That you find it embarrassing to submit work of any quality is the problem - not the quality. Of course, it's an issue many people face, and acknowledging that to be the issue (along with the arbitrary expectations we feel the need to impose on ourselves) will not solve it outright, but it is an important step. Being disappointed in yourself doesn't make you a better artist.

I certainly understand that a lot of that anxiety does come from having tried it once before, submitted it, and receiving the response you did - but issues cannot be addressed and people cannot move forward if they do not put their work out there. I'd recommend you review this video from Lesson 0, as it touches upon students' tendencies towards such anxieties.

Now, you have certainly improved on the issues I called out before, and while there is certainly plenty of room for growth, you're moving in the right direction and much of your work here provides us with a more solid foundation of prior concepts in the course that we can discuss your next steps forward.

Starting with your organic intersections, your work here is very well done. You're clearly capturing how the sausages slump and sag over one another under their shared gravity, and your cast shadows demonstrate a good sense of how the forms relate to one another in space, in relation to the light source.

In terms of your line work - this was one of the big issues before, and is still present in more limited ways across your work - I did notice some things you should take note of:

• For example, we can see here a tendency to sometimes (less frequently than before) go back over your lines multiple times. Remember - you should not be attempting to correct any mistakes, so there's really no reason to be going back over your lines in this manner.

• There's also hesitation in some of your linework, causing it to wobble - we can see this above as well. If you end up making a wobbly mark, then it is what it is - but keep pushing yourself to execute each and every mark with confidence, regardless of your fears of making a mistake. Anxiety is a powerful force, but it's important to keep pushing yourself to exert control over the actions you take, choosing to execute with confidence over hesitation each time, rather than leaning into what your mind naturally wants you to do. This is not easy - control is like a muscle, and if we go long periods without using it, and simply leaning into our mind's baser urges, that muscle atrophies and weakens. But the more we push ourselves to do it, the more it strengthens, and the easier asserting that control becomes.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, the first thing I wanted to do was knock out some of the more notable, generalized issues that are present on occasion but not all over the place, just to keep in mind what you should be more actively avoiding in terms of your approach going forward:

• This vulture has a couple issues. Around the base of its tail, you end up straying from working with complete, self-enclosed forms, working instead with arbitrary lines. We also see in the wing that you've doubled it up, having drawn it twice. And lastly, the feet themselves are similarly loosely drawn, with gaps in their silhouettes that threaten to undermine the illusion of their solidity. This generally happens when a student loses focus and stops exerting that kind of control. As a manner of drawing it's totally fine - but just not in this course.

• The other issue on the vulture is that you've modified the silhouettes around the head, as we see here - this is one of the things I mentioned specifically to avoid in the feedback for your Lesson 4 work. While cutting into your silhouettes is less common across the rest of your work, it does happen on occasion - like in this tiger. There are also cases where you'll draw a looser ellipse and use one of its inner edges as the edge of its silhouette, as we see here. Always be sure to use the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of your form, so any stray marks remain contained within it.

• As I scroll through your work, I'm definitely seeing a variety of instances that are similar to that vulture's feet, where you are at times drawing with one-off marks or otherwise leaving gaps in the outline of a given form. We can see this, for example, on this elephant. I also noticed areas where you were drawing lines that would come down along the entire side of a given leg, running along the edge of several forms with a single continuous stroke. This aligns with a lot of the other issues, where you're focusing on drawing separate lines, rather than complete forms. As it stands, you're still often slipping back into the mindset of sketching. That's not what we're doing in this course - do not focus on the large problem of drawing a whole elephant all at once - focus on each individual form you need to construct, one at a time, to get there. This takes a lot of time, and that may well be one of the issues that causes you the greatest struggle - that you may not be used to investing as much time as these tasks require of you.

• In my feedback of your Lesson 4 work (and in my reply to your last attempt at submitting Lesson 5), I drew attention to the fact that you weren't adhering to the sausage method in its entirety. You still aren't - at least, not consistently. You have a number of cases where you use ellipses instead of sausages, as we can see in this pig, and there are also some places where you forget to define the joints between the sausage forms using a contour line, as we see in this elephant. There are also cases where you do draw that contour line, like on this one's back legs, but where that contour line is not drawn correctly, in the manner discussed here back in Lesson 2.

Now, I've already hit the length of a normal critique, but I am going to address a couple other concerns.

Firstly, when adding additional masses to your constructions, there's definitely ways in which the way in which their silhouettes are designed can be improved, to create a much stronger impression of how they grip and attach 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.

I am noticing that there are a number of places where you tend to avoid certain kinds of complexity - like sharp corners and inward curves - resulting in a lot of softer, rounded corners instead. Unfortunately this absence of complexity robs us of the very tools we need to use to establish contact between these 3D structures, instead making the masses appear flatter and more blobby, like a sticker pasted on top of the drawing.

I'm also seeing a lot of overuse of contour lines, potentially the result of you realizing that your additional masses feel flat, and trying to make them feel more three dimensional. Unfortunately those contour lines help a form feel more three dimensional on its own, in isolation - but does not solve the problem at hand, which is the lack of relationship being defined between the mass and the structure to which it is attaching. Furthermore, using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses, merely exacerbating the issue.

Circling back to the focus on the silhouette design, here's what it'd look like in action on a couple of your constructions.

I also wanted to note:

• You appear to make minimal use of additional masses on your legs - I provided some diagrams of how you can use those additional masses to build up your leg structures beyond the basic sausage chain in my feedback for your Lesson 4 work. When doing this, do not merely focus on a couple notable bumps along the leg's silhouette - consider how all the pieces fit together, even those that don't impact the silhouette at all, as you can see here on another student's work.

• Additionally, here's a quick diagram from another critique that may provide additional insight into how to approach building up your animals' feet.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. 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. 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.

Now, I am of course going to ask for revisions - you are still running into a great deal of issues in consistently applying the feedback and concepts shared in the critiques and lessons, and you do frequently fall back to tendencies of drawing loosely. For these revisions, I want you to adhere to the following rules:

• Do not think in terms of drawing individual lines to create a picture. Think as though you are introducing actual solid, 3D forms, one by one. Every action you take can only result in another form being added. No cutting into silhouettes, no drawing one-off lines, no gaps in your silhouettes, etc. This means you need to give yourself as much time as you need to exert that kind of control over every action - regardless of how long that is.

• For each construction, I want you to write down the dates of each session you spent on it, along with a rough estimation of how long that session took. You are absolutely allowed and encouraged to spend as many sittings and days as you need on each construction - your only responsibility, as discussed in Lesson 0, is to give the tasks as much time as you require to do it to the best of your current ability.

• Do not use any of the contour lines that sit on the surface of a single form (like those introduced in the Lesson 2 organic forms with contour lines exercises, which you tend to pile onto your additional masses). The kind of contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise, which establish the relationship between two interpenetrating forms (so like the ones we use to define the joints between our sausage segments when constructing legs) are still permitted and encouraged.

You'll find your revisions assigned below.