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

Starting with your organic intersections you're keeping your forms simple which helps them to feel solid and 3D and you're doing a pretty good job of piling them up in a way that feels believable. On this page you're capturing how your forms slump and sag over one another with a shared sense of gravity, and they feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off, nice work.

Your shadows have room for improvement. You're pushing some of them boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, which is good, but some of your shadows are missing completely. If we set out a rule for this little 3d world that we're creating, such as "forms cast shadows away from a light source in the upper right corner" then we need to apply this consistently for every form. By being inconsistent, we break a basic assumption we have for the pile, undermining the viewer's suspension of disbelief and ultimately reminding them that they're just looking at a flat piece of paper.

Moving on to your animal constructions, it is clear that you put quite a bit of time and effort into these drawings, but right off the bat there are a few points I noticed that stood out, as they were addressed in my critique of your Lesson 4 work. It is often necessary for students to take their own steps in ensuring that they do what they need to in order to ensure they're addressing the issues that have been called out. It's very easy to simply come back from a break and continue forwards with the next lesson without consideration for what issues may have been called out (or perhaps having them more loosely in mind, but without specifics), and each student needs to decide what it is they need to apply the information they're given as effectively as they can. For some that means reviewing the past feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely. I'd recommend you re-watch this video which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox, and what your responsibilities as a student are.

Taking actions in 2D vs actions in 3D

A large portion of your lesson 4 critique was spent explaining the difference between taking actions in 2D (where we're making whatever marks we please on the surface of a flat piece of paper) and actions in 3D (where we're drawing complete 3D forms and establishing clear relationships between them) and introduced the following rule to help you build your constructions in 3D. Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. With this diagram we can see an example of the various types of actions we can take on a construction using the context of a sphere.

For example, I've marked on your squirrel in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. I've also marked in blue some spots where you'd extended off existing forms with one-off lines or partial shapes, not providing enough information for the viewer (or you) to understand how the addition is supposed to connect to the existing structures in 3D space.

When engaging with organic constructions in this course we'd like you to work strictly by adding in 3D by constructing complete new forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes wherever you want to build onto your constructions or alter something.

Sometimes you undermine the 3D illusion by redrawing your lines (I've circled an example on your squirrel construction). In ending up with all of these different lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing.

Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to execute each mark. This brings me to the next topic.

Line weight and markmaking

In your previous critique I explained that additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps, as tracing back over your lines makes them wobblier. I'd like you to watch this video which explains how to use line weight in this course. You're still tracing back over your lines a lot and this not only makes your lines wobblier and scratchier- ignoring the principles of markmaking which you should be making every effort to adhere to throughout this course- it also flattens your construction by altering the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn as shown in these examples.

On a related note, something that I think may be contributing to the tendency to go back over your lines is the fact that you often start your constructions with much fainter lines, gradually increasing the thickness of your marks as you progress. Aim to keep a more consistent line thickness through the various stages of your construction, and with each step only add the parts that change. The later stages of construction are not an opportunity to completely redraw forms, as those are problems we have already solved.

Leg Construction

In your lesson 4 feedback I went over the merits of the sausage method of leg construction, and wrote 3 paragraphs of specific advice just for you to help you apply it correctly. This doesn't appear to have been applied to your work here, as you're almost always constructing your legs from ellipses instead of sausage forms. Most of your legs are also missing the contour line at each joint to show how the forms intersect, which I specifically called out. Rather than make this critique excessively long I'll ask you to reread your lesson 4 critique, and apply the advice given there to your animal constructions, please.

Moving on to the specifics of lesson 5.

Core construction

As explained here on the lesson intro page animals have 3 major masses, the cranial ball, ribcage, and pelvis. None of your constructions have a rib cage or pelvis mass. This means you have been unable to complete the core construction of any of your animals by combining the ribcage and pelvis masses into a torso sausage. This process is shown quite consistently across the various quadruped construction demos throughout the lesson. You seem to be drawing your torsos using either an ellipse (which is mostly only applicable for birds) or completely arbitrary shapes, giving yourself a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of your constructions. The construction methods in the lessons are not suggestions, they are tools, and you need to learn to use them before moving forward.

Head construction

Another area where you could be paying more attention to the lesson material is head construction. On most of your pages you appear to be plonking the eyeballs straight onto the cranial ball without constructing eye sockets, but in the vast majority of the demos Uncomfortable heavily stresses the importance of establishing eye sockets.

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. 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.

Additional Masses

The last major point I need to cover is additional masses. It is good to see that you've experimented with using additional masses to build onto many of your constructions. It can be quite challenging figure out how to design these masses so they attach to the existing structures in 3D.

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.

Something I noticed with a few of your additional masses is that you'd run the silhouette of your additional mass directly along the outer edge of the existing form it was attached to, so that you'd define a 2D relationship between the two forms instead of a 3D one. I've corrected a couple of examples of this on your horse with the front two masses under the neck and the masses on the leg. By overlapping the additional masses with the existing forms we can give the illusion that the additional masses wrap around the leg and neck, giving them a firmer grip on the construction.

The other edits I made to the two larger masses on the back and the chest were done to demonstrate how we can make use of the shoulder mass (which I've made a bit larger using a blue ellipse) to help anchor additional masses to the construction. Where these additional masses meet the protrusion of the bulky shoulder mass I've pressed a specific inward curve into the additional masses, making them interlock. The more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Foot Construction

This last point is something of a quick bonus to help you tackle your next batch of constructions. I'd like you to study these notes which show 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. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

Conclusion

I'm certain you have every ability to do a great job with this lesson, but right now you don't appear to be making full use of the information at your disposal. This feedback is, by necessity, very dense, and I expect you will need to read through it all several times, and possibly take notes in your own words to help absorb it all. Once you have had some time to go through all the information here, and in your lesson 4 critique, I'd like you to complete some revisions to work on the various issues I've called out here. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

2- Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 6 pages of animal constructions.