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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are spot on. You're forms are simple enough to feel solid, and you're piling them up in a manner that has them feel stable and supported. You're generally doing a good job of showing how the forms wrap around one another in 3D space, rather than just stamping flat shapes in front of one another. You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the forms below, and appear to be keeping a consistent light source in mind.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your work is top notch. I'm happy to see that you're keeping your linework smooth, confident and purposeful, and that you've actively tackled the points discussed in your lesson 4 critique, making a clear effort to take actions on your constructions "in 3D." There's honestly not that much to criticise, but I do have a few pieces of advice that I hope will help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises in future.

I can see that you're taking steps to build your constructions up in 3D by drawing complete new forms and establishing how they connect to the existing structure with specific relationships. Just make sure you're building complete new forms wherever you want to add to the construction, as I do see the occasional spot where you'd made a quick extension with a one off line, such as this example which doesn't quite provide enough information for us to understand how it connects to the existing structure in 3D.

Your additional masses are coming along quite well, and I'm seeing places where you're doing a good job of designing them so they wrap around the existing structures in a way that feels convincing. 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.

So with that in mind I've made a few alterations to the masses on this bear. Along the legs I've taken a couple of places where it looks like you'd extended the construction with one off lines and built additional masses instead. I was very happy to see that you'd experimented with layering and overlapping your additional masses along the top of the back, and had allowed your masses to do so in 3D space. This approach is great, as it allows you to keep your masses simple, instead of trying to achieve too much with a single mass and having it fall flat. I made some fairly subtle changes to the purple and blue masses, to allow the blue mass to stay simple where it is exposed to fresh air, consisting of a an outward C curve, rather than the more complex S curve you had along the top there. With the red mass I've shown how we can introduce some specific complexity to its silhouette, by pressing it against the top of the protruding shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I'm happy to see that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction and are applying it quite effectively. I think you've made a great start with building onto your sausage armatures but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these focus primarily on forms that actually impact the silhouette of the overall leg, but there's value in exploring the forms that exist "internally" within that silhouette - like the missing puzzle piece that helps to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. Here is an example of what I mean, on another student's work. Uncomfortable has blocked out masses along the leg there, and included the one fitting in between them all, even though it doesn't influence the silhouette. 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.

As a quick bonus on constructing paws, I'd like you to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between the different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define those edges themselves - to lay down a structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional. This is something you've already done pretty well on some of your constructions, but we can take this a stage further by using similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

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. Given how the course has developed, 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 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.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. I can see that you're working through a similar process for some of your heads, such as the deer, but bring it all together in the way the demos shows, and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but as shown in in this rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

On a fairly minor note, one thing that can help specifically when dealing with eyes, is to draw the eyelids themselves as their own separate additional masses (one for the upper lid and another for the lower lid). This can help us better focus on how they're actually wrapping around the eyeball itself, as shown here, much moreso than trying to draw the eye lids with single lines.

All right, I think that covers it. You've done a great job and I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.