Hello GardenerBoy, 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 I'm happy to see that you've drawn through most of them as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

Some of your forms are wrapping around one another with a sense of gravity, which is just what we're aiming for with this exercise. The forms highlighted in green here are really well handled. You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below and for the most part you're keeping their direction consistent, good work.

There are a couple of things I'd suggest for when you practise this exercise in future.

• This exercise is less about getting organic forms to actually cut into one another, and more about how they can be piled on top of one another in a way that feels convincing. On both your pages there is at least one form that is merging with another form. This is what Tofu referred to as clipping them into each other in your lesson 2 critique.

• Pay attention to the alignment of your contour curves. We want them to be perpendicular to the form in order to reinforce the 3D illusion.

• There are a couple of places where you're drawing forms in front of each other, rather than piling them on top of each other. I think this diagram that I made for another student might help you here. The form at the far left of the second page has contour curves that suggest it is leaning away from the viewer, but there is nothing behind it to support it in this position. We want all our forms to feel stable and supported in this exercise. This one in particular feels like it is floating in mid air instead of obeying gravity.

• Something else we could do, to help ground the form I highlighted in red, is to shift the cast shadow over. If we make the shadow a bit shorter at the near end of the form like this we can suggest that the near end of the form is resting on the ground plane rather than floating in space. It doesn't "fix" the form, but it's one way we could work with a form we'd already drawn to help it feel more stable.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is coming along quite well. It looks like you're thinking about the various pieces of your constructions as 3D forms, and figuring out how they connect together with specific relationships. There are a few issues, which I will get to shortly, but they generally occur intermittently, rather than persistently, suggesting you were figuring things out and experimenting with various strategies as you progressed through the set, which shows you were learning as you went, nicely done.

During your lesson 4 critique we introduced the following rule:

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.

There are few constructions where you'd cut into the silhouette of your torso sausage just in front of the hind legs. Here is an example, highlighted in red on your hybrid. I know where this comes from, there's a video for this lesson where Uncomfortable breaks his own rules and cuts into the silhouette of his forms in exactly this spot. This conflicting information can make it confusing for students navigating this lesson, and will be corrected once the overhaul reaches lesson 5. For now we work with what we've got, and try to guide students toward the most effective methods using the information provided in critiques. Please avoid cutting inside forms you have already drawn when working on organic constructions in future. It is entirely possible to construct an animal with a "waist" without cutting into your forms, here is an example with a dog construction.

While I can see that you're making a real effort to build on your constructions with complete 3D forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes, there are quite a few places where you'd extended your constructions with single lines or partial shapes instead. You can see this highlighted in blue on your hybrid's tail, and in a number of places on this skunk.

For the tail of your skunk, it looks like you tried to use the leaf construction that was introduced in lesson 3. Follow the basic steps introduced on the exercise page to make sure your construction flows through 3D space. Here is what this might look like. Red for the central flow line, blue for the basic footprint, then green to close the gaps in the silhouette caused by the structure folding over. Another strategy that can work well for tails is modifying the "branch" construction method that was introduced in lesson3, in a similar manner to what we see in the pitcher plant demo.

Where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building on our constructions with compete 3D forms, here in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design the silhouette of these additional forms. 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.

When you do build on your constructions with these additional masses you're generally designing them really well, you're wrapping them around the underlying structures of your constructions, being mindful of how these structures exist in 3D space, good work.

I noticed on some of your earlier pages a bit of a tendency to add quite a few extra contour curves to your additional masses. Unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines 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 did spot a few places where an additional mass has a sharp corner, where there's nothing present in the construction to press into the mass and cause this complexity. I've circled a couple of them on this horse. I've made some alterations to your construction here to show how we might address this. A lot of this hinges on making the shoulder mass bigger. Think of this mass as a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, so don't be afraid to be more generous with it. By enlarging the shoulder mass, that sharp corner in the additional mass that I circled earlier is now being caused by wrapping around a structure that is actually present in the construction. A larger shoulder mass can also be useful to help anchor any additional masses you wish to add on top of the back, the more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I also broke one of your additional masses on the hind leg into multiple pieces, layering them up to build that inward curve in the silhouette, while allowing each mass to stay simple where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing to press against it.

Speaking of legs, I'm happy to see you're making effective use of the sausage method of leg construction on most of your pages. You're doing well 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.

It's good that you're usually constructing your feet with complete 3D forms, many students treat them as an afterthought and revert to working in 2D with single lines. I still think you may benefit from studying these notes on foot construction which show how to create structure in the feet using boxy forms.

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.

Head construction does appear to be an area that gave you a bit of trouble (which is normal) and you're a bit prone to working with single lines- shown in blue on this horse or getting a bit confused, which appears to be happening on your fish construction. So, here is how we might employ the informal head demo method on a horse.

1- The specific pentagonal eye socket as discussed above.

2- The footprint for the muzzle, which is connected to an entire edge of the eye socket.

3- Extruding the boxy muzzle. Notice how all the planes of this boxy form are clearly delineated.

4- Starting to construct the additional forms of the cheek, brow, chin etc. Each one has a complete silhouette that explains how it connects to the existing structures in 3D space.

Some additional tips that may help you when working on head construction in future:

You may want to try doing a couple of pages focusing purely on heads, and drawing them bigger. This will give you more space on the page to think through the spatial reasoning problems involved. In a similar vein, make sure you give yourself ample time to think through each addition you wish to make to your constructions.

Remember that for constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the underlying structures. This isn't something you do that often, but I noticed sometimes you'd draw the details of lips and nostrils for example, without really establishing a solid base structure for these details to connect to, we can see an example of this in this skunk. Trying to achieve too much in a single step has a tendency to flatten things out, so keep that in mind in future.

So! I have given you a few things to work on, but as your work is improving rapidly and you have a pretty good track record of applying the feedback you receive, I'll be marking this as complete and leave you to apply the feedback I've given you here independently in your own time. Of course, if anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.