10:58 PM, Thursday March 11th 2021
Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing a good job in terms of establishing the relationships between the forms, but there's one thing I want to draw your attention to - it looks like you're drawing your sausages lightly first, then going back over them, reinforcing their silhouettes where nothing else ends up passing on top, to end up with a cleaner end result. I get that you're probably trying to employ line weight here, but that is not a correct use of that particular tool.
Line weight is reserved to clarify specific overlaps between forms in specific localized areas - not to simply reinforce the entire silhouette of an object. We definitely want to avoid this kind of "tracing" back over long lengths of line, because it results in hesitant linework. All line weight should be added with the same kind of confidence we'd have employed with making the original marks - that means using the ghosting method. Focusing it in localized areas (rather than along the full length of existing lines) certainly helps with that.
I wanted to call that issue out here, because it's no doubt present across all your animal drawings - but most easily addressed without being complicated with anything else. Make sure that every single mark you put down is drawn confidently, and that you're not going out of your way to hide marks or keep them light. The goal is not to make pretty, pristine drawings - every single drawing is an exercise in spatial reasoning, and these kinds of steps can detract from that.
Now, going over your animal constructions, it's very clear that you've learned a lot from this lesson, and have shown a good deal of growth. This construction shows at its core all the big things I want to see - you're building up your construction with solid, cohesive forms, and you're thinking about how the silhouette of any new form you add on top has to be shaped in order to "wrap" around the existing structure. You're also not taking any shortcuts by doing things like adding 2D shapes amongst the 3D - that's something I noticed a bit in your birds (like the addition to the back of this bird's neck).
I did however note that when you started to get more detailed (like with these bears) your construction did appear to get weaker - suggesting that you were allowing the expectation of adding detail to distract you. I can even see here on the back of the left bear's rump where you drew a line bridging across from one 3D mass to another, adding a 2D shape as discussed with the bird. Getting sloppy in the face of the enthusiasm of getting into detail is pretty normal, but it is a problem you need to be aware of. Detail and texture isn't important. It doesn't supercede or replace, or accomplish any of the jobs that structure is responsible for, and you definitely shouldn't be drawing that underlying structure more lightly in order to end up with a nicer detailed drawing.
As a side note, you may have noticed that when you drew smaller and restricted the amount of space in which you could work, your drawings tended to be clumsier. When you drew bigger, your brain was given more room to think through spatial problems, and your arm was given more room to engage all the way up to the shoulder. And so, your results came out better.
As a whole, I am pretty happy with your results, but I do want to make sure that this tendency to treat detail as you did, and to sometimes draw more lightly initially, is resolved before we move on ahead. So, I'm going to go ahead and assign just a few additional pages of animal constructions, and we'll move forward from there.
Next Steps:
Please submit 3 additional pages of animal constructions. You are very close, and I'm seeing all the right stuff - I just want to see you continue to apply it consistently, and to avoid the issues I've called out in my critique.