Starting with your organic intersections, your work here is coming along well. You're definitely thinking about how these forms interact with one another as the pile up under the force of gravity. You're also making progress with the cast shadows, although there are still some (as shown here) that come out a little inconsistently.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I can definitely see that you were clearly working hard to apply the concepts from the lessons, and to use the tools put at your disposal. There certainly are still areas that you're having difficulty with, but I feel these are all things we can address, and as a whole you are moving in the right direction.

The first issue that I can see here is simply that you're relying pretty heavily on the use of contour lines, and that you often use them in places where they're either not needed, or actually somewhat more of a distraction. Contour lines are one tool, and as with any tool it's important to always consider what we're trying to use them for, and what we're trying to get out of them.

The ghosting method provides us with a good place to do this - its first step, the planning phase, has us asking ourselves just what exactly a mark is meant to achieve, how we can best approach executing it as effectively as is needed, and whether another mark may already be accomplishing the same task. You'll often find when analyzing the necessity of a contour line that the cases where a lot of contour lines are piled onto the surface of a single form (similarly to how they were introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise), you can see the contour lines suffering from diminishing returns. That is to say, the first one that gets added may have a more notable impact, but the second will have less, and the third even less so.

To put it simply, piling on a ton of contour lines without thinking about why and what you're trying to get out of them doesn't really work too well. After a point it stops making your forms feel more 3D, and instead just clutters your drawing.

Before we move forward from this point, it's worth mentioning that the other kind of contour line (the one introduced in lesson 2's form intersections exercise) is considerably more effective. In sitting simultaneously on the surface of two forms, it helps to establish how those two forms relate to one another in space. It also can't be overused, since there's only one valid intersection between any two simple forms.

This idea of "defining the relationships between forms" is what brings us to the more effective way in which to build up our constructions. The additional masses we build up - like those used for this camel's hump, along its neck, and over its shoulder - may not intersect with the other forms, but they do wrap around the existing structure. We can use each mass's silhouette, and the way it's designed, to convey how it wraps around the existing structure, and thus how all these forms relate to one another in space.

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 looking at that camel, here's a rough idea of how I'd tackle it - for each new mass I've decided to add, I'm figuring out how it'll wrap around the existing structure. As I find more nuanced structure to build up, I achieve it by combining more additional masses, going through this process for each one. Also, defining things like the big masses around the shoulder/hip area (the big muscles that help all quadrupeds walk around), I give myself more elements to wrap my additional masses around. Note that none of these drawings feature any contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form - simply because they're not the right tool for this job, and we can define the relationships between these forms without them.

You'll also see how this applies to the masses we build up on our legs as well. I only really saw you attempting to build up further masses on your sausage leg structures a couple times - in my critique of your lesson 4 work, I offered several examples of how that could be built up quite extensively, going beyond just establishing the odd bump here or there, but to build up much further complexity to our leg constructions. I strongly recommend that you go back and reread my Lesson 4 critiques, as it seems you may have focused completely on the idea of using sausages, and perhaps forgotten everything that came after that.

Another point I wanted to talk about is head construction. Looking at your work, I'm getting a strong impression that you're working hard to apply the principles shared in the informal head construction demo here, and I'm pleased to see that. You're clearly working to wedge all the different facial components together, establishing the head as a sort of 3D puzzle. I do however have a couple recommendations of things for you to focus on:

• I noticed that the eye socket shape you're using appears to be a little off. Note that in my demo, I'm using an upside-down pentagon, so it produces a wedge shape between the eye sockets for the muzzle to fit into, and a flat surface across the top for the forehead to rest upon.

• There are definitely some drawings where you end up drawing the whole thing quite small (your red pandas for example), resulting in very little space being available for the head construction. Always make sure to give each drawing as much room as it requires from you. There's really no reason to end up with a small drawing taking up half of an otherwise empty page. Giving yourself more room to work will make it easier to sort through certain spatial problems, and will further make it easier for you to engage your whole arm while drawing.

• When working on the eyes, it helps to draw the eyelids as their own additional masses, as shown here. I feel like I can see you doing this in a couple places, at least partially, but you'll definitely be able to get more out of it if by drawing bigger, you end up with larger eyeballs to work with.

The last thing I wanted to discuss is simply the importance of giving yourself lots of time when working on each drawing. Right now, I'm getting the impression that while you are definitely putting plenty of time into the construction of each of these, I do feel that some of the time that should have been committed to observing and studying your reference may have been sacrificed, resulting in some oversimplification of areas you may not have felt warranted as much time. For example, the paws/feet of your animals are pretty much always underdeveloped.

It's very, very important that you spend the majority of your time looking at your reference and identifying the elements that are present there, as well as how they relate to everything around them. It's far too easy to slip back into the mistake of working from what you remember - memory will always result in oversimplification, and if we aren't paying attention, we can easily end up relying on memory without realizing it.

I've shared a number of things for you to work on here, and I'm going to assign some revisions below so you can address them. For the sake of summary, here are the main points for you to watch out for:

• Reduce your reliance on contour lines. In fact, for your revisions, I ask that you leave out all the contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form. Form-intersection contour lines are still allowed and encouraged, but the type introduced in the lesson 2 organic forms with contour lines exercises should be left out for now. This will, hopefully push you to focus more on how each and every additional mass's silhouette is designed.

• Remember that the sausage method is just the first stage of leg construction. Be sure to build up additional masses along those sausage structures, to capture all of the various, subtle elements present there in your reference image.

• Avoid the cases where you ended up working needlessly small. Take full advantage of the space available to you on the page.

• Spend more of your time observing, and avoid working from memory.