Before we get to looking at your work, I did want to quickly point out that while it's not at all abnormal for students to feel like they need to complete Drawabox before moving onto other things, and that those feelings are certainly valid, they do not reflect the reality of learning drawing. There's two aspects of this to drill down to a little further:

• Firstly, even with Drawabox we encourage students to engage in more advanced concepts and courses if they're interested in them, right from the beginning. Yeah, it's certainly reasonable to expect that you're not going to get as much out of them if the fundamentals they leverage aren't up to a given standard, but in applying those fundamentals as best you can while also learning them from Drawabox, it creates a feedback loop that increases overall efficiency and helps you learn in a more well-rounded fashion. The important part is that we not go in with hard expectations of what we will get out of those courses, other than the fact that they'll broaden our horizons and help us avoid getting too hyper-focused on any one skill, and lose focus on what it is we actually want to produce.

• Secondly, Drawabox is one approach. I've probably mentioned this before, so I may be sounding like a broken record, but Drawabox is not the be-all end-all of art education, nor of learning the fundamentals. It is one strategy of many. There are situations where you run into a roadblock and you have no choice but to bash your head against it until it breaks apart if you want to reach the other side. But there are also plenty of cases where it makes more sense to find another route that is better suited to you and what you're struggling with. One area that I've called out before is observation, and that honestly isn't something Drawabox really addresses in any meaningful way. We leverage observation, and because we aren't asking students to replicate their references in full detail, but rather use them as a source of information to help understand how forms sit together in space we don't need observational skills to be that well developed - but in a case where a student's observational skills require more assistance, our course isn't designed in a manner that handles that super well. Conversely, many other drawing courses focus on observation first and foremost. That is definitely something that could help.

It is often worth taking a step back and considering where the ideas we hold to come from, as we'll often find that we're prone to inserting ideas of our own, without them being based on fact or coming from reliable sources.

Anyway, let's take a look at some of your work.

Looking at this squirrel construction, what jumped out at me pretty quickly was the big difference between the ears in the reference, and those in your construction. Looking at the earlier squirrel construction, where it was sitting, its reference did cause the ears to appear more ellipsoid and rounded from that angle, so it makes me wonder if you had observed it in the previous one, and then opted to work more from memory than direct observation - that's just a theory though. Either way, observing the reference you're working with at the given moment is an area where you are not allocating enough time.

Another point that drawing helps to illustrate is that there are two key points about your approach that are hindering you:

• The first is that you tend to stop your construction pretty early, and tend to rely on those earlier steps to accomplish more than they strictly need to. For example, with the squirrel's head, you started that cranial ball very large, and so everything felt kind of inflated. I often find that when we start with an oversized cranial ball, it quickly throws things off and can make us feel lost. Erring on the side of smaller rather than larger is generally preferable if you're not confident that you're able to get the proportions right, because you can always build upon a smaller form with additional masses. It is on the other hand difficult to work our way back, given the specific limitations to the constructional drawing approach we're using to develop our spatial reasoning skills here.

• There are still a ton of steps you're skipping, or applying differently from what was called out to you - not defining the forehead area, drawing eye sockets with six sides rather than five (I noticed that in your notes you were using screenshots from the tiger demo, but didn't have shots of the head construction demo we frequently reference, and is also referenced in the tiger demo itself as being more up to date. The rhino head demo DIO shared would also be useful).

Using your reference, I put together this demonstration as to how I would tackle it. I want you to go through it, and compare it back not to the quality or result of what you achieved, but the actual steps you employed. Every construction is going to be its own little puzzle to solve - we start from the big structures that we observe, and gradually shift focus to smaller elements, while mixing in logical deduction (like where in step 9 I identified a bulge along the silhouette of the face, then added the same form under the other eye despite it not being as clearly visible in the reference, since I can trust in the squirrel being fairly symmetrical).

Continuing on, I want to take a moment to talk about this horse construction which, while it does have similar issues to those I've called out already, as a whole I think it is a vastly more successful construction as a whole, for a number of reasons:

• Your markmaking in general is way more confident and consistent, resulting in really good sausages to lay down the basis of your leg structures.

• The positioning of the back hooves creates a strong illusion of it standing on a three dimensional ground plane. The front hooves achieve this as well, though to a slightly less clear extent.

