Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along pretty well. You're doing a good job of wrapping the forms around one another, demonstrating the impacts of gravity, and casting your shadows in a realistic fashion upon these various curving surfaces.

Getting into your animal constructions, it's probably best to answer your questions before I get into my critique:

• To your first question, it helps to always come back to one simple fact - this lesson is not about drawing animals. Rather, it's about doing the same thing we've done in the last couple of lessons, using animals as a subject matter, or a lens through which to look at that same problem. The problem is to manipulate simple forms, figuring out how to combine them in 3D space, to define their relationships in that space, and to create more complex structures. It doesn't really matter if it's an animal, an insect, a chair, or a corvette. They're all just forms, and we have to work primarily with the superficial, surface-level information we've got, which comes from our reference material. While to be fair, we do make certain mild assumptions based on what we know of animals - for example, we know based on close enough observation that the legs don't simply plug into the bottom of the torso as they sometimes might appear to, we don't know very much about their skeletal structure, underneath all that is visible. So we don't need to worry about any kind of specific anatomy, and should always come back to the basics. This bear is a good example. You don't have its legs coming all the way up to the shoulder, but you've still laid out that structure in a way that feels fairly solid and believable. In some cases (and I'll get into them later), there is benefit to understanding that there's usually an observable mass at the shoulder and hip where the animals tend to develop larger muscles to help them walk and run - but these are still things that are visible, once you learn what to look for. Admittedly this answer goes back and forth, but the real answer is to focus primarily on what you can see. Knowing certain things ahead of time, from past experience and past study of animals however, will probably help you better target what it is you're looking to find.

• The way you handled many aspects of that longer fur, and especially the tail, is correct - that is, you built up the main masses that underly that long fur (even if the mass itself is made up of fur, it's still a voluminous mass that we need to block out before worrying about individual tufts). The rest simply comes down to how carefully you design those tufts. As shown here, avoid erratic/wavy tufts, and instead focus on keeping things long, flowing, and abiding by the force of gravity and its need to pull everything downwards.

• Wrinkles, like all textures, are made up of forms - so your first step to tackling any kind of texture is to think about those textural forms, not of the lines you visibly see in your drawings. Looking here, it's pretty notable that you're drawing the lines you see, rather than using those lines to help you understand how the folds of skin themselves exist as three dimensional entities. Developing that understanding of what is present is critical, because it is that understanding that then allows you to figure out what kinds of shadows they'd cast (based on the relationship between a given textural form and the surfaces around it). It's those shadows that'll allow you to avoid excessive markmaking, because the focus will always come down to conveying the presence of those forms, rather than arbitrary decoration of a drawing.

• This is contradicted somewhat in some of the earlier videos (for example, where I draw the tiger in that intro video, or the tiger head demo), but more recently as I've put more thought into how to tackle explaining texture, the stance of the course as a whole has shifted to focusing only on things that convey information that exists in 3D space. So for example, construction itself involves a lot of larger structures which are drawn using explicit markmaking, to establish the volumes and structures that are present. Then texture pertains to implying the presence of smaller textural forms, which rest along the surface of these larger constructed ones. Patterns however, do not exist as 3D structure at any scale. Instead, they are a facet of local/surface colour, like the difference between a wall being made of brick (with grooves and holes and flakes, all 3D elements) versus a wall being covered in a wallpaper design. So, for the drawings we do throughout this course, focus entirely on information that exists in 3D space, and leave everything else out, treating it like it's all covered in the same white colour. That goes hand in hand with the idea of reserving all our filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only, to help imply the presence of 3D forms (be they constructed or textural).

With your questions out of the way (and at this point hitting the length of a pretty normal critique), I'll try to hit the main points in your constructions. There's a lot of good here, and a lot of areas in which you're making good use of these solid, 3D elements, and fitting them together to create solid, believable results, but there are some things I want to call out:

• First off, it looks like you may have forgotten some of the things I called out in my last critique. In Lesson 4, I talked about the importance of always working with your constructions in 3D space, and avoiding jumping back into the 2D space of the drawing to make quick adjustments/alterations, or to use shortcuts. Anything you do in 2D space - adding a one-off stroke, pulling the edge of a shape out, etc. will gradually undermine the impression that your construction is solid and 3D. For example, if we look here at this dog, I called out areas where you were building on top of the legs with flat/partial shapes rather than complete forms as was demonstrated in a variety of diagrams I provided in the previous feedback. As I also called out there, be sure to use the sausage method consistently when constructing your animals' legs. You may want to review its specific requirements here.

• When it comes to designing the silhouettes of your additional masses, there are definitely some places where it could be done better - specifically in terms of keeping your masses simple, and defining how they integrate with the other masses present in the structure. Here are some notes on one of your rhinos. 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.

• You've got some varying approaches when it comes to head construction, with some pages (like your first page of black bears) coming out quite well, with all of the different facial components wedging against one another in a more solid fashion, and others where things like the eye sockets float more loosely relative to one another. Be sure to read through (or reread) the explanation presented here in the informal demos page and try to apply it more strictly to all of your head constructions. There are some that may be a little harder to approach this way (like the rhinos - here's how I'd tackle that myself), but generally it can be applied fairly easily to many different kinds of animal heads.

• Also, one thing that can help with handling things like eyelids is to construct an individual mass for the upper and lower lids, as shown here, instead of drawing a standard iconic "eye" shape. This will help a lot when it comes to wrapping around the eyeball in a believable fashion.

Overall I think you're doing pretty well as a whole, but since you did have issues applying some of the points I'd raised in the Lesson 4 work, I am going to ask you for revisions to ensure that you are able to demonstrate your understanding of what I've called out. You'll find them assigned below.