Hello Tatyana, thank you for completing the additional pages as requested.

Starting with the organic intersections, these are much, much better. Your forms feel stable and supported, and you're exploring how the forms slump over one another in 3D space. Good job.

I have a couple of pointers for you to work on when practicing this exercise in future.

• Right now most of your contour curves are sticking to the same degree. Keep in mind that the degree of the contour curves will vary, both due to how the forms turn in space, and due to the degree shift discussed in the ellipses section of lesson 1. If the text and diagram in that section is in any way unclear, I recommend re-watching the ellipses video at the top of the page, where Uncomfortable demonstrates this with some cardboard discs. This album of photos of a slinky also provides an example of the shift in degree on a cylindrical form.

• There is scope for you to push your shadows more boldly, they tend to hug the form that is casting them. Admittedly the sample homework image does have fairly minimal shadows, so what I've done is take one of your pages and project the shadows more boldly here, so you have a visual example. You're keeping your light source consistent, which is good. I recommend experimenting with placing your light source in different positions (whilst still keeping the light source consistent on a given pile) and find that upper left or upper right are good places to start.

Continuing on to your animal constructions, I'm seeing a big improvement with regards to how much of your construction is being built in 3D. I think it is probably best to break this feedback into the following key areas, to make things easier to digest and remember- core construction, additional masses, leg construction, foot construction, head construction.

Core construction

As introduced here the ribcage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso. You tend to draw it as a ball, resulting in it being too short. I've redrawn the ribcage on a few of your constructions in this album. On your polar bear I'd also redrawn the torso sausage, allowing it to sag, as discussed here. You may notice that I'd drawn the ribcage of the deer overlapping the pelvis mass slightly. I'm extrapolating from the position of the legs and the length of the torso here. It looks like you're drawing a three-quarter view for this construction, with the chest nearer the viewer and the rump further back, so I've allowed the ribcage to pass in front of the pelvis. You can find a more extreme example of this in action in the puma demo.

Additional masses

Additional masses are an important tool for fleshing out our constructions beyond the basic balls and sausage forms, to arrive at a construction that is a bit more characteristic of the particular animal we're trying to draw. As with all constructional drawing in this course, whether we're drawing a flamingo or a table lamp, we start with big simple forms and gradually add complexity piece by piece.

I'm pleased to see that you've taken a swing at drawing some additional masses on some of your constructions. 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.

So, with that in mind, here are a couple of examples on your bear, where I've pulled the mass on top of the rump down around the side of the body and pressed it against the top of the thigh. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I've also drawn several additional masses on your deer. Note that while the masses I've added to your deer are based on some guesswork (because I don't have access to your reference), when building your own additional masses these should be based on the various kinds of lumps bumps and complexity you observe in your source material. I wanted to include the examples on the deer to make a point that additional masses don't need to be restricted to the torso, but can (and should) be used on finer elements such as the legs too. Which brings us to the next topic.

Leg construction

It is good to see you sticking more closely to sausage forms for your leg armatures here. There is still a slight tendency for some of them to swell through their midsection, or for the ends to get slightly stretched out and pointy, so keep striving for the properties of simple sausage forms introduced here.

You're inconsistent about applying the contour curves at the joints. You do this correctly sometimes, showing that you do understand how to do this, but you often leave them out, forgetting to apply your understanding to your constructions.

Keep in mind that the sausage forms aren't neccessarily supposed to capture the legs exactly at they are. They allow us to create a base that has both gesture, due to the subtle curve along the length of the sausage forms, and solidity, achieved by keeping the forms simple. Once the sausage chains are in place, it is usually necessary to build onto the legs with additional forms, as shown on your deer above. You can also find an example of building onto leg constructions with additional forms in this ant leg demo I shared with you previously and the donkey construction on the informal demos page.

Foot construction

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between the different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define those edges themselves - to lay down a structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

As for your deer's feet being obscured in your reference, when you run into this sort of situation I encourage you to find a second reference where the feet are visible and use that to help you fill in the missing pieces.

