Overall you're doing very well and are demonstrating a strong understanding of 3D space throughout your work for this lesson. I do have some points in which to offer advice to help you continue getting the most out of this manner of exercise, and I think that advice will be useful going forward, but as a whole you are doing a great job.

Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing well to draw these forms with consideration to how they slump and sag over one another, as a pile impacted by the ever downward force of gravity. I did notice just two minor points to keep in mind:

• On the left of both pages, you had a sausage form kind of hanging off. It wasn't entirely impractical or unreasonable - I think one could argue that, if we were to jump forward a few moments, there's a decent chance of that form still remaining there due to how the other masses hold it in place, but in general it is something to perhaps avoid for this exercise. Try to stick most of all to an arrangement of forms that feels stable, as though it will definitely not move or change as we step forward from moment to moment. Instead, focus on the idea of something that has been allowed to settle, and need not settle any further.

• For your shadows, you're definitely moving in the right direction, but I do think these can be pushed further, with more thought to how they wrap around the surfaces beneath them. Here are some corrections.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, there are a few specific areas I want to talk about, so I'll address them each in turn.

Firstly, additional masses on your legs. There are two elements to this part, which you'll see here. Firstly, I noticed that you did often strive to build upon the basic sausage structures with complete forms, with fully enclosed silhouettes. That said, there are some areas, which I marked in red, where you weren't quite so fastidious, adding one-off marks to instead alter the silhouettes, closing off partial shapes but not defining how these new additions actually sit in relation to the existing structure in 3D space. Just keep an eye on that.

As for the cases where you did draw those fully enclosed forms, you tended to be fairly timid in just how much you were willing to do with these, and focused largely on adding forms that would impact the silhouette of the overall leg structure. Try to push yourself beyond this - consider the forms along the inside as well, as they will determine how the different masses at the silhouette will fit together. The more we can fit everything together, the more solid and grounded they will appear.

Secondly, when it comes to drawing feet, as with all things, we need to think about them in pieces. Rather than viewing the whole foot or paw as a single entity, then drawing individual lines to separate the toes, there's no reason to consider these any differently from how we build up everything else. What we can use to that end are "boxy" forms - that is, forms with purposefully placed corners that help to imply the presence of distinct planes, and the edges that exist between them. As shown here (on another student's work), we can lay down a basic boxy structure, then attach yet more boxy structure for each toe, one at a time. This also helps us establish a flat face along the underside of the foot/paw, which would press against the ground. You did strive to do this in your wolf's paws, but the result was more of a flat shape for each one. A more intentional placement of corners will help turn them into 3D structures.

Thirdly, while I am generally pretty happy with how you're building up your additional masses and designing their silhouettes, I did notice a strong tendency to lean on adding contour lines to those masses, and I wanted to let you know that this is not necessary - and in some cases, can actually be a little detrimental. I'll admit, in some of my older demos I do this myself, but more recently I've come to see in students that it can actually give us the impression that should we not design our additional masses correctly - placing inward and outward curves, as well as sharp corners and more gradual, smoother transitions in the wrong places - that we can "fix" this afterwards by simply adding contour lines to help the form feel more 3D and voluminous. While that is indeed the result, it shifts the focus from establishing a strong, believable relationship between the different forms and structures, to simply making that one form feel 3D in isolation, on its own. That doesn't actually solve the problem at hand, but it can shift our attention away from thinking more intentionally about where we place those curves and corners.

Also, it can be very beneficial to take note of opportunities to press a new mass against an existing structure. For example, all quadrupeds have the same kind of bulky masses around their shoulder and hip, which we can define by blocking in simple ellipsoid forms in those areas. Then, as we build upon the structure with new masses, especially along the back, we can stretch them down along the sides to really "grip" the torso, and to press up against the hip/shoulder masses, making them feel more grounded and solid. This is essentially the same as where I encouraged you to consider the masses along the inside of your legs' silhouettes earlier on in this critique.

Lastly, head construction. Again, overall you're doing this quite well, save for one thing, and even that isn't present all the time. A lot of your head constructions tend to feature little gaps between the eye sockets and the rest of the structures, and in so doing, we end up with a weaker relationship between these different pieces.

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 - and many of them do not stress the importance of eliminating those gaps as much as they should. 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.

Honestly, you already are employing the core elements of the approach for the most part, and there are drawings where you're fitting the eye socket up tightly against the other elements, as we see here. Just keep pushing yourself to follow that process in the future. It ties back to the fact that every drawing we're doing here is an exercise - a 3D spatial puzzle that, in solving it, our brain is developing its internal model of 3D space, by figuring out how all the different pieces fit together. Not in the flat, 2D space of the page, but in the three dimensional world it looks out upon.

So, that about covers it! As I said, you've done a great job, and you've got some excellent examples of a well developing understanding of 3D space. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, and leave you to practice the points I raised on your own as you move forwards.