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

Starting with your organic intersections you’re doing fairly well with this exercise. You’re keeping the forms simple enough to feel solid, and you’re able to pile them up so that they wrap over one another convincingly, slumping with a sense of weight and coming to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported. You’re pushing the shadows boldly enough to project onto the surfaces below, and casting them in a reasonably consistent direction for any given pile.

• On this form I’ve circled some areas where there are faint extra lines. These could just be marks showing through from the page behind, but it does look a lot like you started off with a different pen (or possibly pencil) and then came in with your rich dark fineliner once you were sure of where you wanted the form. This kind of exploratory underdrawing can lead students to think of their forms as less solid and real, as well as investing less time and care into those early marks as they can be discarded later. Make sure you use the same pen for drawing all of your forms, with the option to use a brush or thicker marker for filling in large areas of black if necessary.

• You’re not drawing two full circuits around the small ellipses on the tips of the forms, which Tofu instructed you to in your lesson 2 feedback for this exercise.

• As stated here in the exercise instructions each page should consist of only one pile of forms. It looks like you’re trying to get more mileage in by putting four piles on one of your pages. While it is admirable that you want to get more practice in, by drawing small piles with maybe three or four forms in each, you limit what you get out of the exercise by repeating similar simple arrangements over and over instead of facing more complex challenges with larger piles.

• You’ll get more out of the exercise if you draw through and complete your forms (as shown in the demonstration video) instead of cutting some of them off where they overlap. This will push you into figuring out how the whole form sits in space, and help you develop your spatial reasoning skills further.

Moving on to your animal constructions, it looks like your eagerness to complete the exercises in quantity continues. I can see that you’ve made a good faith effort to follow the instructions and build up your constructions like 3D puzzles, but it is also apparent that most of your constructions simply did not receive enough space or time for you to be able to work to the best of your current understanding and ability.

Given that the importance of giving each construction as much time and space as it really needs was one of the first pieces of advice I gave you for your insects, it is baffling to see you cramming even more constructions on a page in this lesson. Drawing more itself isn't a bad thing on its face, but it's about how it impacts the manner in which we engage with the work. You will always have more opportunities to practice these exercises after the lesson has been marked as complete - the quantity we assign is not with the expectation of seeing growth and improvement over the set, but just to judge whether your understanding of what you're meant to be doing with the exercise is correct, or whether it requires clarification. Can't really judge that too well if you're spreading the time, energy, and effort you could have dedicated to a single construction over four or five quick studies.

I’m observing a tendency to oversimplify or skip steps that heavily suggests that you should be investing more time into these. Both for the actual drawing and for observing your references carefully and frequently throughout the process, so you can pick out more information from your reference image and rebuild those forms in your constructions.

Make sure that you take the time to methodically and intentionally follow the steps that you do understand, so that next time we provide feedback we only need to point out and explain things that you did not understand. For example we insist on students drawing through ellipses as this helps to keep them smooth and even. You do this correctly often enough that there is clearly no problem with your understanding or ability, but sometimes it seems you are less intentional about following this step, leading to ellipses like the pelvis mass in your Axolotl getting uneven and deformed.

Make sure you always start with simple forms, gradually building up complexity bit by bit. If we look at this bird for example, you’ve got a series of loose disconnected lines to suggest feathers on the underside of the wing. Having gaps in the silhouette of a form makes it unclear where the edge of the wing is supposed to be, so this can only be interpreted as lines on a flat piece of paper. It would help you to keep a feeling of solidity if you establish a simple shape for the wing first, then attach complexity of the feathers one at a time, like adding edge detail to a leaf back in lesson 3.

We can also see an example of jumping ahead into too much complexity with a single step in the feet. It looks like you tried to draw the entirety of the lower leg and toes with a single form. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer (and you) to understand how it is supposed to sit in 3D space, so the more likely it is to fall flat. Instead, we break the construction into as many steps as necessary for each addition we make to feel solid and three dimensional in its own right. You can see an example of how we could apply this to a paw with these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing feet in future.

