second page, you snuck another sausage form underneath the pile (or at leasts it seems as though you did, given that the larger one on top doesn't respond to it at all) - avoid doing this in this exercise. Always build on top, never underneath, because there's no way to take a form that is already on the page and have it respond to something underneath it after the fact.

Now, to answer your first question before I get into the critique, it's important to remember that this course has a very specific goal - to help students develop their spatial reasoning skills. Everything we do here works towards that goal. So the individual lessons, where we look at drawing plants, insects, animals, vehicles, etc. are just lenses through which we look at the same problems. It isn't actually about "I'm going to teach you how to draw animals!" - rather, it's "we're going to go through the same exercise from different angles, having your brain work through these kinds of 3D spatial puzzles to help rewire how it perceives the world beyond the page upon which you draw."

To that point, each drawing here isn't really about capturing our reference image perfectly - rather, every drawing is an exercise in which we use the reference images as a source of information to build up something believable and solid on the page. For that reason, we don't really worry too much about proportion - that's where you get the "cute" factor from, the proportional relationships between the different elements of the animal's construction. There are other courses/resources that will address that much more than we do here - here we really just stress taking more time to observe your references, but more in regards to assessing the nature of each form we add to our construction, one at a time.

As to your second question, it's certainly harder to draw animals that are angled towards/away from the viewer, than it is to draw them in a side view - it's simply a more demanding spatial problem. Just remember - what we're doing here is trying out a bunch of spatial puzzles. Some will be harder than others, but it's not about trying to find tips and tricks to make them easier, so much as accepting that some of our attempts are going to fall flat. That's why they're exercises - we tackle the same kind of problem many times, and gradually as we apply the principles from the lesson and from previous critiques, we gradually rewire the way our brain perceives the things we're drawing. That's what makes it easier in the long run.

Now, with all that said, let's take a look at your animal constructions. There are a number of topics I want to discuss, so I'm going to lay them out here and then touch on each one at a time:

• Time spent observing/studying your reference

• Use of contour lines

• Design of your additional masses

• Head construction

Time spent observing/studying your reference

This course introduces students to a whole array of tools we can use when building out our construction. As a result, it can be very easy for students to spend a lot of their time looking at all these tools at their disposal, and on applying them to their drawing - but in so doing, to sacrifice how much time they actually spend looking at their reference, as well as the frequency with which they do so.

Looking at your work, I feel that a lot of these drawings show that you've spent a lot of your time drawing, but ended up relying a lot more on memory - that is, on what you remember seeing in your reference - rather than continuously looking back at that reference to actually get the information from the source. This is a very common problem - it's easy to fall into the expectation that our memory can retain a lot more information than it really can, and as explained here in Lesson 2 this can leave us oversimplifying things. One example where we can see this is in these two bears - specifically their feet.

The elephants are also cases where things get pretty wacky, although the head on the second one is fairly well observed.

At the end of the day, remember that you need to be spending the majority of your time studying your reference, looking back at it constantly and only ever looking away for long enough to put down a specific mark or add a specific form. That doesn't mean that you should be spending less time drawing - rather that each drawing will as a whole take longer, to allow for adequate observation between every mark.

Use of contour lines

Back in Lesson 2, we introduced contour lines in the organic forms with contour lines exercise. While it's a pretty easy way to introduce the concept, some students end up seeing this magical tool and end up throwing them everywhere. The thing is, as with all the tools in your toolbelt, it's critical that you take the time to consider exactly what you're trying to achieve with a given mark, and whether it's actually necessary. In your work, you appear to overuse those contour lines a great deal.

Contour lines - specifically those that sit on the surface of a single form, like in the organic forms with contour lines - suffer from diminishing returns. That means that you might add one to a given form, and that may have a fair bit of impact in making it feel solid and three dimensional - but the next one would have far less impact, and the one after that, even less.

