Hello Gyanyu, apologies for the delay in handling your submission, I was away during the seasonal Promptathon event.

The quality of your images is good enough for me to see your individual lines and provide feedback. The resolution is on the low side for providing drawovers, so it would help us if you could submit images at least 1000pixels wide for lessons 6 and 7.

Starting with your organic intersections you’re doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid. As for how you’re building up the piles, this is a bit mixed. In some cases you allow your forms to wrap over one another in 3D space, and in some cases it looks more like the forms are sitting in front of one another, so some of the forms look like they would fall down. If we look at this section, form 2 is good, because it sags over both the near and far side of the form below, so it appears stable and supported. On the other hand Form 3 seems to sit completely in front of the form below it, so it looks like it would just roll off the pile at any moment. When doing this exercise in the future, it's important that you always think about how you're building up a stable pile, working from bottom up. With each sausage, ask yourself whether it's being supported in space, or if it is about to fall.

In the specific case shown above, this could be remedied by adjusting the shadows and line weight as shown here to communicate that the far end of form 3 is sagging over the far side of form 2, so that is feels stable and supported.

Speaking of shadows, you’re doing a good job of pushing them boldly, so that they read as shadows, rather than hugging the form casting them like line weight. When practising this exercise in future try to keep a single consistent light source in mind for any given pile, and project all the shadows away from that light source. You tend to push your shadows in towards the midsection of every form, avoiding projecting shadows away from the tips, and giving the impression that the light source is moving around. Here is a very quick example where I picked one of the more convincing shadows and adjusted the other shadows to follow a similar light source, I hope that helps.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall these are heading in the right direction. It looks like you’ve made an effort to use the construction methods shown in the lesson (as well as using the sausage method for legs as requested in your lesson 4 feedback) and I’m seeing a fair bit of growth in the design of your additional masses as you progress through the set. I do have some advice for how you can continue to improve your constructions, so let’s get cracking.

• First off, I didn’t see this happening much, but it is an important point to grasp to keep your constructions feeling solid and 3D. On your stag I’ve used red to highlight 3 areas where it looks like you tried to cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you had already drawn. while it's entirely possible to do this correctly in 3D space, I'm advising students not to work subtractively at all when building up organic structures within this course, just because students tend to be prone to doing it wrong without realizing, and then reinforcing 2D thinking instead. Sticking to working additively in 3D space will on the other hand be a lot harder to do wrong (as long as you're somewhat mindful of what you're doing), and will ultimately reinforce that 3D thinking and eventually help you subtract more effectively as well.

• In a similar vein, on the same stag construction I used blue to highlight a couple of places where you’d extended off the silhouettes of existing forms with partial shapes, which leaves it unclear how the new addition is actually supposed to connect to the existing forms in 3D space. Remember, as discussed in this section of lesson 3 when we want to build upon forms that aren’t already flat we need to attach complete new forms to the existing structure. On the rump we’d use an additional mass for this, and the “branch” construction method from lesson 3 is usually a good solution for antlers or horns.

• There are areas where your constructions look like they would benefit from investing a little more time into them. Not just for drawing, but for observing your reference as well. For example the antlers of the same stag look like you could probably benefit from pushing yourself to spend more time looking at your reference (specifically doing so continuously throughout the drawing process, rather than only up-front) as well as planning where each form needs to go. Remember you are allowed to use dots to plan start and end points for lines. Sometimes students may feel rushed to complete some drawings faster, simply because they only have a certain amount of time in a given sitting. If you ever feel yourself pressured to work faster than you need, remember that you can always set a drawing down and pick it up another day. No need to call it done the moment you get up.

• I’m happy to see that you’ve used the sausage method for the majority of your leg constructions, and are able to keep your sausage forms simple in most cases. You appear a little bit random about where you apply contour curves to the legs. Sometimes this is done correctly, to define the intersection at the joints, and sometimes they are applied to the surface of individual sausage forms as well as, or instead of, at the joints. By adding a contour line at the joint, we actually define a relationship between the forms. Adding them to the midsection of the sausages just clarifies the individual form, and can stiffen the construction needlessly.

• You tend to leave most of your legs at the simple sausage stage. There will often be much more going on if you take the time to look at the legs carefully, and all the extra bulk, lumps or bumps can be constructed using additional forms, as shown in the various examples I shared with you in your lesson 4 feedback.

• When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing feet in future.

• For the wing of your hybrid I’d like you to take a look at this wing demo where Uncomfortable shows how to create the feathers by adding to the simple shape rather than cutting inside it.

Continuing on, I wanted to talk in a little bit more depth about additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been using masses to build upon your constructions in 3D throughout the set, and it does look like as you went through he set you got more comfortable with designing their shapes so that they wrap around the existing structures convincingly.

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 generally do great at keeping your masses simple where they are exposed to fresh air, but I wanted to call out the long mass on the back of this stag which undulates along its top edge where there is nothing present in the construction to press into it and cause those inward curves.

On the same image I’d noted that the mass under the belly seems to get cut off where it passes between the legs. Remember that additional forms need to have their own complete, fully enclosed silhouette, so we can explain how they relate to the other structures in the construction.

The last thing I wanted to call out on that image is that sometimes you’ll add contour lines that contradict the orientation of the form you’re tying to describe. I hope you’ll remember this diagram I shared with you previously, which shows different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which a form is perceived. So if we look at the corresponding stag reference you shared, you correctly asserted that the rump of the animal is facing towards the viewer, with the shoulders facing away, but missed that the neck twists around so that the head can face towards the viewer.

In this drawover I’ve shown how to break the long mass on the back into more manageable pieces, gave the additions to the rump and belly their own complete silhouettes, and flipped the curvature of the contour line on the neck mass. In most cases we can design masses so that they feel 3D without piling extra contour lines onto them to reinforce them, though it looks like you already realised this independently in your later constructions. I’d like you to note that the mass on the back has been pulled around the side of the torso and pressed against the top of the protruding thigh mass, helping to anchor the additional mass more securely to the torso. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Moving on from the stag, there are a couple of things I wanted to talk about with your chameleon. As I’ve called out in the notes there, the branch the animal is clinging to is missing in two places where it should be visible, so it feels flat and unconvincing. I’d definitely recommend drawing through and completing it, especially as there is such a complex 3D relationship between the animal and the branch, he is bracing his rear end against it, as well as gripping it with his feet. The tail looks a bit flat, and I think adapting the branch construction method from lesson 3 would be a good strategy to help you keep control of those long spiralling lines and give the form a feeling of solidity.

The majority of your head constructions have pretty solid 3D muzzles, but for this chameleon you did a fair bit of the head construction in 2D, using flat partial shapes. This animal is admittedly a bit different to any of the creatures in the demos, so maybe that threw you off your game a little. Here I’ve included a rather simplified step by step to get you started. I liked the large pentagonal eye socket you inscribed onto the cranial ball, so the first step is almost identical to your own construction. In the second step I’m defining a footprint for the muzzle form, where it will attach to the surface of the cranial ball. This step is important, because it defined the relationship between the cranial ball and the muzzle in 3D. In the third step I’ve extruded the muzzle. Because the head is turned slightly towards the viewer we can see some of the front plane of the muzzle, and I’ve defined this explicitly. The fourth step shows how we can keep using more forms to develop the construction, adding the crest at the back of the head and the cheek.

Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, and how Uncomfortable is 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 in this informal head demo.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eye sockets - 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 eye socket 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 as shown in in this rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All righty, I think that should cover it. I think your constructions are moving in the right direction, and I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete so that you can move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge. I hope the above information will be useful to you when practising these constructional exercises in future.