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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them feel solid and three dimensional. You're demonstrating a clear understanding of how these forms wrap around one another in 3D space, by drawing your forms slumping over one another with a sense of gravity.

You're pushing your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, and designing them in a manner that is mindful of the curvature of the surfaces these shadows are being cast onto, good work.

Moving on to your animal constructions these are coming along very well indeed. You've paid close attention to the idea of taking actions on your constructions in 3D by adding complete forms wherever you want to build or change anything, and you're demonstrating strong spatial reasoning skills by connecting these forms together with specific relationships. Your mark making is clear, confident, and purposeful, which is great to see.

Core construction

The first stages of your constructions are looking solid, though I have a couple of points for you to keep in mind.

• As noted here the rib cage should occupy roughly half the torso length, you tend to draw it as a ball, making it notably shorter than shown in the lesson intro.

• You do a good job of connecting your cranial ball to the torso with a simple, solid neck. I'm noticing on many of your constructions you tend to make the basic neck construction very narrow, which necessitates using a lot of additional masses to flesh out this area. This isn't necessarily a mistake, but you'll make things easier for yourself if you start with a wider cylindrical form for your neck in most cases.

Leg construction

You're doing a very good of using the sausage method of leg construction on most of your pages. There are one or two places where these leg sausages get a little bit too complex, for example on this bear but most of your leg constructions are great.

It is good to see you've usualy remembered to include contour curves at the joints, to explain how these forms connect together, this helps to reinforce the 3D illusion of your constructions.

When it comes to constructing feet, I have some advice on how you can tackle the construction of the base foot structure, and then the toes. As shown here on another student's work, we can use boxy forms - 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 structured that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

Additional masses

Its good to see you're exploring the use of additional masses throughout your constructions, and in most cases you're doing a grand job of specifically designing the silhouette of those masses to have them actually wrap around the existing structure.

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 did notice that on some of your necks you've drawn additional masses without giving each mass its own fully enclosed silhouette- sometimes when you reach the cranial ball you'll cut the mass off, leaving its silhouette open-ended. Be sure to draw all your forms in their entirety, fully closed, and if they should overlap, allow them to overlap in 3D. I've drawn some corrections for this here on one of your goat constructions.

There were a couple of other points I wanted to make while I had that goat construction open. Sometimes you'll draw an additional mass with an inward curve where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press into it. Instead, we can build an inward curve by layering multiple masses, keeping each one simpler where it is exposed to fresh air, I've shown this on the neck of your goat.

The green arrow is to draw attention to where I've pressed the mass at the base of the neck up against the shoulder mass, note the specific use of an inward curve where the additional mass wraps around the front of the shoulder there. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I've also redrawn a couple of the masses on the legs that included arbitrary sharp corners. I have a hunch that you were aware that these masses weren't quite feeling solid, as you've gone back in and added a contour curve to them afterwards, to try to make them feel more 3D. Unfortunately those contour lines help a form feel more three dimensional on its own, in isolation - but does not solve the problem at hand, which is the lack of relationship being defined between the mass and the structure to which it is attaching. Furthermore, 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, exacerbating the issue. So, I would actively avoid using 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).

You are off to a pretty good start with exploring the use of additional masses to build on your leg structures, 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, 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 and puzzles.

There was one more oddity to bring up on your goat. I've marked with a blue ? on this image a line which I didn't fully understand the purpose of. If it is the upper edge of an additional mass on the belly, then we're missing the lower edge of the torso sausage, which I've popped in there with a blue line. If the lower edge of your torso sausage is the outer edge of the belly, then the line I've marked with a ? seems to be redundant. It's possible that this is a contour line running along the surface of the torso sausage, although with two other additional contour curves already on your torso sausage this one is unnecessary.

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. The question comes down to this: "how many do you really need?"

Unfortunately, that first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns. The first one you add will probably help a great deal in making that given form feel three dimensional. The second however will help much less - but this still may be enough to be useful. The third, the fourth... their effectiveness and contribution will continue to drop off sharply, and you're very quickly going to end up in a situation where adding another will not help. I find it pretty rare that more than two is really necessary. Anything else just becomes excessive.

Be sure to consider this when you go through the planning phase of the contour lines you wish to add. Ask yourself what they're meant to contribute. Furthermore, ask yourself if you can actually use the second (form intersection) type instead - these are by their very nature vastly more effective, because of how they actually define the relationship between forms. This relationship causes each form to reinforce the other, solidifying the illusion that they exist in three dimensions. They'll often make the first type somewhat obsolete in many cases.

Head construction

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.

Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but as shown in in this banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Looking through your pages, it's clear that you're thinking through how the various pieces of your head constructions exist in 3D space and you're figuring out how to wedge these pieces together like a puzzle. You're sometimes breaking your heads into a more complex series of planes than what is shown in the informal head demo, or varying the shape of the eye sockets, but your work is solid and three dimensional.

One minor point that can help when it comes to eyelids, is instead of drawing the top and bottom eyelids as simple lines, draw them as entire forms - like a piece of putty being stuck over the eyeball, as shown here. This will help you focus more on how it wraps around the ball structure.

Conclusion

Okay, I think that covers it. You've done a great job and I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.