Something that I see from students, specifically at this lesson, is that there is a pretty strong tendency for them to get so enthusiastic about drawing animals (often the first "fun" thing after boring plants and disgusting insects), that they get a little ahead of themselves and don't apply the principles of the course quite as stringently as they really ought to. As a result, the drawings can often still be quite lovely, as many of yours are here, but they don't necessarily follow the processes and concepts of the lesson in the way that they're intended, and that's a problem. After all, this lesson isn't about drawing animals - it's about using animals as just another lens through which to develop our spatial reasoning skills.

There are a number of ways in which you skip over rules/principles of this course:

• You tend to draw your underlying construction more lightly, relying on misusing your fineliners to produce those kinds of marks (the tool after all is chosen for its rich, dark strokes). Remember that every single one of my demonstrations, despite being done digitally, employs a brush that makes such rich marks unavoidable. Every mark I put down on the page is something I've committed to, and I have no chance to be rough or loose with my strokes. You should be approaching your linework in the same manner, accepting your underlying construction as introducing solid, three dimensional forms to the world - rather than treating them as something that can be removed from the drawing when you're done. Note specifically how I've worked through this informal demo from lesson 4. That's the kind of confidence, forethought and commitment I want to see behind your constructions.

• You're inconsistent in drawing through your ellipses - make sure that you go around the elliptical shape two full times before lifting your pen.

• In my critique of your Lesson 4 work, I called out situations where you'd redraw the silhouette of a form you'd constructed, and explained why this is an approach you should be avoiding. I can see you employing that approach in various parts of your drawings - on the turtles' fins, for example, as well as places where along your horses' legs you added flat shapes to "bridge" across from one form to another, instead of building out those forms as 3D entities, defining how they relate to the structure to which they were attaching. Everything we add to a construction should exist as its own complete, enclosed, three dimensional form, and you should be thinking about how you can define the relationships between those forms either by using contour lines to define their intersections, or by shaping their silhouette in a way that demonstrates how it "grips" or wraps around the existing structure.

• As discussed back in lesson 2, we aren't getting into any rendering/shading in these lessons. Form shading should be left out entirely. There are definitely a few drawings where you got really focused on the idea of decorating your drawings and making them look nice, that you forgot about this. In my critique of your Lesson 4 work, I talked about how at no point is our goal to decorate our drawings. Both construction and texture are focused on communicating information to the viewer, about how the object might feel to be manipulated in our hands, or to run our fingers across its surface. Keeping this in mind can help us avoid getting caught up in that detail.

As a whole - now we're getting into the normal critique of the work you've done here, rather than pointing out issues addressed previously - you definitely did have quite a heavy stint there where you focused really heavily on detail and texture, to the point that you seemed distracted from the core construction. This isn't an uncommon problem - students who, again, get really enthusiastic about doing something enjoyable will often fixate on that, to the detriment of the core foundation upon which the detail is supposed to be supported. Always try to approach your drawings without thinking about how you're going to add detail. Build up your forms confidently, committing to that linework, and focusing on how every new set of forms you're adding relates to that underlying structure. Once your construction is finished, you can think about tackling detail - and I'd recommend doing that in a separate sitting, to ensure that the processes are entirely distinct from one another.

On the topic of detail, I definitely noted a lot of more erratic strokes when you approached drawing the fur on these drawings. You leaned heavily into quantity over quality, and that was the wrong choice. Instead, focus as always on ensuring that your marks are purposeful, that your tufts of fur are designed, not just the result of arbitrary scratching. It is better to draw ten marks that you have specific control over, than a hundred that were drawn by reflex, instinct, or auto-pilot. As you can see here, I take time to consider how I want to design each tuft, and the overall density there is far less than what you've used - but despite that, it still looks plenty furry.

Here you definitely held yourself back a little more, which is good - it definitely isn't as overwhelming or noisy, although the strokes themselves are still drawn in auto-pilot. But it's a step in the right direction.

All things considered, the drawings of the turtles are far and away your best work here, and they do a pretty good job of establishing a well developing set of spatial reasoning skills. Of course, as mentioned before, you should definitely be building up the more complex detail along the turtle's fins by introducing additional forms, as explained here.

The last thing I want to share with you is regarding head construction. I'm seeing a lot of different approaches to constructing your animals' heads, and in a number of these you're moving in the right direction - defining the eye socket with a series of lines, and figuring out how it fits together with the muzzle, cheeks, brow ridge, etc. That said, you have other constructions where you skip over this, or apply it only in part. Give this explanation a read - it goes over the mindset behind this approach, and how the eye socket is the first step towards taking what is a relatively smooth structure (the cranial ball) and breaking it down into more complex planes to start refining it as it exists in 3D space.

Now, you have certainly shown the capacity to apply these principles well, though scattered in different ways across many pieces, and you have shown considerable growth over this set when comparing the turtles and rhinos to the birds and bears. I do, however, want to see a more concerted, targeted effort at holding to the principles of the lesson, so I'm going to assign some additional pages below. I fully expect you to be able to accomplish this quite well, so I imagine my response to your revisions will be a simple "great work!" and permission to move forward.