Starting with your organic intersections, you've handled this quite well, both in establishing how these forms slump and sag over one another to create a believable pile subject to the forces of gravity, as well as with drawing the shadows being cast, and how they wrap around the surfaces upon which they fall. Nice work overall, and demonstrates a well developing understanding of the 3D relationships between these structures.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, there's definitely solid progress being made here, but I do have a number of points of advice that I can offer to help improve your use of the various techniques, and ultimately get more out of the exercises themselves. Among these are points I have raised in previous feedback that you have received, which does suggest that you may need to review those previous critiques more frequently, and take more care in absorbing their contents.

The first thing I want to talk about isn't actually a huge deal, but it is still of some importance and should influence how you approach your drawings. It's about line weight. I noticed that there are a number of drawings where you appear to go back over long stretches of linework - sometimes jumping from one form's silhouette to another's - to thicken your lines and generally reinforce them, adding thickness. I want to discourage you from applying line weight this broadly, for two main reasons. Firstly, it results in us tracing back over lines - tracing being a specific methodology that focuses entirely on how those lines sit on the flat page, following it as closely as we can, rather than focusing on the intent of that given stroke (to represent an edge moving through 3D space), which is better represented with a confident stroke. As a result, the line weight can tend to be more hesitant, and can cause the student to actually avoid using the ghosting method (which they definitely should still be employing).

We can avoid this by ensuring that line weight, as with every tool we use, is put to a specific task, with a specific responsibility. I find that it's usually best to focus line weight on clarifying how different forms overlap one another, in the specific, localized areas where those overlaps occur, as shown here. This makes our use of line weight more limited, and more purposeful.

The second point is about the fact that you've got line weight jumping from one form to another. Our constructions are made up of many different forms, but when we have line weight jump from one form's silhouette to another's, we often end up with little "bridges" that are created by that jump. As shown here, it can result in a little 2D shape being enclosed between the line weight stroke and the different forms, which as discussed back in my critique of your Lesson 4 work, alters the silhouettes of those forms and flattens them out.

As a side note, in looking more closely at that actual drawing, I noticed that there appears to be a lot of underlying, very faint marks that look like they were done in pencil, perhaps to plan out your construction. I expect that you understand that this was not a mistake - it was an intentional deviation from the instructions and principles of the course. I did not see you doing this anywhere else, so I'm going to leave it be, but this is not something I generally look kindly upon.

To that point however, while you do not appear to use pencil underdrawings or sketches in later drawings, you do have varying degrees to which you hold to the principles of markmaking from Lesson 1. You tend to get much more haphazard and chicken scratchy, building up parts of your drawings with individual strokes, often with gaps between them, rather than executing each mark with care and purpose. We can see examples of this here, as well as in the lines you drew to establish the boxy base upon which this deer is laying. You're not using the ghosting method there at all.

Continuing forward - and on the topic of Lesson 4's "don't alter the silhouettes of your forms" point, I did see this coming up in some spots in your constructions. It wasn't all over the place, but we can see a couple such spots in your cow's head here.

That said, you are making a concerted effort to work a great deal with additional masses, although I do have some advice to push this further.

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.

You can see this in action here on one of your cows. There are a few things in particular to note here:

• Each individual mass is small, accomplishing just one specific task. When you try to do too much with one mass, it's going to become way too complex, and end up feeling flat as a result. Instead, build up to that complexity by piling multiple forms on top of one another.

• Note how where my masses overlap, they overlap in 3D space. Not just as flat shapes on the page. So they consider how they're supposed to wrap around the existing structures.

• Take advantage of opportunities where you can wedge your masses together - for example, how we block in the hip and shoulder masses with simple ball forms, and then bring the mass above the shoulder further down in order to press against it. This manner of "grounding" forms against one another creates a more solid, more complete "puzzle" where all the pieces fit together, making the whole result feel more solid.

