Starting with your organic intersections, your work here is coming along well, and demonstrating that you're considering how they slump and sag over one another under the shared force of gravity. Your use of cast shadows also demonstrates that you're considering how they wrap around the surfaces upon which they are cast.

Do be sure to draw through all of your ellipses two full times, however, and consider the orientation in space of the cross-sectional slices they're meant to represent, when picking how wide to make their degree. Right now you seem to be drawing very circular ellipses for each one, even when that end is turned more to the side.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, your work here is a bit mixed, although the weakest ones do tend to be towards the beginning, suggesting that you have grown and improved over the set. First I'm going to call out some areas where you were running into issues applying the points from my last critique, and then I'll get into some advice for how to use the concepts from this lesson more effectively, to get as much as you can out of these constructional drawing exercises.

So first, things that were mentioned in my critique of your Lesson 4 work that you may need to be more mindful of:

• As shown here, earlier on you were still fairly prone to altering the silhouettes of your existing forms (or otherwise building up your construction without focusing purely on establishing fully self-enclosed forms). I also noted how the paw skips over the constructional approach altogether, jumping straight into a much more complex state that simply doesn't have the solidity we would otherwise get from starting simple and building up in stages. You do improve upon this over the set, although I tend to see you using the same approach for establishing your animals' lower jaws. Also, as far as complexity goes, your additional masses frequently tend to be much more complex than they should be (resulting in them feeling flatter) - this is something we'll discuss a little further down.

• I can see that you're making an effort to stick to the sausage method when constructing your animals' legs, but there is still a ways to go when it comes to doing this consistently. You very frequently draw ellipses instead of sausages, and there are also plenty of places where you forget to define the joint between those segments with contour lines. It's really important that you approach every mark you put down with full awareness of exactly what it is you're trying to achieve with it, and that you keep the entirety of whatever approach/technique/tool you're trying to use in mind. I recommend you review the sausage method diagram again.

Now, the first major point of advice I want to provide is on the topic of additional masses, and how exactly we go about approaching them. It all comes down to the manner in which we design their silhouettes, in order to capture the impression that this piece we're adding wraps around the existing structure, reinforcing and respecting its solidity, while also benefitting from that itself, to make itself appear more solid. 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.

Here's this concept at work. Note that each mass is designed more specifically (each inward curve, outward curve, sharp corner and soft corner are all placed specifically, and I do not draw each mass in a single stroke, but rather stop at the points where the trajectory dramatically changes as per Lesson 1's principles of markmaking). I did notice a tendency for you to lean harder on the simpler outward curves, which resulted in masses that were at times quite blobby (like on the moose's backside). These don't capture a sense of how the mass wraps around the existing structure, but rather read more as stickers pasted on top of the drawing itself.

In addition to this, I added some notes calling out other issues with this construction.

Now I had noted that you still tend not to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages on your legs (at least in many cases), but I also noted that you didn't leverage the use of additional masses much to build on top of those basic structures. I had provided diagrams to this effect in my last critique, and I only really saw you leveraging this tool to capture further complexity in those leg structures here and there - usually to capture one-off bumps in the silhouette. Try to think of it more as just another layer of construction. Don't focus only on things that break the silhouette, but rather consider also the pieces that fit in between them - just as noted on your moose where I redrew the additional masses on it, it's important to look for opportunities to define relationships between different structures. That includes considering the masses that may only exist internally within the leg's silhouette, as we see here on another student's work.

Additionally, here are some notes to help you in tackling feet.

Lastly, let's take a moment to discuss 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 going to assign some revisions below to help you demonstrate your understanding of these points. When doing the revisions, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions/reminders:

• Keep in mind that you do not have to complete a given construction in a single sitting. Your only responsibility is to give it as much time you need to do it to the best of your current ability, and if that means spreading it across multiple sittings or days, that's what you need to do.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of each sitting you worked on it, along with a rough estimate of how long was spent in that sitting.

• Only work on one construction in a given day. So if you just put the finishing touches on a construction, you should not move onto the next until the following day. This is to encourage you to push each construction as far as you can (not talking about texture/detail here, but general construction, designing each form, using the ghosting method for each structural mark, and doing whatever it is you need to do your current best), without the urge to jump into the next one.

You'll find your revisions listed below.