Starting with your organic intersections, you're largely doing well, but there's two main things I want to mention:

• Firstly, try to always focus on achieving a sense of stability for your resulting pile of sausages. They're all subject to the same force of gravity, and so understanding how the forms would behave together under that gravity is pretty important, and working towards achieving the impression of equilibrium - where no sausage is going to fall over or roll off from one moment to the next - will help in aiming for that goal as effectively as we can. So for example, I would avoid the standing sausage on the far left of this page.

• Secondly, I noticed that you approached these by first drawing your initial linework more faintly, then going back over the lines to make them darker. This approach, while fine in general, should not be used in this course. Each mark should be drawn with the same confidence, and line weight should be reserved only for clarifying how different forms overlap one another, being limited to the localized areas where those overlaps occur, as explained here.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, there's a lot you're already doing very well here. Despite the break away from the course, I think you did a good job of reviewing many of the concepts from earlier lessons, and gave yourself a good chance of continuing from where you left off. In some ways it may have been beneficial to have taken the break, if it forced you to review that stuff more thoroughly. It's not uncommon for students who haven't taken such breaks to forget a lot and neglect to go back on their own to solidify things. So! Good on you for that.

There are a few things that I can still give you plenty of advice on though, to help you continue to get the most out of these exercises - and, fair warning, some of them simply were never mentioned clearly in the lesson material. The course has been going through an overhaul (mainly updating of the videos) to reassert some of the things I've learned myself from giving students feedback on their lesson work over the last many years, but until that overhaul reaches each lesson, I try to share the concepts through my feedback (effectively giving the official critique track students a bit of a sneak peak to that which will eventually be shared with everyone, if I don't drop dead in the process).

First, let's start with the stuff I can knock off more quickly, in point-form:

• Probably what stands out most is simply that you're drawing really small on the page, and leaving a ton of blank space, which speaks both to not necessarily giving yourself as much room as you need to think through all of the spatial problems (or at least limiting your capacity to do so by working in such tight confines). This also can make executing our marks using our whole arm, from the shoulder, considerably more difficult. While I didn't strictly see any huge issues necessarily, it's still an important point to keep in mind, as this can vary from topic to topic, and from task to task. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

• You tend to use a ton of contour lines, and to put it simply, they're not really needed. This suggests that when you go to draw those contour lines, you're not necessarily asking yourself the important questions that should generally occur during the planning phase of the ghosting method - what is this mark's purpose, how can I approach it to achieve that goal as effectively as I can, and are there any other marks that are accomplishing the same goal. Contour lines of the sort we introduce first in Lesson 2's organic forms with contour lines exercise definitely have their place, but that exercise exaggerates how many we might employ to get students used to working with them. In truth, you're pretty quickly going to end up in a situation where adding more contour lines will not add more solidity. There are other kinds of contour lines however - those that define the joint between forms that were introduced in the form intersections exercise - which are going to come up much more. Establishing the relationships between forms is a really effective way to make our forms appear more solid and three dimensional, because in doing so, we're hinging the solidity of one form on the other. The more pieces we add to the puzzle that fit together in a clearly defined manner, the more everything looks 3D. It also helps that there's only ever one such relationship that can be defined between two forms, so it can't really be overused either.

• To that point, I noticed that you often do a good job of defining the joint between your sausage forms when constructing your legs, although there are some cases where you forget, like on this deer's legs.

• When tackling this squirrel's tail, your approach for building up the structure is incorrect. You built up what is effectively not a visible structure (and thus something we can't really see for ourselves, and thus in the context of this course which doesn't treat animals as being different from, say, a tea kettle, doesn't exist), and then when adding your fur, you added a big gap between the structure you'd established and the actual complexity of that fur. That gap effectively results in a very loose relationship between the steps of construction, causing the tail to feel very flat. Instead, you'd do your best to represent what it is you see as a simple form, and then add your fur tufts directly to its silhouette, as shown here.

• I noticed that there were definitely some spots where you were still relying on modifying the silhouettes of existing forms, rather than adhering as strictly to what I shared in my critique of your Lesson 4 work (that is, building everything up with the addition of new, complete, fully self-enclosed structures). Here on one of your deer I highlighted some places where you engaged with your construction in 2D space.

Now, one of the reasons I spent a bit talking so much about contour lines is because while piling them on isn't necessarily harmful, there are situations where it can be. One of those is in dealing with the additional masses we use to build upon our structures. While a contour line that establishes the intersection between two forms is one way of establishing the relationship between them in 3D space, it only works if our forms actually interpenetrate. In the case of our additional masses, they're generally wrapping around an existing structure, effectively gripping and clinging to it. As a result, we have to use the actual shape of the silhouette of those masses to convey this relationship - and thus the way we actually go about adding it to the page for the first time matters a lot. Additional contour lines can make it feel like we can take a silhouette that missed the mark and "fix" it by making it appear more 3D, those contour lines on its surface are only going to make it feel more 3D on its own - not in relation to the other forms.

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 can see this kind of concept in action here on this deer - note how I place inward curves, sharp corners, outward curves and more gradual corners all in very specific places, depending on whether or not the mass I'm drawing is making contact with another defined structure in that place. There's no vagueness here - only specific relationships being defined.

This also means that we cannot put corners in arbitrary places. I noticed some cases of this here on your donkey's legs (although I should note that there's a lot of good in how the rest of that donkey was constructed). While we're on the topic of legs, I did note that you tend to focus those additional masses in a more limited fashion, placing them where you specifically want to alter the silhouette of the structure. I'd recommend that you apply these more widely, considering the "internal" forms that exist between those that impact the silhouette, as this helps us to figure out how everything fits together. Construction is basically just a big puzzle, and the more we can get pieces to fit together, the more solid and grounded the end result will be. You can see what I mean here on another student's work.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction - although this is not really a correction, more just me covering one of the weaker areas of the lesson. 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.

To be fair, I honestly see a lot of elements of this approach in many of your constructions - not all, but enough to suggest that you're developing a good sense for it. Just be sure to push yourself to follow it as directly as you can, as it'll lean into the nature of what we're doing here as an exercise, to further develop our understanding of 3D space and the relationships between the forms.

Now, there are definitely points that you will want to work on, but I'm pleased with your progress and feel that I've given you enough information for you to work with on your own. Just be sure to revisit this feedback now and then - don't read it once and leave it forever, as you will forget.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.