Our goal with these exercises is not to reproduce the reference image as accurately as possible at all costs, but to treat it as a source of information, from which we build a construction that resembles the animal in question. While we expect students to observe their reference carefully and frequently to apply the information from the reference to their construction it is inevitable that the drawing will deviate from the reference ins some ways despite a student's best efforts to be accurate. As far as this course is concerned what matters most is holding to the 3D structure you're building up, and that you do not undermine its solidity under any circumstances. If that means the end result not matching up perfectly in some ways with the reference, that's fine.

Tracing makes students think in terms of drawing lines on a flat piece of paper, instead of encouraging the 3D thinking that we're trying to develop with these exercises, so it is less about "cheating" and more about how this undermines the student's efforts to learn from these exercises.

I understand that your strategy comes from wanting to do the best you possibly can and succeed in this lesson, however starting with a flat shape (the traced outline of the animal) and trying to arrange forms to fit inside that shape is actually working against you. Our goal here is not to make a pretty picture, but to learn something. Please set aside whatever personal objectives you may have for how you want these drawings to look and follow the instructions exactly as written as closely as you can in future.

Okay, looking at your organic intersections, you're doing a good job of keeping your forms fairly simple and easy to work with. This exercise is about piling forms on top of each other in a way that feels convincing, and I have a few points that should help you to achieve this.

• Be sure to pile new forms on top of what you have already drawn. Don't try to draw new forms going underneath what is already on your page like this one. With that larger form already resting on the ground plane there is no space to fit the new form underneath, which results in the form I've traced over there being flattened out at the bottom.

• In order to help you get a grasp of how to wrap these forms around each other, generally avoid laying forms parallel as seen here.

• This isn't necessarily a mistake as it is not explicitly stated in the exercise instructions, but in future I'd like you to "draw through" all your forms when doing this exercise. Be sure to draw each form in its entirety instead of cutting some of them off where they pass behind another form. here is an example of what one of these forms might look like if we drew through and completed it. Doing this will really help to push you into really thinking about how each of these forms exists in 3D space.

• You want all your forms to feel stable and supported for this exercise, like you could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off. The form second from the left on this page looks pretty precariously balanced.

• In future I'd like you to push your shadows more boldly. Right now they have a tendency to hug the forms that are casting them. The direction of your shadows isn't always consistent. If one shadow on the pile is being cast to the left, all the shadows on that page should be projected left, as shown here.

Moving on to your animal constructions right off the bat there are a few points I noticed that stood out, as they were addressed in my critique of your Lesson 4 work. It is often necessary for students to take their own steps in ensuring that they do what they need to in order to ensure they're addressing the issues that have been called out. It's very easy to simply come back from a break and continue forwards with the next lesson without consideration for what issues may have been called out (or perhaps having them more loosely in mind, but without specifics), and each student needs to decide what it is they need to apply the information they're given as effectively as they can. For some that means reviewing the past feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely.

We have previously discussed starting with simple solid forms, and in order to maintain the 3D illusion of these forms we introduced the following rule- once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Please reread your lesson 4 critiques for a fuller explanation and various diagrams and examples provided to help you apply this. Here on your wolf, you established an ellipse for the cranial ball, then when you came back to refine your silhouette with a line, you sliced off the piece I highlighted in red, so the viewer can no longer see the cranial ball as a solid 3D form, only as a partial shape. You can see this explained in this example that I shared with you previously. This happens frequently whenever you pick the inside line from your ellipses to use for its silhouette, leaving the outer line to hang outside your construction arbitrarily. Again, we've been over this before.

When it comes to leg construction you're not applying the sausage method correctly, or sometimes not at all.

Keep your sausage forms simple as explained here. So the ends should be round like half spheres, not flattened or pointy, and both the ends should be the same size. The width of the sausage should be consistent along its length with no pinching or bulging.

Remember the contour curve for the intersection at each joint. These curves explain how the forms connect together in 3D space (like the form intersections exercise from lesson 2) and you can see them highlighted in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram.

Once the basic sausage armature is in place, build up complexity using additional forms as seen in the ant leg demo and dog leg demo I shared with you previously.

When it comes to establishing your core construction you need to take another look at this section of the lesson overview page. With the exception of birds, start your constructions with 3 major masses for the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis, as shown. Frequently one or more of these masses is oddly proportioned or missing entirely from your work.

Once these masses are established the rib cage and pelvis need to be incorporated into a torso sausage as explained here.I've demonstrated how to do this here on your wolf.

Lets get these first stages of construction firmly in place, then I will be able to give you further advice on how to build upon a basic construction.

The last thing I wanted to talk about today 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 Uncomfortable is 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 in this informal head demo.

There are a few key points to this approach:

1- The specific shape of the eye sockets - 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.

2- 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.

3- 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 eye socket 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 as shown in in this banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

I will be assigning 4 additional pages of animal constructions for you to do with these points in mind.