I think you generally have the right idea about how to build up your constructions by taking actions in 3D as discussed in your previous critique. For example this cat is mostly built from complete 3D forms, with their own fully enclosed silhouettes, and you’re doing fairly well at explaining how the pieces are supposed to fit together with specific 3D relationships, such as using a contour ellipse where the base of the tail connects to the body.

The thing is, you’re not being very consistent with this approach. If we look at this frog you’ll see I’ve marked with blue a ton of places where forms have been left incomplete, so it is less clear how they are supposed to connect to the existing structure in 3D space. With the muzzle and additional masses I think you’re intending to construct 3D forms, you’re just being a bit sloppy about completing them. Again, take your time, be methodical and intentional, complete each form before moving onto the next one.

The hind leg is more egregious as it consists only of flat partial shapes which get cut off where they pass behind one another, and it looks like you realised it felt flat and tried to fix it by adding contour lines after the fact. Unfortunately this type of contour line (as introduced in the organic forms exercise) only helps to take a form that can already be perceived as 3D (usually through the simplicity of its silhouette) and clarifies it. They don’t help to address the underlying issue, which is a lack of information on how the forms fit together in 3D space.

In the case of the leg, it should be constructed using the sausage method as specified in your lesson 4 feedback. It looks like you had the sausage method loosely in mind for most of your pages, although you’re missing some of the specific requirements of the method.

• Make sure you stick to the properties of simple sausage forms as closely as you can for each limb section. These are the same as for organic forms, we’re looking for two round ends of equal size, connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. Sometimes you do alright, the upper section of the front leg of the frog is good, but it doesn’t seem like you consciously had this in mind as a priority, if we look at the lower section of the front leg of the frog, the ends are flattened, with sharp corners, instead of being smooth and round.

• Once the sausages are in place, the second step is to apply one contour line to each joint which we use to define how the sausage forms penetrate one another, connecting them together with a specific 3D relationship, much like the contour lines introduced in the Form Intersections exercise in lesson 2. The contour lines at the joints are consistently missing in your work, and sometimes you add contour lines to the midsection of the leg forms instead, which is specifically noted on the sausage method diagram as something to avoid, as they stiffen the leg needlessly.

• The third step is to use additional forms to build up any lumps, bumps, or extra bulk that cannot be captured with the simple sausages, to develop the character of the specific leg in your reference. While your additional forms are generally pretty sparse (give your constructions more time and space so you can fully develop them) I did quite like how you were building upon the legs of the stag on this page and would love to see more of this in your work.

When laying out your major masses, remember that as introduced here the ribcage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso. You tend to draw it as sphere, so sometimes it is too short. The section below discusses incorporating a slight sag through the torso sausage, which you include sometimes, but not others. Looking at the two camels at the top of this page the torso sausages are doing the opposite, arching upwards, forcing you to try to attach masses under the belly, which is much more tricky than adding them to the top of the torso where we have gravity to help us.

In lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions “in 3D”- additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses on the majority of your constructions, although it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette 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, if you take a look here you’ll see that I’ve made some adjustments to a couple of the masses on your bear, pulling them down from on top of the spine and wrapping them around the side of the torso. You’ll notice some specific corners and inward curves where they meet the nice big protruding masses you’d established for the bulky shoulder and thigh where the legs attach to the body, and these sorts of protrusions are a goldmine for helping to anchor masses to the torso more securely. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

On this image I’ve also constructed another additional mass, to replace the section where you’d attempted to extend the silhouette of the back with a one-off line, which only exits on the flat space of your piece of paper.

On this bear it looks like you skipped over constructing the torso sausage, which I’ve added in green. This is an important step for establishing a solid foundation for your constructions, so don’t skip it, even if the ribcage and pelvis overlap on the page. Continuing on, once the core construction is in place, make sure you give additional masses their own complete silhouettes instead of cutting them off where they pass behind 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. 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 (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.

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.

Phew. That was by necessity, quite a long critique, and I expect you may need to read through it a few times to absorb all the information. I’m going to ask you to complete some revisions to address the various points discussed here. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Stick to one construction per page, using as much of the space available for that one construction as you can. This is to encourage you to give each construction as much space as you really need, to be able to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved here, and fully construct your forms, even for smaller areas such as heads and feet.

• 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.

• 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 5 pages of animal constructions.