Hi SamChan, thank you for re-uploading, everything is there now.

Let's start by taking a look at your questions:

• Should drawing feathers be treated like drawing leaves?

  For feathers that are too small or too densely packed to construct individually, we can treat them more like texture, as shown in this example. The leaf construction method can be a good strategy for capturing larger "primary" feathers.

• How do we draw horse tails that are just hairs? My second horse tail looks flat...

Your horse tail looks fine for the purposes of this lesson. If you're wondering why your second horse's tail looks a little funny, it is because the top of a horse's tail contains a tailbone, so there's something sturdy in the middle to support the tail in that raised position. It is more apparent when the hair has been trimmed shorter, as seen here. In this image I'd established a solid form to support all the long tufts of hair. You're not expected to know animal anatomy, but to work from the forms visible in your reference, so you did the exercise correctly.

• Do we draw a sausage ribcage for creatures with longer bodies (like the axolotl and earless moniter lizard)? I realised after starting the drawing that I had no idea how to go about it.

The torso sausage of your axolotl looks good. I can see you had to think a bit harder about what to do with the lizard but I think your approach is working. Just remember to use the outer line of your ellipses as the basis for your construction, to avoid accidentally cutting back inside their silhouette and undermining their solidity.

• For the bumps on the lizard (to communicate overall silhouette texture), should they be drawn flat, or as a 3D lump? Or were these meant to be cast shadows?

Whether we choose to fully construct those forms, or imply them using the guidance for texture introduced in lesson 2, comes down to whether the forms the forms in question are arranged strictly along the surface of a existing structural form (in which case it's texture, like the analogy of stapling a bunch of fish to your walls, that would turn them into texture) or if it is more independent in how it sits in space, in which case it's more of its own structural element and should be constructed.

Moving on to the meat of this critique, as I said in my initial reaction to your submission, your work is great. I can see you've paid a lot of attention to building your constructions up "in 3D" and fitting all the pieces of your constructions together in a way that feels believable.

I'm happy to see that you've made liberal use of additional masses to build on your basic constructions throughout the set, and you're designing many of them in a way that establishes a clear 3D relationship between the additional mass and the structures it is attached to. You're doing well, but I'm still going to go ahead and share a piece of prewritten text that I think will help you with the design of additional masses when practising these constructions in future.

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.

There are a few places where you seem a little tentative about really pulling your additional masses around the 3D surfaces of the existing structures. For example along the belly of this horse there seem to be several very slim masses that just barely hang onto the underside of the torso sausage. Here I've used a single mass and wrapped it more boldly around the torso sausage to give it a firmer grip. The green arrows are there to help show how I'm thinking of the curvature of the torso sausage in 3D space, and how that influences the design of the additional mass.

Above the shoulder I've pulled the mass down from on top of the spine around the side of the body, and I've also made use of the ellipse you had constructed for the shoulder mass to help anchor the additional mass to the construction. Where the shoulder protrudes from the torso sausage we can use it to press a specific inward curve into the additional mass (also noted with a green arrow). The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Sometimes I saw places like this area on your hybrid where you end up with inward curves along the outer edge of a given mass (where there's nothing to press in on it to create that inward curve). If you really need an inward curve along the edge of the construction there, we can build it by layering masses as shown here allowing each one to maintain a simple outward curve where it is exposed to fresh air.

I see that on some of your pages you'd piled quite a few additional contour lines to the surface of your additional masses. Adding this type of contour line (like from the organic forms with contour curves exercise) can help a form feel more 3D in isolation, but doesn't really help to clarify the relationships between your forms or solidify the construction as a whole. The type of contour line introduced in the form intersections exercise is much more effective in this regard, and it also only allows us to add one contour line per intersection. The type of contour line running along the surface of a single form allows us to add as many as we want, but unfortunately they suffer from diminishing returns, where the first one may be quite helpful, but the second much less so, and the third is largely redundant. While adding contour lines that don't contribute much isn't a big deal in itself, it can sometimes lead students to thinking that adding contour lines will "fix" a mass that doesn't feel 3D, causing students to invest less thought into the design of their masses. So, when you go through the planning phase of each contour line you wish to add, be sure to ask yourself what it is contributing to your construction, and if it is the best tool for the job.

When it comes to constructing paws, you may find it helps 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. You can see this demonstrated in these notes on another student's work.

The next 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 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.

Overall I'm seeing that you're putting a lot of thought into building your head constructions up in 3D, and you're often using elements from the informal head demo, such as wedging the pieces of your head constructions together snugly, without leaving arbitrary gaps. Try bringing it all together in the way the demo shows, and you should be able to get even more out of this exercise in future. Sometimes it seems like this method is 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.

One thing that can also help, specifically when dealing with eyes, is to draw the eyelids themselves as their own separate additional masses (one for the upper lid and another for the lower lid). This can help us better focus on how they're actually wrapping around the eyeball itself, as shown here, much moreso than trying to draw them with single lines.

The last thing I wanted to call out is simply that I noticed a tendency to draw your earlier constructional marks a little more faintly, particularly the ellipses of your major masses. Be sure to make every mark with the same confidence - drawing earlier parts more faintly can undermine how willing we are to regard them as solid forms that are present in the 3D world, and it can also encourage us to redraw more, and trace more over this existing linework later on (such as along the top of the big ellipse for the body of this flamingo), rather than letting them stand for themselves.

All right, I think that should cover it. You've done a great job and I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.