Since I've jumped over to doing all my week's critiques in bulk across two days (Mondays and Thursdays, at least for now), and since it's the beginning of the month where I tend to get a metric shit ton of submissions, needless to say I'm.. swamped. And so I need to say that your submission is a wonderful oasis in a desert of sand. Lesson 5 is always a tough one to critique because students frequently have issues - this is in part due to the inconsistencies in the demonstrations and notes (something I intend to put some of the time I've cleared up by doing critiques in bulk instead of daily towards fixing). Yours however.. is exceptionally well done. And so unless I spend too much time gushing over that fact, it should hopefully be a quick one. I'll do my best to stick to identifying the primary strengths, a couple areas where improvement can be had, and then I'll shuffle you off to your cylinders.

Starting with the organic intersections, they're not really worth talking about - they're spot on, and establish a strong understanding of how these forms can wrap around one another, and establish a sense of stability and gravity through how they slump over each other.

Moving onto the more important stuff, you're focusing most of your effort in the animal drawing precisely where it needs to go - everything all comes down to solid, 3D forms, and reinforcing the illusion that they are three dimensional at every opportunity. You lean hard into defining the relationships between your forms (how the neck connects to the torso, that sort of thing) and it helps reinforce the illusion of solidity throughout each construction. You do this doubly so with your additional masses, making sure they all wrap confidently around one another, and around the underlying structure as a whole, resulting in structures that feel entirely believable. Your red panda, for example, has additional masses that fit so perfectly together along the lower leg/back and throughout its head that it makes me salivate just a little. Looking at the drawing, I can really grasp how it would feel to pick this thing up and manipulate it in my hands, how it occupies space as a whole. It appeals strongly to the basic grasp of spatial reasoning that viewers will have, and as such, feels entirely convincing and real.

You hold to this throughout, although with this wolf I notice a relatively small issue - you've got two forms along the wolf's back, and both are quite large. The one closer especially appears to be trying to accomplish a lot of things. When adding additional forms, always try and focus on the idea that they each represent a very specific muscle group, and each muscle group is largely responsible for accomplishing one major task. As such, try to avoid making them too big, too all-encompassing. Wherever possible, break them into smaller sections, having them overlap one another and pile up with nice pinching along their silhouettes. This will capture a stronger impression of musculature, and will break things down to introduce the kind of complexity you may not have even thought to add, were you just trying to draw the animal directly from observation. It's all a big puzzle - we lay out the forms and find how we're going to build our way to our desired result, and along the way find out things about how it can possibly exist in 3D space that we might not have otherwise been aware of.

Honestly, most of your drawings are simply really well done, so there's not too much else to say. There are areas where things may be a bit.. off - like the shark, for example, but all the steps you took to get to that result are entirely and precisely correct, as far as construction goes, so in the context of this course it is still considered a successful drawing. With more practice you'll be able to bridge the gap and pick up on the little observational quirks that will allow you to capture them even more accurately, but frankly this just looks like a weird shark that is probably swimming around out there, entirely real and believable, and the subject of mild ridicule from all its shark friends.

For your frilled lizard, I do have a thought - I think maybe employing some of the techniques we'd employ when constructing the leaves and flower petals from our plants lesson - specifically building out the flow lines along the ridges (kind of how you did with the fighting fish) would have probably been quite useful.

Lastly, the hybrid is meant to be more of a test than a learning exercise. When students truly grasp how construction works and how forms can be combined, they knock this one out of the park. Needless to say, you certainly have - it means you truly grasp how everything is made up of these simple masses and forms, and that you can transplant them with ease, changing your references from a goal for you to strive for to a tool for you to use when bringing the things in your imagination to life.

Your work here is spectacular, so I will happily mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the fantastic work.