Hello Bobby_big_box, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Your organic intersections are a great start to the homework, and demonstrate a very strong understanding of how the forms slump and sag over one another in three dimensions. Your shadows are coming along well, and help to clarify the relationships between forms.

While we do want the forms to feel heavy, try to avoid drawing them as though they’re melting or oozing over one another, like the large form at the top of this page. This tends to cause the form to get a bit too complex and lose some of its solidity.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the degree of the small ellipses on the tips of the form does matter. If it is circular it tells us that the tip points directly towards the viewer, and I noticed this occurring a lot in your pages. If that was your intention, then it is fine, although usually the small ellipses would be fairly similar in degree to the contour curve next to them, unless the form is bending quite sharply.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your work is honestly excellent throughout. There are a couple of things I can bring to your attention, but overall you're doing a great job with all the core principles of the lesson, demonstrating strong spatial reasoning skills, and a well developed grasp of how to build up these complex structures without losing the illusion of solidity. I think you’ve done really well, and should be proud of what you have accomplished.

The first thing to call out is fairly straightforward, when laying out your major masses, keep in mind that the ribcage should usually occupy about half the length of the torso as stated here on the lesson intro page. I noticed on most of your pages you’d drawn the ribcage as a sphere, resulting in it being a little bit too short.

It is great to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method of leg construction, and are applying it well. Moving down to feet, it is very common to students to treat these as a afterthought and switch to working in 2D or leave them oversimplified. I’m really pleased to see that you’ve been conscientiously constructing these with solid forms, working from simple to complex and building each toe as a complete 3D form, so they don’t fall flat despite the amount of detail you’ve achieved, amazing work.

The main thing we explore throughout this lesson comes down to the use of additional masses. In a lot of places, you're using them really well, but there are ways in which certain areas can still be improved.

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.

For the most part your additional masses demonstrate an excellent understanding of this logic, applying it to the forms at play and being mindful how they all relate to one another in space. I did spot a couple of things I’d like you to focus on, and I’ve marked them up with notes on this deer.

• I really like how you’d pressed the additional mass on top of the torso against the tops of the shoulder and thigh masses, forming inward curves in the mass’ silhouette where it pushes against those protruding forms. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• You had a third inward curve along the underside of the same mass, but here there was nothing physically present in the construction to cause this complexity (only the smooth rounded torso sausage) so it feels arbitrary. I do see the bulge along the side of the torso in the corresponding reference, so I’d suggest actually drawing it as a mass, as shown in green on this draw over, even though it doesn’t directly impact the overall silhouette of the construction. This way of thinking- about the inside of your structures, and fleshing out information that isn't just noticeable from one angle, but really exploring the construction in its entirety, will help you yet further push the value of these constructional exercises as puzzles. I’ve also broken the (very long) mass on top of the torso into more manageable pieces. In this case it helps to describe the bulk over the hips and shoulders, and in general I’d avoid running a single mass over such a long distance, as it can lead to accidentality making the mass too complex and cause it to fall flat.

• The other point I wanted to make with the masses on the deer is something that occurs intermittently along the legs. Sometimes you’d press a mass against the edge of a sausage form (which is great in theory) but do so where that part of the sausage was actually inside another form, so wouldn’t protrude to cause complexity in the mass. On the draw over I’ve shown how we can locate the complexity in the mass where the underlying sausage forms intersect (the contour curves at the joints) because we’ll have a defined plane-change where the two sausage forms penetrate one another.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. This is due to how the course had developed over time, 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:

• The specific shape of the eye sockets- the specific pentagonal (5-sided) 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 eye socket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

It looks like you understand this method well, and I’m seeing these points being applied successfully on quite a few of your pages, such as rabbit 1, anteater 2, and bovine 2. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but as shown in the rhino head demo just beneath it on the same page, this method can be adapted to work for a wide array of animals.

All right I think that covers it, once again, excellent work. I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.