Head construction

In this area your approach appears to vary wildly. There are some constructions, such as your manatee and your panther, where I can see you were clearly working towards applying the method shown in the informal head demo and others such as the penguin, the elephant, and the frog where you were doing something completely different. Your stronger head constructions show that you are capable of building your heads like a 3D puzzle, and I'd love to see you applying the informal head demo more consistently. For an example of how to adapt the method shown in the informal head demo to apply to an elephant I can show you this commentary-free elephant demo.

Now, while you're generally doing much better at building your constructions in 3D, head construction does seem to be one area where you hop back and forth between taking actions in 3D by drawing complete new forms and establishing how they attach to the existing structures in 3D space, and taking actions in 2D by adding partial shapes. For example on your deer it looks like you started constructing a boxy muzzle form but forgot to finish it.

Conclusion

Your constructions are heading in the right direction, though there are a few issues to address before I can mark this lesson as complete. This feedback is pretty dense, and I expect you may need to read through it a few times to absorb it all. As I suggested in your initial critique, it may help if you take notes in your own words to help you remember key points to work on. Once you've done that I would like you to complete another round of constructions, but this time instead of posting them as a reply here I would like you to make a fresh lesson 5 submission, which will cost you 2 additional credits. You do not need to redo the whole lesson, only the pages assigned below, and check off the usual boxes for the submission form.

Please continue to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these pages:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 6 pages of animal constructions, consisting of the following:

• 1 page of bird constructions

• 2 pages of non hooved quadrupeds

• 2 pages of hooved quadrupeds

• 1 page of any animal constructions of your choice

I wanted to step in here briefly to comment on a couple of the points you mentioned. DIO will be around to look at your revisions later - currently we're running our seasonal promptathon event, where TAs are encouraged to take a break from critiquing, but we leave it up to them whether they wish to actually take advantage of that opportunity, or whether they wish to continue their work as normal.

Now, there are two main things that I wanted to comment upon:

• Your expressing to my teaching assistant that you are reconsidering continuing with Drawabox.

• The suggestion that what you're receiving in response to your homework and revision submissions are somehow not "full reviews".

As a student of this course, you have every right to reconsider whether you wish to continue taking advantage of the specific services and resources we provide. That said, should you wish to express that sentiment to us, that should be a concern brought to me directly - either via patreon's messaging system, or via the email address on the bottom of each page of the website. My teaching assistants do their best to provide the service to my specifications, and I've found each and every one to satisfy that requirement at every turn. In other words, if you feel what you are receiving is not worth your money, then the concern is with the services I ask our teaching assistants to provide. Expressing this to the TA is not unlike making a cashier at a store feel personally responsible for the products that store owner has chosen to stock.

Now, while you may not have intended this the way it came out, it very much seems like you're implying that what DIO has given you thus far has not constituted a "full review". I can only assume that this is not what you meant to suggest, as I can't really identify why one might consider the feedback to be lacking. Like every critique we provide, DIO looked through your homework submission, identified the areas in which your work could be done better, and explained it at length, including where appropriate markups of your homework itself, but also leveraging prewritten sections of text and preprepared diagrams where they could be used effectively to explain the issues at hand.

Admittedly looking back on it I noticed that DIO did mention their feedback being "unusually brief" - but honestly at 1500 words for that original critique, there wasn't really anything brief about it. While there may have been other issues they might have gotten into in a more "in depth review" but that is precisely why it's so critical that students do everything they can on their end to apply the feedback they've already received - the more we have to repeat the same issues later on, the less we're able to help you move forwards.

Going beyond that, our critiques aren't just limited to identifying areas where students specifically struggled with the instructions - but they also allow us to provide additional information has not yet been integrated into the lesson material. Over the course of providing feedback for years, we've identified ways in which the lesson material can be adjusted to convey that information more effectively, and are steadily working through an overhaul of the lesson material's video content so as to ensure these concepts are conveyed as effectively as possible. As this overhaul takes a great deal of time however, and as we continually push against the continuous flow of homework submissions, we rely on providing that information to students so that they are armed with the information they need going forward to better interpret the later content that may in some ways be out of date (in the sense of not necessarily always demonstrating the tools, techniques, and restrictions that we've pushed harder in more recent updates of the content).

