Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along pretty well. You're clearly thinking about how these forms interact with one another in space under the influence of gravity. Your work with the cast shadows is coming along as well, although there is room for improvement here. Specifically, keep trying to think about how a surface may turn away from the form casting the shadow, pulling the shadow away with it. Right now you are leaning more towards treating the sausage's surfaces as though they're flat (in regards to the shadow) - so you're mostly shaping the shadow shape based on the form casting it only.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I can certainly see plenty of signs that you're trying to apply the various concepts and techniques covered in the lesson's demonstrations to the best of your current ability. I'm quite pleased to see that - and I'm glad to say that I can see some issues in your approaches which we should be able to address, to yield some improvement.

Looking at one of your birds to start, there are definitely a few things of note to call out here. I've marked them out here, directly on your work. I understand that you did mention you put plenty of time into observing your references, but it is entirely possible to invest the time, but ultimately not necessarily invest it into the right areas. As I showed in my redline notes there, if we look closely at the bird's wing, we'll find that though you opted to capture it with an ellipse, the wing's actual shape is quite different. Along with how you quickly tried to imply the feathers by drawing a bunch of arbitrary lines along the wing's surface (rather than carefully considering each feather individually, and either outlining it via explicit markmaking, or implying it using implicit markmaking (as discussed back in Lesson 2, it does seem like you went through the drawing very quickly.

We can see similar things in the head, where the shape of the eye socket was definitely drawn quite fast, without as much consideration for how each mark contributes to the final result. Now I will absolutely admit - the informal head construction demo definitely fits in more easily with mammals, so it's certainly more challenging to figure out how to apply it to a bird, but in general everything becomes considerably more difficult when not given enough time.

You also don't need to start out with a cranial ball that occupies the whole volume of the perceived head. You can start out smaller and build up masses gradually, one at a time, to work your way there.

One thing I felt you did quite well were the basic leg structures - while the sausages were a little on the thicker side, most of the structure was built up well. Just remember that the claws/talons should also be drawn as complete, enclosed, 3D forms - not partial shapes as you did here. You need to figure out how they intersect with the feet/toes, and define clear relationships between them in 3D space. After all, each of these drawings are exercises - or really, they're all 3D spatial puzzles. The end result isn't so much important, as much as the fact that we're putting our brain through the process of figuring out how all of these pieces fit together in three dimensions.

Circling back to the observation thing, that is certainly something that you struggled with throughout the whole lesson. That is certainly a problem that can be addressed - but only once you can see that it is occurring. Given the difference between the bird's wing shape, and the one you actually drew, I hope that does provide a clear example where your observation could certainly have been given more time. Another thing to keep in mind is that animals have often evolved the capacity to make themselves hard to process visually. That bird's wing, for example, camouflages quite easily into the rest of its body, making it very difficult to distinguish the wing from the rest of it. All the more reason that we really need to invest a lot of time into identifying what it is we're trying to draw.

All that said, I think there are a lot of aspects of your construction that still work out quite well, simply because you are thinking a fair bit about how these structures exist in 3D space. Structurally this leopard still feels fairly solid, even if there are a fair number of discrepancies between it and the reference.

One specific issue I did notice when it comes to your use of additional masses however comes up when you've got masses that occur around the same area. You tend to draw them as though they ignore one another, having them pass through one another. This is incorrect - instead, every new mass we introduce has to define how it relates to the structure that exists. As soon as a mass has been added, it becomes part of the existing structure - meaning any other mass you add thereafter has to wrap around it as well, as shown towards the backside of the leopard.

As a side note, I included a little blurb in the bottom right of that page showing how when we draw paws or feet, we can make them appear more three dimensional by strategically including corners in the form's silhouette. This will imply the distinction between different planes of the form (making it feel 3D) without including any internal edges. From there, we can build on further boxes in this same manner to create the toes.

The last thing I wanted to call out is that while I can see you applying that informal head construction demo, one additional suggestion I have is that you make a point of drawing the eyeballs larger, and of constructing the eyelids themselves as their own separate additional masses, as shown here. This will help you get a better sense of how the eyelids actually wrap around the eyeball structure, rather than trying to draw the classic "eye shape" on top.

Now, I'm going to assign some revisions below for you to address the issues I've called out here. Of course, the biggest one comes down to how much time you invest into your observation for each drawing. Back for the first round of revisions I assigned in Lesson 4, I gave you some additional restrictions of not working on more than one drawing in a given sitting, and keeping track of how long each drawing takes you. I'd like you to adhere to that here as well.