Starting with your organic intersections, there is a lot that you're doing correctly here, but there are a number of sausages that kind of break away from what we're trying to achieve in this exercise. Basically, we're creating a pile of forms that are meant to feel solidly grounded atop one another, giving the impression that they've reached an amount of stability under gravity. On the first page, there are some forms that do not achieve this impression - like this one across the top which appears to be floating without making proper contact with the forms beneath it, and this one on the side where it appears you weren't sure if you were placing it further back, or closer to the viewer. Its relationship with the other forms suggest that it's more forward, while the placement of its cast shadow on the ground makes it appear as though it's much further back.

Your second page is definitely better, although there is still room for continued improvement in terms of making each mass feel stable in its position. Avoid the impression that if we move forward by a second in time, that the whole pile will fall apart.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I can see that you've definitely put a ton of focus on building up your construction with the careful, one-by-one addition of individual, fully self-enclosed forms. That's a big step in the right direction, and certainly helps to avoid circumstances where we take more actions in 2D space, modifying silhouettes and such and otherwise undermining the solidity of our construction.

That said, I do have some advice to offer in how these additional masses can be used most effectively. Before I get to that though, there's one major point I want to stress - sometimes when students get really focused on this aspect of construction, building everything up in forms and considering the way those forms interact with one another in 3D space, they can find themselves taking time away from other aspects - like the constant and continuous observation of their reference images as a result. Basically, they realize, "oh I wasn't putting enough time into A" and so that becomes their core priority, and B, C, or D may suffer for it.

In this case, I think you may not be spending as much time observing your reference, and so the positioning of the different aspects of your structure - especially the limbs - tend to be out of whack at times. We definitely don't expect perfect replication of the reference image, but these are simply signs that in shifting your attention to what I highlighted in Lesson 4's critique, you understandably took resources away from something else that is also important.

This also does lead into my answer of your question, about whether it's possible to go too far with the additional masses. To put it simply, no - as long as every mass you add is specifically informed by what you see in your reference image (ie: this relies on a lot of time being invested into observation, getting down into looking at smaller elements the further into a construction we get).

And, of course - there's always that temptation to put less time into elements when a drawing requires a lot of them, so that is just something to keep in the back of your mind - that every single mark, every single form, is still going to require as much time and attention as it individually requires, regardless of how many others are necessary. Fortunately I think you handle this well thus far.

That said, always try to work from big to small. Meaning, don't jump into everything with the smallest masses right off the bat, but rather look for the bigger elements that can be blocked in, and then gradually shift to looking at the smaller ones as you progress. Also, don't think you need to add a mass everywhere - only where it actually serves a purpose. For example, just about every edge of the base structure's silhouette on this horse has a mass on it. As shown here (at least as far as the torso is concerned),

Alrighty, onto the main things to keep in mind when building up your additional masses.

• I can see that you're approaching the design of your additional masses in an intentional manner, considering where your inward curves, outward curves, sharp corners, and more rounded corners/transitions are placed. You generally do a good job of handling the "wrapping" of one mass over an existing structure, using inward curves correctly and such, but watch out for cases where you may accidentally use an outward curve where an inward curve is needed, or where you place a corner offset from where it needs to be, as I've pointed out here.

• I am seeing a ton of places where you leave arbitrary gaps between masses. Here's an example where your different individual masses do not touch, but rather attempt to leave a roughly consistent space between them. Don't do this - actually push those masses up against one another, as that is critical for having those masses.

• I also noticed that you tend to focus the majority of your masses along the edges of your structure - basically where those masses will impact the silhouettes. While that's certainly useful, paying attention to the forms that exist in between, internally within that silhouette, is incredibly important as well. This relates back to the previous point - it's by considering what might fit in between that we're able to make everything feel more grounded, as shown here on another student's work.

• Also, again on the topic of not just thinking about how things impact the silhouette, don't be afraid to really bring your masses down along the sides of your animal - in the case of the masses you build up along their backs. These are the same notes I'd drawn on your horse that I linked further up - note how much further down along the horse's side those masses descend, often looking for opportunities to press up against other masses (like the simple ball structures I blocked in at the hip and shoulder.

Continuing on, a couple points about your legs/feet.

• I can see that you're making an effort to apply the sausage method, although do take some time to review the specific aspects of simple sausage forms shown in the diagram. You're close, but you do often slip in small ways towards drawing ellipses rather than sausages, which widen a bit through the midsection. I'd recommend avoiding trying to draw these forms as being totally straight, as this will lead more into drawing ellipses - and a slight bend to them. I really do mean slight, just a tiny bend will help you avoid the kinds of things that make you lean more into drawing those forms with ellipses.

• Here's a quick suggestion on how to tackle feet, pulled from a critique I did for another student. You often do actually start out with boxy forms (and I can see you applying this same approach on this camel's front foot), but when it comes to adding the toes you tend to slip back into working in 2D space, but there definitely is a lot of experimentation across your different animals, with this cat's toes being drawn more as flat blobs.

When it comes to some of the basic elements of construction, one thing I noticed was that you very frequently end up drawing your ribcage incorrectly (in terms of size/proportion), and this likely does throw off your proportions. As shown here, your ribcage is going to occupy a full half of the torso's length, with the pelvis occupying the last quarter, leaving only another quarter in between. You very often draw the ribcage way shorter than that, leaving a much larger gap between.

For your fur, you're definitely going way overboard with this, and it's resulting in a lot more repetition in those individual fur marks, and a tendency to go into auto-pilot. I can definitely see places where you're trying to be more intentional in how you design those tuft shapes, but as an inevitable result of having to draw so many things, your brain loses focus and you fall back into repetitive patterns.

Of course, one solution to this is to give yourself the time you need to draw each individual mark separately, designing each stroke, although in truth you do not actually need to be piling on so much. The goal here is not to reproduce the reference image, but rather to lay down enough for the viewer to understand that the object is furry. Rather than reproducing the image, it's more like you're telling the viewer about something you saw - laying down only what's necessary in order to get that across. The bare minimum.

I've got an example I did for another student who was running into the same issue, to illustrate the point. Here's their original. And here I removed the vast majority of the fur marks they'd put down, and added a few of my own, concentrating them only in very specific places. As you can see, I've reduced the amount of marks conveying fur by 90% or more, and yet it still reads as furry.

Now, the last thing I wanted to discuss 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.

I've laid out quite a bit for you to work on, so I'm going to assign a number of revisions for you to do that. I strongly recommend that you not work on more than one animal construction in a given day. You are encouraged to break them up across multiple sittings and days (remember - it's the complexity of the thing you're drawing that dictates how much time it demands of you, not how much time you have to give it), but if you even add just the last finishing touches on one construction, it's best that you not start the next one until the following day.

Also, include both the dates of all of the sittings you've worked on a given construction, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent during that sitting.