Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along fairly well - you're doing a good job of establishing how these forms interact with one another under the press of gravity, causing them to slump and sag over one another. The first page is definitely the stronger of the two in this regard - the second page is still coming along well, although that top-left sausage having empty space between it and the sausages underneath it does serve to undermine the illusion of gravity here. Some of your cast shadows are also a little off - for example, right under that gap beneath the top-left sausage on the second page (in this specific area), you've got a cast shadow that implies the presence of some kind of a protrusion on the top form that simply isn't there. Always consider the way in which your cast shadow shapes are being designed, and the relationship they define between the form casting the shadow, and the surface receiving it.

Moving onto your animal constructions, as a whole your work here is coming along well. There are a few things I want to call out to keep you on the right track - both in terms of applying these drawings as exercises and getting the most out of them (in terms of developing our spatial reasoning skills), as well as in terms of how we leverage the tools at our disposal throughout this course. Before we get to that though, I do want to call out that you are as a whole doing a great job of considering the way in which each individual component of your construction exists in 3D space, and how they all fit together to build up to greater levels of complexity.

The first issue I wanted to call out really is more of a superficial one, but it does to varying degrees get in the way - both in terms of taking effort from you as you draw which could be focused on other components of the exercise, as well as in making certain aspects of your drawings a little harder to parse visually while doing this critique. To put it simply, you're getting rather overzealous with your brush pen. It's completely normal for students to get very excited about this lesson, since animals are naturally a blast to draw, and some students get too preoccupied with decorating their drawings and ensuring that the end result comes out as something impressive and beautiful. I really do have to reiterate however, that the drawings we're doing in this course are just exercises.

While you are allowed to use a brush pen or a thicker pen, it's only to fill in the cast shadow shapes (which ideally would already have been drawn and designed with the standard 0.5mm pen used for the rest of the constructions). You should not be employing it in the addition of line weight (which very quickly causes the line weight to get very thick and obvious - line weight itself should always be kept very subtle, like a whisper to the viewer's subconscious rather than a loud shout. Throughout your drawings, I can see you both painting on textural cast shadows (rather than designing their shapes first, then filling them in), as well as taking line weight much too far in its thickness.

Again - these are superficial issues, but it is important to always remember what we're pursuing here. Every drawing is just a three dimensional spatial puzzle, and in solving it, your brain is gradually being rewired to better understand how to think in 3D space, even as you draw marks on a flat page.

Now with that out of the way, let's look at the other issues I wanted to call out:

• As a whole I feel your use of additional masses is very much progressing in the right direction here. The manner in which you're adding them to your construction shows that you're thinking pretty hard on how they wrap around the existing structure. There is still room for improvement on this in some areas - for example, here on this wolf you included an inward curve along the outer/upper side of that back mass. Inward curves, as explained here are a form of complexity that occur in response to contact with another structure. If there's no such structure to apply pressure there, then always stick to simpler, outer curves. If you need a specific kind of arrangement of structure, then you may be able to achieve it by layering a few forms together, rather than trying to achieve that inward curve with a single mass.

• I also had a few other observations using that same wolf, as shown here. Defining the big shoulder mass (it's not always easy to spot, but if you look closely with any quadrupedal animal you can see signs of larger muscles in this area that help the animal walk and run) can give us something concrete for other masses to wrap around and "grip". The more we can treat these constructions as 3D puzzles, with pieces wedging up against one another, the more grounded each element will feel. I can see you trying to do something similar with the mass near the wolf's hip, although it was a little imprecise.

• On that same redlined image, I pointed out an area where you resorted to shortcuts, using some flat/partial shapes to extend things out rather than continuing to build up with complete, 3D masses. When the areas of our drawings start to get smaller and tighter, we can feel more inclined to take quick shortcuts like this - instead, it's better to just give each drawing more room on the page, even if that means packing fewer drawings in at a time.

• And of course, don't forget that the sausage method requires you to reinforce the joint between sausage segments with a contour line, to help define the relationship in 3D space between the segments.

• The last thing I wanted to quickly say isn't actually a criticism - I can see in some places where you're building up your animals' eyelids as their own separate masses (like the goat on the bottom left of this page). This is a particularly effective approach as far as the spatial exercise goes, and it's something I've been recommending to students more recently (as shown here in this diagram).

So! As a whole, your work is definitely coming along quite well - you just need to hold yourself back from shifting to "decorating mode". In some cases it has minor superficial issues that hinder my ability to analyze your underlying structure, but in other cases - like this pallas cats it causes more significant issues where it's unclear whether the filled black shapes are cast shadows, form shading, or line weight. For the drawings we do in this course, filled black shapes should be reserved for cast shadows only - with form shading being left out (as explained here), and line weight being kept as subtle as possible, focusing it on clarifying specific overlaps between forms (as shown in this example of two overlapping leaves). These of course are all rules we follow in this course, but it is in large part because of how our limited toolset (working strictly in black and white) works best.

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