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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing well. You're keeping your forms simple which helps them to feel solid and 3D. I'm happy to see you drawing through your forms here as this will help you to develop a strong understanding of how these forms exist in 3D space.

You're doing well at capturing how these forms slump and sag over one another with a sense of gravity. Something I'd like you to think about when practising this exercise in future is whether the forms feel stable. We want to be able to walk away from the pile without any of the forms toppling off. For example the form at the top left of the lower pile on this page looks precariously balanced, like it might roll of the pile at any moment.

One other minor point to call out, as stated here each page should consist of only one pile of forms. Not a huge deal, and it certainly is admirable that you're trying to get as much as possible out of each page, but it suggests you could be paying closer attention to the instructions. It would be unfortunate if you missed a more important instruction in the remaining lessons, so keep that in mind.

• Sticking to one pile allows us to draw larger, making it easier to think through the spatial reasoning puzzle involved here, and making it easier to engage our whole arm.

• Sticking to one pile promotes thinking about stacking the forms, and how they'd wrap around one another. Drawing single forms on the ground plane is less beneficial in terms of what we're trying to get out of this exercise.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall you're doing a very good job with these. You're clearly putting a lot of thought into fitting all the pieces of your constructions together like a 3D puzzle, and in many places you're defining specific relationships between your forms that actively reinforce the 3D illusion, leading to some very solid constructions.

I have a few fairly straightforward little points or reminders to bring up briefly, and then a couple of topics to talk about in a little more depth.

• Keep in mind that as introduced here the rib cage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso. You tend to draw it spherical so there are a few constructions such as this one where this results in the rib cage being too short.

• You're usually doing a good job of establishing how the cranial ball connects to the torso by constructing a simple, solid neck, though I spotted a couple of constructions such as this koala and this rhino where you'd left the cranial ball floating in front of the body. Sometimes it can be tricky to construct the neck when it is mostly obscured by the head. You'll find an example of how to construct the neck in a foreshortened pose in the puma demo on the informal demos page.

• I'm happy to see that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction throughout this lesson and are usually applying it fairly well. Sometimes your sausage forms swell through their midsection, so they're more like ellipses than sausage forms. This makes the constructions stiff. This rhino would probably be the most prominent example.

• It is good to see that you've generally remembered to reinforce your leg constructions by applying a contour curve for the intersection at each joint. I did notice that you quite often add extra contour curves along the surface of the individual sausage forms as well, which is noted on the sausage method diagram as something to avoid, as they stiffen the construction needlessly.

• A more general note about contour lines, while you're not necessarily relying on them to make your constructions feel 3D, you do tend to use a lot of them. Contour lines themselves fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want. Unfortunately the first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns, where adding one may help the form feel 3D, but piling on a whole bunch of them won't have much extra effect. While adding contour lines that don't contribute much isn't a big deal in itself, it can sometimes lead to students feeling they can "fix" forms that they have already drawn by adding contour lines, leading to the student putting less thought into carefully designing their forms or using the form intersection type of contour line, which is much more effective at defining the relationships between forms and making the construction more solid as a whole. So, when you're deciding what contour lines to add in future, be sure to think through what each line is contributing to the construction, and if it is the best tool for the job.

All right, moving on to one of the areas I want to talk about in a bit more depth, additional masses. I'm happy to see that you've made use of this tool to build onto your constructions throughout the set, and it looks like you're thinking through how to design your masses so that they feel like 3D forms and not just pasting them on like flat stickers.

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.

I've used this rhino as an example to point out in green an example of one the masses that is well designed, using specific corners and curves to indicate how it wraps around the thigh in 3D space. In red and blue I've noted a couple of ways in which some of your masses had room for improvement.

In blue I'd noted a couple of places where it looks like you had added to the construction with partial shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how those additions connect to the existing structures in 3D space. Adding contour lines to a partial shape doesn't fix the issue, it might make the addition feel more 3D in isolation, but does not solve the problem at hand- the lack of 3D relationship between the existing form and the extension. Instead we want to draw complete forms with fully enclosed silhouettes wherever we want to build onto these constructions.

In red I've noted some spots where logically we would expect to see an overlap between the additional mass and the structure it is attached to, showing how the additional mass wraps around the form underneath. Instead the highlighted lines run along the edge of the existing form's silhouette, defining a 2D relationship between these forms. On this image I've redrawn the masses on the legs to they wrap around both sausage forms they are attaching to, giving them a firmer grip on the construction.

Additional masses don't always have to overlap every existing form they encounter, and we have to consider the 3D nature of what forms are currently present in each construction on a case by case basis. For example, on the same image I've drawn a large mass at the base of the neck. I've pulled it down from the spine, around the neck and the torso, and where it meets the top of the big bulky shoulder mass, I've used an inward curve, allowing the bulk of the shoulder to press against the additional mass, helping to anchor the additional mass to the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. We can then continue to add more forms as needed to flesh out the construction. Keeping each one simple where it is exposed to fresh air, and establishing relationships between each new form and whatever existing structures we are attaching it to.

You're off to a good start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be taken even further. A lot of these forms focus primarily on masses 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, from another student's work - as you can see, 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.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. This isn't so much about any mistakes you've made but more about clarifying the lesson material. 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.

I can see you've put a lot of effort into building up your constructions in 3D, with complete solid forms, and you're doing pretty well. I do think there would be value in you applying the informal head demo method when practising animal constructions in the future (I've certainly found it helpful for achieving a more solid head construction). 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 to suit a wide array of animals.

Okay, I think that covers it. You've done a good job and I'm happy to mark this as complete. Normally the next step after lesson 5 is the cylinder challenge, but I see you already completed it. Feel free to move on to lesson 6.