Starting with your organic intersections, these are for the most part looking pretty good, save for a couple things to keep in mind:

• When drawing your cast shadows, remember that you should be following a single consistent light source. You don't want your shadows to be cast both to the left and the right, so being more aware of where that light is coming from will help you keep everything in order.

• Always try to keep your sausage forms "full" - like a filled water balloon, you want to avoid situations where the silhouette's own shape feels like it's getting limp or deflated. For example, in this specific crop that sausage form on top is taking on a lot of additional complexity in its silhouette that undermines its solidity. Keep those sausages as simple as you can, focusing only on how the whole form bends to wrap around the forms beneath it.

Moving onto your birds, you're off to a good start with these animal constructions. While there's plenty of room for improvement here (which is totally understandable being that it's the start of the homework), you're showing that you're working through a lot of the right steps and tackling problems in appropriate manners. Some of the main issues I would address here however are as follows:

• Remember that construction is all about building up from simple to complex. In this bird, you opted to draw each individual feather rather than blocking in the entire wing first. Also, when drawing those feathers, you cut them off where they were overlapped by their neighbours. If you were to be building them up as the main constructional structure of the wings (which would be incorrect, but that's the direction you took), it would be additionally important for you to draw each such structure in its entirety, to better understand how they each sit in space, and how they relate to one another within that space. This is very much like the leaves and flower petals in lesson 3, each of which we draw in their entirety.

• With this bird's tail, it's very clear that you jumped into a silhouette that was way more complex than you were able to support. Stepping back to the leaves exercise in Lesson 3 once again, you define the "simple" silhouette, then build that kind of complexity onto it. You don't jump straight into a level of complexity that cannot be supported by the structure that is present.

Continuing on, there are a couple of good things that really stand out:

• You're definitely thinking hard about how to approach your head constructions, and from what I can see, you're trying to implement the kind of structure I explain in this informal demo. I can see you trying to build out the head by keeping those various facial elements snugly wedged up against one another. It can be improved and refined, as shown here, specifically in matching the kinds of shapes/silhouettes I use in that informal demo more closely, but as a whole you're very much moving in the right direction here.

• You are definitely making a noticeable effort to employ the sausage method for constructing your animals' legs, with some cases coming out quite well. This is however an area where you seem to drift further away from following the technique as strictly as you could, the further into the homework you get. For example, in the fennec fox you're taking much more care in building a sausage structure, then wrapping additional masses around it to add bulk where it's needed. Conversely, in this donkey, you're drifting further away from the method (especially on the back legs, where the thigh doesn't follow the characteristics of a simple sausage, but also in the fact that you're not defining the intersection between the various segments with a contour line). It's clear that you are capable of employing this technique effectively, but that sometimes it slips your mind, and perhaps you get a little too caught up in your drawing to remember its specific elements.

• Your use of additional masses, in a lot of ways, is coming along well. I can see that you're clearly thinking about how those masses build upon the existing structure, and how you wrap their silhouettes around those existing forms. You are however somewhat prone to making the parts of the silhouettes that don't make contact with the existing structure a little more arbitrary. For example, if we look at this bison's underbelly, there's a point that gets pushed inward, but with no real reason for it. This kind of unexplained complexity to the silhouette makes the form itself feel more flat, and undermines the solidity of the construction as a whole.

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.

I think you do already understand this to a considerable extent, but to have it presented more formally should help you apply it more strictly to your drawings.

Circling back to your leg constructions, I did notice that in some cases - like the fennec fox - you were very fastidious in adding additional masses to them as complete, enclosed forms. In other drawings however - like your water prowler hybrid - you instead added individual lines to modify the silhouettes of the sausage form after the fact. Here you weren't adding independent, complete forms - you were just adding partial lines to redefine a form that had already been constructed. This is something I did address in my critique of your lesson 4 work (where we talked about not modifying the silhouettes of our forms), but since giving you that critique in October, I have somewhat refined the explanation I give on that point/

Here's the explanation as I give it now to other students - I honestly think giving it to you here is overkill, because you've demonstrated the fact that you do build up your masses correctly in some cases - but I figure it wouldn't hurt to give it to you anyway:

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo.

This is all part of accepting that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for the viewer to believe in that lie.

Now, I've pointed out a number of strengths and some areas that do need work. As a whole I'm feeling pretty good about how you're progressing, but I would like to see just a couple more pages of animal constructions incorporating what I've shared above. You'll find them assigned below.