Our TAs are tasked with providing all of that information, while also prioritizing the efficiency of their work. Our core goal is to do everything we can to provide reliable feedback at as cheap a price point as possible - and so in order to do that we charge students a fraction of what we actually pay our teaching assistants for the same work (for example, currently DIO is being paid $20USD for the feedback that is costing you $10USD). That is why efficiency is so critical - ensuring that our TAs can leverage prewritten explanations and diagrams where appropriate, and putting the onus on the student to take as much care as they can to apply the instructions from the lesson, as well as the concepts shared in prior feedback, so that issues do not need to be called out repeatedly.

Of course, efficiency only allows us to reduce our costs so much, while paying our TAs fairly - the rest is made up by those students who allow their credits to expire, something you've done quite a bit, having let something like 80 credits expire over the last four and a half years.

In the interest of being completely transparent, it's on that basis that I actually told DIO that while in most cases repeatedly missing instructions or having extensive difficulty in applying things that have been called out several times already (which are more often the result of language barriers or other learning issues - I don't believe that to be the case in yours), we often hit the limit on how much we're able to help, and so there have been many such cases where we ourselves have notified a student that we've gone beyond what we're able to, and recommend instead that they look for another course that may be able to commit more resources to them.

To be clear, I don't believe the issue here to be a language barrier - I think it's just that your work gets spread out over a very long period of time, resulting in more opportunities to forget things in between rounds of feedback. Of course that does mean that there's more you might be doing to address that concern (taking notes of the feedback you receive, attempting to summarize them, etc. can help make it easier to ensure that feedback is applied later, by having a more succinct list of priorities to refer to in between more substantial reviews of the actual critiques), but as far as resources go, I asked DIO to continue providing you as many rounds of revisions as you required, but to have you submit them as new homework submissions so they would actually be compensated accordingly, rather than having to provide round upon round of critique off the initial $20.

That said, we still need you to do more to ensure that you are using the course in the way it is directed. The video at the top of this page from Lesson 0 that DIO linked previously is critical to this end, as it outlines everything the student is expected to do, what they're expected not to do, and why. Grinding is an important point in this regard - it may seem like going back over the same exercise more than the number of times it was assigned is beneficial, but there are many ways it might be less effective.

One common example is that, say a student is assigned 2 pages of an exercise. That student out of their misguided enthusiasm decides to complete 10 pages, and submit their 2 "best". Where in just doing the 2 that were assigned, they would have taken all of the resources they had - primarily time and focus - and committed them entirely to those two pages, in being assigned 10 those resources get split up amongst the full 10 pages. Sure, a student can give themselves more time overall, but more often than not it doesn't, and those students who do opt to grind tend to submit work that shows a lack of focus, rushing, and so forth.

Furthermore, requiring students to complete the entirety of the assigned revisions also plays an important role in allowing our TAs to work efficiently. You mention "I'd rather not reinforce bad habits and waste my time" - we provide the resource and services we do expressly by prioritizing that the student's time be wasted before the TA's. Meaning, if the same half hour the TA requires to provide feedback on a round of revisions could have been done based on a body of work of 8 drawings, rather than a partial submission of 2 drawings, the former will have a far greater chance of revealing issues that will help the TA better understand what it is you're doing, what it is you're missing, and how to best recommend that you address those issues. One or two drawings won't always reveal enough useful information, especially when the core issue is that certain instructions aren't being applied.