The ghosting method itself starts with the planning phase - that's where you ask yourself, "what is this mark's job going to be, what is it supposed to accomplish", "how can I execute this mark to best accomplish that task," and finally "are there other marks that are already accomplishing this task". Right now, since you're just piling them on, it shows me that you're skipping that stage and jump right into drawing a bunch of contour lines.

Now, there is another kind of contour line - those introduced in the form intersections exercise - which are far more useful. These define the relationship between different forms in 3D space, and in doing so they help reinforce the illusion that what we're working with is 3D far more effectively. Also, because there's only one valid intersection between any two simple forms, it's impossible to overuse them. So try and focus on these - especially in the use of the sausage method when constructing your legs.

Design of your additional masses

When it comes to building up your animal constructions, I can see that there are some areas where you do attempt to add complete, enclosed, solid masses to the structures one at a time - that is, interacting with them as though they exist in 3D space, as though they're sculptures and you're adding new lumps of clay or meat to them. There are however lots of places where you're still working in 2D space instead - that is, treating them like they're just drawings by adding partial shapes or individual lines.

This is something we discussed at length in my critique of your Lesson 4 work. There are a lot of these, but I can point out a couple on this elephant alone. I get that it's been a long time since I critiqued your original Lesson 4 work, so I can imagine that it's easy to have forgotten a lot of it - but that's why it's important to go back over the feedback you've received even once you've moved on, so you can avoid making the same mistakes over again.

Where you do introduce more complete silhouettes for your additional masses, you are definitely struggling to establish how they actually wrap around with and relate to 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.

So you can see these principles applied here on one of your bears. The key is to focus not on the idea that you're trying to replicate your reference image (as this can cause you to jump into drawing individual components that are too complicated on their own), but rather in thinking about the process of construction like solving a puzzle, one little piece at a time. Keep each piece as simple as you can, and only introduce complexity in order to describe how this simple mass is going to interact with the existing structure.

Head construction

Given that Drawabox is a continually evolving course - where by doing critiques, I'm able to come up with new and more effective approaches for explaining certain concepts - the lesson material itself gets updated. Unfortunately, video content (like the main demos in the lesson) is a lot harder to update, so I often use the "informal demos" section of the lessons to provide additional and more up-to-date content, until I can incorporate it into the lesson material itself.

It's not that the existing main demos are bad, just that in doing lots of critiques, I can find better ways of explaining things.

The reason I'm explaining this here is that in the tiger head demo, at the very top, I explain pretty much this same thing, and encourage students to take a look at this explanation of head construction from the informal demos page. Looking at your work, I feel you may have missed this.

The approach shared there is very specific, and it goes over how to build up the head structure so all of the components fit together like a solid three dimensional puzzle. Even the specific shape of the eye sockets leans into this, providing a wedge between them to fit the muzzle, and a flat top for the brow ridge and forehead. I want you to apply this approach in your drawings, and do so as directly as you can.

Conclusion

Now, I've shared a great deal here with you, and I will be assigning revisions below for you to address these points to the best of your ability. To summarize:

• Take more time ot observe your reference, and do so more frequently - don't draw for a long time without looking at your reference.

• Ease up on your use of contour lines - only use them where they're actually necessary.

• Review the feedback you received for Lesson 4 - specifically about not altering silhouettes once they've been drawn, ensuring everything you add is its own independent, solid, three dimensional mas, and also the advice I shared about how to build up your leg constructions. There were specific diagrams I shared on how to build upon the sausage structures that you should review.

• Build up your constructions one step at a time - focus on each step being its own simple addition, and focus on how its silhouette is being designed, so as to capture how it wraps around the existing structure. Don't rush these.

• Review and apply the informal head construction material

You'll find the revisions listed below. I strongly recommend that you avoid any detail/texture when doing these. Also, I recommend that you work on no more than one drawing in a given sitting. It's very easy for students to get stuck in the mindset that they need to finish a drawing in a set amount of time (like the idea that I have to be done this drawing before I get up). This is not true, and there's no reason for it - your responsibility here is to give each drawing as much time as it requires from you, and you are encouraged to work on a single drawing across multiple days if that's necessary.