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

Starting with your organic intersections you've done a good job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and I'm happy to see you drawing through them all as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

On this page most of the forms have been laid parallel which makes it look like they would just roll off the pile. Forms 2 and 7 are the only forms that look like they're not parallel with all the others. When working on this exercise we want all the forms to feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off.

We also want the forms to feel heavy in this exercise, like well-filled water balloons. Leaving gaps where forms are unsupported will make them feel stiff or weightless. Think about how these forms might slump and sag around the forms below, and come to rest in a stable position.

You're doing a good job of projecting your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the forms below, and you appear too be keeping a single consistent light source in mind. In future try to keep the placement of the forms in relation to one another in space very clear in your mind when designing your shadows. There are a couple of places where you've drawn shadows that contradict one another, for example here where the blue shadow indicates that form 4 is resting on top of from 3, but the pink shadow tells us that form 3 is in in front of form 4.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is coming along very well. You're doing a good job of building your constructions piece by piece from simple to complex, without attempting to skip any steps. Your work appears carefully planned and methodical and I can see that you're putting a lot of thought into how all the pieces of your constructions fit together with specific relationships, and this is helping to reinforce the 3D illusion we seek to create with these exercises, well done.

So, you're doing a pretty good job here, but I did notice a few spots where you had undermined the 3D illusion by extending off existing forms with one-off lines or partial shapes, which doesn't quite provide enough information for the viewer (or you) to understand how the new additions attach to the existing structures in 3D space. I've marked some examples on this page in blue.

Instead, we want to be drawing complete 3D forms with their own fully-enclosed silhouettes wherever we want to build on our constructions. I do see you applying this quite well in many places. Here is how I might go about adding the extensions I marked in blue previously, using an additional mass under the neck, and another additional mass on the cheek.

Speaking of additional masses, in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building onto our constructions with complete forms, and now in lesson 5 we delve a bit deeper into how we can design the silhouette of these additions in such a way that they appear to wrap around the existing structures convincingly.

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.

To further illustrate this concept for you I've made a few edits to this meerkat.

A- One of the hind legs had been extended with a one-off line. I've replaced it with a complete additional mass.

B- These two masses appeared to get cut off where they passed behind something else. we want to "draw through" and give the masses their own complete silhouettes.

C- This edge of this mass was running almost parallel with the edge of the leg it was attached to, with a teeny tiny overlap, this can make the mass feel flimsily attached, like it might wobble off if the animal were to move. I've wrapped this mass more boldly around the leg, to give it a firmer grip.

D- Here I've redrawn the shoulder mass, with the blue ellipse, making it a bit larger. It is good that you're including a shoulder and thigh masses on your constructions (rather than trying to attach the legs to the bottom of the body) though you do tend to draw them quite small, more so on some of your other constructions than this particular example. In these constructional exercises we're using the shoulder and thigh masses as a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that allow these animals to walk, so don't be afraid to be more generous with their size. These bulky shoulders can also provide a really useful structure to help anchor additional masses. Notice with the mass above the shoulder, I've pulled it down from the spine around the sides of the body, and pressed it against the shoulder mass, causing some specific sharp corners and an inward curve. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

E- Sometimes you draw pretty large additional masses that run long distances. Trying to achieve a lot with a single mass can sometimes lead to it getting too complex and feeling flat. This one wasn't bad, but I wanted to show you how we can break large complex masses into smaller pieces, so each one can achieve a more specific purpose. The two red masses were drawn first, then the purple one was added, wrapping around the forms that are already in place.

Something else I noticed with your additional masses, is a tendency to pop an extra contour curve or two onto them to try to make them feel more 3D. Adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasise the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships. While adding lines that don't contribute much isn't the worst thing in the world using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses. So, I would actively avoid using surface contour lines on additional masses in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

I'm happy to see that you've continued to make effective use of the sausage method for constructing legs, and this is working well. You tend to leave quite a few of your leg constructions as basic chains of sausages, and where you do use additional forms to build extra bulk and complexity these 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.

Moving down to the feet, you're doing a good job of drawing your feet with complete forms, though I did see a couple of constructions where you'd switched back to working in 2D with the toes, by drawing them with single lines. I think you may find it helpful 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. Then we can use 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:

1- 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.

2- 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.

3- 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.

Looking through your constructions it is apparent that you have a strong understanding of these key elements, and most of your head constructions feel really solid. You may find it useful to take a look at this rhino head construction which shows how this method of head construction can be adapted to fit a variety of unusually shaped heads, and also pushed further, using more additional forms to build a more specific, characteristic construction of the particular animal in question.

Oh, as a fairly minor bonus point, when drawing eyelids, it helps a lot to actually draw each eyelid as its own separate additional mass, wrapping them around the eyeball as shown here. This will help push you into thinking about them in 3D.

Okay I think that covers it. Hopefully the advice in this critique will help you push these constructions a little further so you can get even more out of them when practising in future. You've done a good job here, your constructions are solid and I'm happy to mark this as complete. Next up is the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.