• This isn't present in the marks I made, but it's also something to consider - try to avoid putting yourself in a situation where you need to place an additional mass along the underbelly, unless it's absolutely necessary. Sometimes, it is - but often we can avoid it by sagging the initial torso sausage, as explained here in the lesson notes. This saves us from having to construct an additional mass that hangs upside down (working against gravity), or at least reduces how much we have to do it.

When it comes to thinking about the design of your addiitonal masses' silhouettes, you actually do a good job of this in some cases. For example, the design of the mass on this one's torso is pretty good. It'd be better if it were pressing up against the hip mass, but it wraps around the torso sausage well.

Moving on, another point I noticed is that you appear to have made no use, or at least minimal use, of the sausage method when constructing your animals' legs. In my feedback for your Lesson 4 work, I actually commended you for making consistent use of the sausage method when constructing your animals' legs, and then pushed you to build further upon it through the use of additional masses. I also provided you a variety of diagrams to that point, but you don't appear to have employed them at all here. I can see you attempting to use the sausage method here (though you are having some difficulty in sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages at times, you do appear to be attempting to do so), but elsewhere you tend to draw your legs in entirely arbitrary ways.

I recommend you review the feedback I gave you previously, although I'll add this example to it. Some students focus too much on just adding additional masses on their legs where they'll impact the silhouettes, but as shown here, it's important to consider the pieces that fit in between as well, because that's what makes them all feel more grounded and solid (similarly to blocking in the hip/shoulder masses and having our other additional masses press against them).

Since we're talking about legs, let's take a quick moment to look at feet. Sometimes you approach these in a more structured fashion, considering how you're building up forms (like here), and in other cases you jump over steps of construction or approach them in a much looser fashion, like here.

It helps a fair bit to construct our animals' feet using "boxy" forms - that is, forms where the silhouette features sharp corners in specific places to help imply the presence of internal edges, internal separation between distinct faces/planes. The fact that we can do this without adding additional lines inside the feet (which are often quite small, and thus can get cluttered quickly) can help keep things a little cleaner, and can then allow us to build upon them with further such boxy forms to construct the toes or whatever else is necessary. Here's a demonstration of what I mean on another student's work.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is 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.

As a whole, your work has clear pockets of progress, where you're thinking about how the things you're building up exist in 3D space. But you are struggling a great deal with:

• Keeping points I've raised previously in mind - avoiding infringing on your existing forms' silhouettes, using the sausage method for your leg constructions, and building upon them with additional forms, etc.

• Holding to the principles of markmaking, using the ghosting method, and generally being conscientious with your linework

In general, I really just get the impression that you're not giving yourself nearly enough time here. This leads me to one thought - your reference photos come largely from some sort of a museum (which is actually quite neat), but it's got me thinking - did you work from life while at the museum, or did you take a bunch of photos, then work from them at home?

This is a concern for two reasons:

• These exercises are demanding, in terms of how much time they require from you. It's entirely normal for students to spread the work of a single construction across multiple days - but working on them within the constraints of physically being at a museum would definitely push you to work faster, to not be able to refer as easily back to previous feedback or look at demos/diagrams of how certain things are solved, and so on.

• Also, working on-site is a pretty big challenge in terms of ergonomics and comfort, and can influence how we approach our work.

If that's the case, then it does explain a lot of the issues I noted above - though each of these issues can still arise even when working from photos in the comfort of our own homes, if we're choosing not to give ourselves enough time.

I'm going to assign some revisions below to allow you to address the points I've raised here. I've mentioned quite a bit, and this critique is fairly dense - so you should expect to have to go through it several times over a span of days, both before and as you work through the revisions, in order for it to really settle in your mind. When doing so, I want you to hold to a couple things:

• Refrain from working on more than one construction on a given day. You will likely run into constructions that will require more time than you can offer them in a single day, so it's perfectly fine (and encouraged) to spread that work across multiple days. But, if you've touched one drawing in a given day, even to put the finishing touches down, you should not start the next one on that same day.

• Note down on each construction the dates you worked on it, and the rough estimate of how long each session lasted.