I can certainly understand your anxiety, but I think it would probably be a good idea for you to give this updated video from Lesson 0 a watch. It explains why it's best not to include additional self-critique/analysis/etc, as well as why you're absolutely right to submit now, rather than attempting to redo it on your own.

Alrighty! Jumping right into the organic intersections, you're doing an excellent job there both in establishing a believable sense of gravity and stability in the pile, and in the projection of your cast shadows from the forms casting them onto the surfaces receiving them.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I do indeed have a number of points to call out that should help you get back on track. They're going to fall into the following categories:

• How you're arranging your constructions on the page

• Core construction

• Use of additional masses

• Leg construction

• Head construction

Now, jumping right in with how you're arranging your constructions on the page, you are unfortunately doing yourself something of a disservice in this regard, and making things harder than they need to be. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

As for the matters relating to core construction, just a couple points here:

• Firstly, remember that as discussed here in the notes, rather than building a straight cigar shape for your torso sausage and then attaching an additional mass to the underside to create that belly sag, it's best to simply sag the sausage in the first place in order to account for the belly, whether completely or partially. It's simply a matter of avoiding situations where we're adding additional masses against gravity. That is certainly something we sometimes need to do, but sagging the initial sausage first and accounting for the additional mass that needs to be built up along the back/spine is going to put you in a much stronger position.

• Secondly, you're sometimes neglecting to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen. It's not all the time - I see it more frequently in your horses, but still something to keep in mind.

• I can also see some cases where your ribcage ellipses are either drawn rather skinny, or simply not long enough, as with these wolves, especially the bottom two. As mentioned here, your ribcage occupies a full half of the torso length.

Moving onto your use of additional masses, my biggest concern here is the use of arbitrary sharp corners throughout their silhouette designs. Ultimately the specific way in which we design our silhouettes is what sells the illusion that each new addition is a complete, solid, three dimensional element.

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.

Note that as sharp corners are indeed a form of complexity, they can only occur in response to contact with a defined structure - meaning, something else you've already drawn in the construction, not something you may be holding loosely in your mind. Here you can see this in action on one of your horses.

As to your leg construction, it seems you've forgotten a fair bit from the previous lesson. It's extremely important that you keep in mind that when you spend a long time away from the material, you are going to forget things - and so, you should definitely be making a point of reading back through past feedback you'd received to refresh your memory.

The sausage method has three main elements to it, all of which are outlined here on this diagram from Lesson 4:

• Each segment should adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages - meaning two circularly shaped ends, equal in size, connected by a tube of consistent width. You frequently employ ellipses instead, which as noted in the bottom left of the diagram, are not sausages. I also noticed that in some cases you actually drew around the shapes twice. This would be excellent if the intent was to draw ellipses, because it leans into our arms' natural desire to draw ellipsoid shapes - but of course here, that is not what we need.

• The segments need to overlap a healthy amount, allowing for the sense that the forms interpenetrate one another.

• The joint between the segments must be defined by a contour line, so as to take those flat shapes and define the relationship between them in 3D space, as three dimensional forms.

So, I think you may want to review my last critiques, where I addressed how you're approaching your leg constructions. I shared a number of diagrams that also went over how to build up additional masses upon those structures.

Lastly, 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 indeed going to ask for a full redo - simply because there are enough things from the material and past critiques that you have had issues in addressing, and so what I'm going to be looking for in terms of growth is going to be spread out across the board. This is admittedly a unique situation, because I can see quite clearly from your work that you have every capacity to knock this out of the park - it's really just a combination of missing points from the lesson material and from my past critiques, as well as forgetting important things from earlier lessons. So, I will need to give you a full critique next time.

So! When you're finished your next round of this work, be sure to submit it as a new submission (which will cost you 2 credits), and mention that it's your second go at it so I can adjust my critique accordingly.