Some ideas I learned from Patrick Jones that have really benefitted my process are that every line is a thought and to work at the rate of your thoughts. It's not about arbitrarily doing something in a set amount of time -- if you think fast by all means work fast. Drawing is an interactive experience that requires you to be fully present and moving with purpose. The timed studies are a great challenge and force you to focus on communicating the most important parts. You still want to work at the speed of your thoughts, so the adjustment to distill information rather than rushing to get lots of information down quickly. Just my two cents. These turned out great 👍 Keep it up!

These are perfect. If you wanted to make the sail look like he's resting his weight in his back half and peeking over that ledge, it's a great opportunity to throw a straight in there, but I really like how he looks as he is. Great job simplifying!

Very good notan studies! You can make them sophisticated when you get to the 5 value studies. These are perfect.

Lovely work! I think for future attempts you can still go a little simpler with the shapes you select, like using an example here, the cat could have a simple ellipse for the major head shape and the dog more triangle ears. This is mostly to help with breaking it down to a basic essence where you can later then use those basic shapes to stylize and experiment and have some room to play with -- like squashing and stretching the ellipse or replacing it with a totally different shape like a square instead. Your stuff is already looking pretty good, just keep exploring! :)

I think you did pretty well with the likeness, especially for a 25 minute drawing!