Hello Alexey_umnov, 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, and they're sagging and slumping around each other with a sense of gravity.

You're pushing your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below on your first page, but your second is too tentative. I've made them bolder here as well as bringing to attention a place where you'd attempted to redraw one of your forms to correct it. Sometimes we do make mistakes, as we are not robots, it is best to work with what you have on the page instead of trying to "fix" it. Cutting inside your forms reminds the viewer that they are just looking at lines on a piece of paper and breaks your 3D illusion. Repeatedly redrawing or correcting things can also lead to your work becoming messy or confusing.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see your spatial reasoning skills are developing well, and it looks like there is notable growth as you progressed through the set.

General concepts

It looks like you made a deliberate choice to include 2 constructions on every single page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

I'm noticing a tendency to start your construction off lighter, and then increase the weight of your marks as you progress. This can encourage us to redraw more of the structure than we strictly need to. I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight to clarify overlaps only towards the end.

And a quick reminder to draw through your ellipses 2 times before lifting your pen as explained here. You're doing this sometimes, but not consistently, and it is something that we ask students to do for every ellipse they freehand in this course.

And another quick reminder- we don't use form shading in this course (that link explains why). We can see an example of you using hatching to describe form shadows on the belly and near hind leg of this tortoise.

Reminder from your lesson 4 critique

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - 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. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

For example, I've marked on your moose in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn, and in blue some places where you extended the silhouette of your construction without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space.

Another way you make little alterations to your silhouette is when you add line weight. This often results in little extensions where you "bridge" your silhouette from one form to the next, as seen on these camels.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouette. Uncomfortable shared several diagrams with you in your lesson 4 critique, to help you to understand how to do this.

Additional Masses

Where lesson 4 introduced the idea of building onto our construction with complete forms, here in lesson 5 we get more specific about how we design those forms to interact with our exiting structures.

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 can see you're making a good start with using additional masses on your constructions, though some of them stay soft and round all the way around their silhouette, giving them the feeling of being pasted on like stickers. Some are better, and do have a sense of wrapping around your construction. I've done a draw over on your moose to show how we can be much more specific with how the new masses wrap around the underlying structures. I drew a larger ellipse for the shoulder mass. This is a simplification of some of the big muscles that help the animal to walk so don't be afraid to be more generous with it. I then used that shoulder mass to help anchor the additional masses to the construction- note the inward curves where the additional masses press against it. I also redrew some of the 2D extensions to be forms in their own right.

Leg construction

I'm really happy to see that you're using the sausage method to construct your legs. Though in many of your constructions you're leaving your chains of sausage forms completely bare. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as seen in this dog leg demo. You can also find an example of this in the donkey demo from the informal demos page.

When you do use additional forms on your legs, it is often by using a sphere to fully enclose a joint, as seen in these camels. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, as shown here. he key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

Sometimes it can be more challenging to add forms to legs if you're only focusing 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.

As an extra bonus these notes on foot construction may be useful.

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.

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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

I'll also include this camel head demo for comparison to your own camel head constructions.

Conclusion

I can see that you put a lot of time and effort into your homework, and your skills are developing. There are enough points of concern here (some of which have been brought up in your pervious critiques) that I will assign some revisions to allow you to address these points before moving forward. In particular:

-Don't use any sort of "clean up pass." If you're making parts of your construction faint by accident check that your pen has sufficient ink flow.

-Try to only take actions on your construction "in 3D." Don't alter the silhouette of a form you've already drawn, add a complete, new form.

-Work on having your new forms wrap around your existing structures. And don't forget to use additional forms to build complexity on your legs as well as the torso.

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 4 pages of animal constructions.