• While the curves you use to define the joints between those sausages (I'm looking specifically at the knee) do tend to be a little too broad in their curvature (if we were to draw the complete ellipse, I basically mean that their degree is too wide to convey the angle at which that cross-section would be set, which is more parallel to the ground), you've generally placed them well and avoided them spilling outside of the area where the two sausages overlap.

Looking back at my previous round of feedback, I had given you a list of points to keep in mind - let's take another look at that list and see if the issues are absent from this new round, or if they are still present to some degree:

When drawing your additional masses, don't draw them with just one stroke.

Honestly there aren't a ton of places where you actually use additional masses - and more importantly, there are definitely places where you should be using additional masses, but don't, like with this squirrel's back. That said, I did see a couple of additional masses on your alligator, and it does seem that you are still attempting to draw them in one stroke, as shown here.

Keep working not to draw what you think is there - always look back at your reference and confirm that you are at least pulling from an accurate impression of the animal you're drawing

Based on the ear issue with the squirrel (which is similar to the example I provided previously, which related to the ear on one of your wolf constructions), this still appears to be an issue that is present.

Head construction follows a specific process when approached in this course, and it is critical that you follow it in its entirety, rather than in bits and pieces.

I'd say you're still applying it in bits and pieces - skipping the forehead, six sided eye sockets instead of five, and so forth.

Draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, every time.

In many cases you are drawing through your ellipses properly. There are some cases where you draw through them one and a half times instead of two full times though, so be sure to be attentive - it's easy to think we're drawing through our ellipses two full times, and as a result not pay attention to the actions we're actually taking.

Do not draw through your sausages, as this will shift them more towards being ellipses rather than sausages.

This one's mixed - you did a great job on the horse, although with the squirrel I can see that you are still frequently drawing through your sausages more than once.

Use the foot construction demo that was provided.

By and large it does not really seem like you're employing the foot construction demo approach. I can see that you're often blocking in the feet with a box-like form, but you usually neglect to add the toes onto that structure. When you do add toes, like in some of the squirrel's feet, it tends to be as flat shapes rather than actually establishing how those forms relate to one another in 3D space, as shown in the demo.

Lastly, let's talk about your notes. The thing about note taking that I find to be especially useful is the actual act of taking the information you're given and reframing it in your own words. Screenshotting and saving bits and pieces can be somewhat helpful in terms of having access to those references on the side so you don't have to go digging through them, but it doesn't necessarily help in you remembering that those demonstrations exist - which could perhaps be why despite having those demonstrations on hand, there were still things you skipped or missed in your approach that were shown in your notes.

While this is considerably more time consuming, what you might try is the following:

• Go over the last handful of rounds of feedback you've received (going back to DIO's initial critique for this round and everything after that should suffice), then summarize for yourself every issue that is addressed, while also recording the links to the diagrams associated with them. This is to basically build yourself a little catalogue of the issues that come up, and associated information/explanations provided to try and correct them. Rephrase those explanations in your own words.

• Every time you start an animal construction study, go over those notes. Pick out and rewrite in a new, smaller set of notes, anything that will specifically pertain to the animal you're setting out to draw for the study. Best to still keep this in categories, like "general block in", "head construction", "leg construction", and so forth - the goal is for you to be able to get that information easily when you need it.

• As you progress through the construction, refer to those various categories, and take your time in going through the demonstrations. When a demonstration gives you something you can follow more directly, do so. Don't try to hold it in your mind in a more ephemeral fashion, hoping you'll be able to apply it subconsciously - everything we're doing throughout this course demands that every choice be a conscious one, as the goal is to rewire what our brain considers normal and natural ways of doing things, so as to push those behaviours down into our subconscious. Right now, your subconscious tendencies are to oversimplify, to focus on your drawing rather than your reference, and to work from memory.

It also would not hurt to actually do your own attempts at following along with the demonstrations provided, to get more direct practice in applying them. I'm not sure how much of what I've suggested here repeats what I suggested previously, but I'm under the assumption that you made a concerted effort to apply what I had said there.

Anyway, that's it for this round of review. Feel free to do another 5 animal constructions, and submit them when you're done, and I'll give you another round of feedback. Of course, do your best to apply what I've stated here, and try and reflect on why the issues that are called out keep coming up - consider what aspect of your approach may be responsible for lapses in memory, or what may be hindering you from applying the information/demonstrations you need for a given problem when it comes up.