Starting with your organic intersections, nice work! You're doing a great job of establishing how these forms interact with one another, how they slump and sag and generally behave under the force of gravity, while maintaining each one's sense of solidity and volume.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, as a whole you are doing well, and how you're building up your structures through the addition of solid, enclosed structures. That said, there are issues that I want to call out. In some cases, they're simply to keep you on the right track and to ensure that you're always getting as much as you can out of these exercises, and in others they are key concerns that we've discussed in the past, that you need to be more mindful of.

First and foremost, it does help to reiterate what these drawings we're doing throughout this lesson, and throughout the constructional section of this course, are really meant to be. As I mentioned already, they're all exercises. The reference image gives us a direction in which to head, and information with which to work, and we generally start with a fairly similar collection of simple forms (a ball for the cranium, ribcage, pelvis, and so on). From there, we're continually adding new structures on top of what's already there, informed by the reference image, and building up towards the direction defined by the reference. At each step, our focus is on making sure the new thing we're adding feels solid and three dimensional, and that its relationship with the existing structure is clearly established. This means that each drawing is really like a 3D puzzle, where our brain is forced to think about these spatial relationships at every step.

To that point, it can be easy to stray from this - especially when getting into the smaller elements of a construction, where we're more likely to put marks down quickly and more haphazardly than our larger structures. It's always important to give each form we're defining as much time as it requires to establish them all as solid, enclosed structures. We also do have to make sure that we do not make choices that can risk undermining the solidity of forms we've already constructed.

This is something, along with a number of other points, that I address on this page of your field mice. I tried to number/colour code it to help it from getting too confusing:

• 1) For the most part you've been pretty good about not modifying the silhouettes of existing forms, but with ellipses, since they can sometimes end up a little loose when we draw through them, it's easy to end up with lines existing outside of your intended form's silhouette. As such, always treat the outermost perimeter of that ellipse as though it defines the edge of your form's silhouette, just so everything else is neatly contained within it.

• 2) One issue with the lesson in its current state pertains to head construction - there's just a lot of different demos flying around, and they all kind of differ in how head construction is approached. That's largely because there's no "right" approach, but rather correct principles that an approach may or may not adhere to. There are however approaches that are more effective for learning, and the most recent one I've put up, the head construction demo from the informal demos page is currently the best we've got. It lays out the process in a very specific manner, and while this specific approach may not appear to match perfectly with every animal's head structure, we can generally push and pull it, while adhering to its core principles, to apply to a wide variety of heads. For example, here is the same approach applied to a particularly banana headed rhinoceros. Try your best to apply these principles to all of your animal head constructions, so that you're tackling the problem with a more consistent method.

• 3) When drawing your animals' feet, it's not uncommon for students to get a little sloppy in adding the toes, because they seem like afterthoughts. Alternatively, it can be much more effective to first focus on establishing the core structure of the foot as a "boxy" form (boxy referring specifically to the presence of clearly defined corners which help to imply the presence of distinct planes - a front plane, a side plane, a top plane, etc), then adding yet more boxy forms for each of the toes. Don't rush ahead and try to accomplish too much at once. Here's another example on another student's work.

• 4) That belly mass on the lower mouse is especially sloppy - it's important that you design each additional mass as intentionally as possible, ensuring that the silhouette clearly establishes how the form relates to the existing structure. 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.

• 5) I kind of alluded to this already, but you do have a tendency when getting into the smaller sections of your drawings, to leave gaps and simply not define those forms properly. Take your time, giving each mark as much as it requires, and establish every new form as a complete, enclosed structure, so that it has a chance of being interpreted as something three dimensional. As soon as a silhouette has a gap, its solidity is going to start to be undermined.

• 6) Lastly, and similarly to the previous point, you're rather sloppy when it comes to adding fur. It's not that your approach is wrong - you're adding enough variation not to go on auto-pilot, but you're simply trying to get through it way too quickly. As shown here, each tuft of fur should be intentionally designed. This will indeed take a fair bit of time. For the purposes of this course, you can choose not to include it at all, but if you decide that you're going to add fur, you need to be willing to go all the way with it.

While that covers the majority of my concerns, there are a few others I wanted to quickly touch upon:

• 1) on this page - do not allow a single additional mass to do too much. Break them up into separate parts, each one becoming part of the "existing structure" after it's been added, so any others would then go on to wrap around it. Keep each one as simple as possible, with their complexity being completely focused only on establishing how they wrap around the existing structure.

• 2) on that same page - you're already doing this to a point, but it could be pushed farther. Find opportunities to bring those additional masses down so they actually find something to press against - like the hip and shoulder masses, where quadrupeds usually have a concentration of muscle mass that allows them to walk and run around. Do not attempt to do this with your ribcage and pelvic masses however, as they do not actually have any structure that protrudes beyond the torso sausage.

• 3) on that same page - any kind of detail that shows up along the silhouette, be it fur or even line weight must be applied to the given form, not the entire structure. Meaning, you should not have fur jump freely from one structure to another. It must instead cling along the silhouette of the existing forms. This is so we can avoid accidentally creating flat shapes that bridge from one form to another, of which you have quite a few. I also noticed on the lower cat especially that you had a tendency to work more in 2D than you do in other drawings across this lesson.

• Make sure you use the sausage method for all of your leg structures as discussed in my critique of your lesson 4 work. This is actually a pretty big issue, as you seem to be leaving it out of a lot of your drawings, if not the vast majority of them.

• When adding additional masses to anything, it's important that you maintain specific control over the silhouette design. We've talked about this above, but I wanted to specifically address the tendency on this camel's legs to add masses with somewhat more arbitrary corners to them. Corners and inward curves should only occur in response to direct contact with another structure - with that other structure pressing against the form, or vice-versa. It also helps to not only focus on the masses that'll make a prominent show along the structure's silhouette. consider internal forms as well, so that you have more structure to press up against. Again - I'm noticing here that you're using flat shapes in places as well.

As I have indeed pointed out quite a few issues of concern, I do want to make sure that you are able to apply them and demonstrate your understanding of them. So, you'll find some revisions assigned below.