As far as bad habits go, it's a pretty common fear students have, but it's one that is severely overblown and misunderstood. The process of learning is one that sees us learn and unlearn things throughout. One thing students don't often consider is that sometimes something that was useful and beneficial early on might become a crutch that limits our progress later on, once we outgrow it. That which wasn't a bad habit to begin with becomes a bad habit. That doesn't mean we should have avoided it from the beginning - but rather that things are always in flux, what was useful may become detrimental, what was detrimental may become useful.

And sure - there are always going to be situations where if the instructor or teaching assistant was able to sit with you the whole way through and catch things that may be less useful sooner, that would be better. But that's not what we provide, and it's something that is generally going to be considerably more expensive.

Now, glancing at your revisions (DIO will still come by to critique them more thoroughly, but I figured I'd quickly take a look), there are a lot of signs you could be doing much more to apply the feedback you're receiving, and to follow the instructions more closely. For example:

• I noticed a pretty consistent issue in drawing your ribcage mass - you tend to draw it as a ball/sphere. The lesson material states that this should occupy a full half of the overall torso, which would result in a more elongated form.

• You're frequently forgetting to draw a contour curve at the joint between your sausage segments when constructing your legs. There's also a tendency to draw your sausages a little more ellipsoid than they should be (they shouldn't be getting wider through the midsection), although this is more likely just something you're working through, rather than something you're outright forgetting to do. You are remembering to add those contour lines more in some constructions than others, but that largely highlights that there's an issue with how you're approaching the work, that sometimes you remember, sometimes you don't. What I mentioned earlier about taking notes to summarize the main things you need to keep in mind may help.

• You are definitely improving in terms of working less in 2D space than you were before, but it does still come up - for instance, on your deer you constructed its muzzle primarily as a 2D shape, cutting across the cranial ball to basically redefine its shape on the flat page, but never actually conveying any 3D information in the process.

• While there is certainly variation in terms of how much time you spend on each construction, even your longer ones tend to fall into the realm of what I'd normally consider quick, with the shorter ones (like your 11 minute elephant) definitely suggest that more time should have been taken. Interestingly enough on that elephant the markmaking itself was pretty good - your ellipses were confident and evenly shaped, your lines were smooth, etc. With just 11 minutes and a fairly complex structure to build though, that begs the question of just how much time was left to actually observe your reference image? A construction like this could easily take a student an hour, if they're continually going back and observing their reference, considering the relationships between the different elements of that reference, and then deciding how to capture those relationships in their own construction. More than anything, our time is spent on the steps in between actually putting marks on the page, and those are more often than not the parts that get sacrificed when we limit how much time we have. To that point, it's worth mentioning that it is of course entirely acceptable to tackle one construction over multiple sessions - there's nothing that states we must complete a construction in one sitting.

Lastly, as to your concern regarding reference, I do understand your worry there, but I assure you it is not the source of the trouble. That said, what can often help with situations where a reference image has parts hidden, is to simply find more than one reference image for the given animal. At the end of the day, our references serve as sources of information. Our goal isn't so much to redraw that reference, but rather to use it as a source to help fuel what is essentially the same exercise, time and time again.

Constructional drawing, as we do it here, is just an exercise. It's about taking a complex object, breaking it down into simple forms, considering how those forms relate to one another in 3D space, and then recreating that relationship on the flat page. This is the same process we perform time and time again, whether we're constructing plants, insects, animals, vehicles, etc. - it's all ultimately the same exercise, just seen through a different lens, and in doing it we're forcing our brains to understand what it is we're drawing on the flat page as it exists in 3D space, effectively rewiring it in the process. All that matters is that we're forced to think about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space - whether or not we accurately match the proportions, whether it matches the reference perfectly, none of that is of particular importance.

So, if you catch yourself in situations where the whole animal is not visible, that's okay - just find another reference where that part is visible, and use it to fill in the gaps.

I hope this lengthy response clarifies any misunderstandings on how this course works, what services we provide and how we provide them, and why it is critical that we prioritize our TA's time over yours. If you do decide to move away from Drawabox, I want to thank you for the support you've provided thus far, and for the many students you've helped to receive feedback on their own work over the last four and a half years.