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

The Google Drive link works fine, thank you. I wanted to quickly note that when submitting your work, PDFs are not ideal. A JPEG or PNG is easier to deal with as I can import these into my drawing software to provide drawovers on your work, with PDFs I end up taking a screenshot as a workaround. We actually talk about PDFs being kind of a pain for us to work with when critiquing in this video from Lesson 0 (somewhere around the 16 minute mark).

Starting with your organic intersections overall you're doing a pretty good job, you're capturing how the forms slump and sag over one another with a sense of gravity, and most of your forms feel stable and supported.

Remember to keep your forms simple for this exercise, as this simplicity helps the forms to feel solid and 3D. There are a couple of forms that are starting to get slightly too wobbly and complex.

I encourage you to draw through your forms wherever possible, instead of cutting them off where they pass behind one another. This will help you to develop a stronger understanding of how the entire form sits in 3D space.

Many of your shadows appear tentative, so they read more like heavy line weight than clearly projecting onto the surfaces below. I'd like you to work on projecting your shadows more boldly when practising this exercise in future. Here I've pushed the shadows away from the light source you'd indicated on one of your pages to show what I mean.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are heading in the right direction. I'm pleased to see areas where you're clearly putting a lot of thought into how the various pieces of your constructions exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

I am seeing a few areas where you jump back and forth between building your constructions in 3D by drawing complete forms and establishing how they fit together in 3D space, and altering your constructions in a manner that can only exist in the flat 2D space of your piece of paper, working in single lines or partial shapes. I've marked a couple of examples of working in 2D on this flamingo using red hatching where it looks like you'd cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn, and blue for some places where you'd extended the silhouette of existing forms with one-off lines. When working on organic constructions in this course keep pushing yourself to only take actions that reinforce the 3D illusion we seek to create, by adding complete new forms wherever you want to build or alter something. Here is what those two flat extensions might look like if we drew them as complete 3D forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes.

On the same flamingo image I noted that you didn't appear to have attempted to use the sausage method of leg construction, as was requested in your lesson 4 critique. You can find a fairly thorough example of using the sausage method in the donkey construction on the informal demos page. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs across the set. Fortunately there are some pages where it does look like you were aiming to use the sausage method, so let's focus on those.

• As noted on this deer I'm happy to see that you've been using ellipses to establish the shoulder and thigh masses, and placing them well up the sides of the body, good work. The first stage of the sausage method is to construct a chain of overlapping sausage forms. These have the same properties as the organic forms exercise from lesson 2, round ends of roughly equal size, connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. On this particular page you seem to be flattening the ends of the forms, introducing sharp corners to them. On others, you appear to be drawing circles and then connecting them, and on some others you're drawing around your leg forms multiple times, which is something I specifically called out as a mistake in your lesson 4 critique.

• The second step is to define the intersections where these forms connect together by drawing a contour curve at each joint. I see you've done this on some constructions but not others. These little curves might seem insignificant, but they are a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of your construction, so be sure to remember them in future.

• Remember the sausages are not intended to capture the legs exactly as they are, they serve as an armature which we build onto with additional forms to add the kinds of bulk and complexity we see in the particular leg we're constructing, as shown here. I noticed that the reference you'd used for this deer construction had the lower half of the legs cropped off. Try to find references where the whole animal is visible, as it will make your job easier. If you do choose to use a reference where the feet are obscured, I suggest using a second reference where the feet are visible to help inform your choices when filling in the missing pieces.

As a quick bonus on constructing paws, I'd like you to study 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.

Now, while it doesn't look like you attempted to use additional masses to flesh out your leg constructions, I'm happy to see that you've been using additional masses along the torsos and necks of many of your constructions, and it looks like you're often thinking about how these additional masses attach to the existing forms in 3D space.

It can be tricky to figure out exactly how to design these additional masses. 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.

So, with that in mind, I'd like you to take another look at this flamingo where I've redrawn the mass at the base of the neck in purple, breaking it into two separate pieces, each with their own complete silhouette. Layering masses in this manner allows us to build that inward curve at the base of the neck without pressing an inward curve into an additional mass where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to cause this kind of complexity.

I've also made a few edits to the additional masses on this deer. I wanted to point out that the mass on top of the rump is very well designed, you'd kept it simple where it is exposed to fresh air (a soft outward curve) and introduced specific sharper corners and an inward curve where it presses against the top of the thigh. This demonstrates a strong understanding of how all these forms exist in 3D space, and your additional mass helps reinforce the illusion that these forms are 3D, great work. I've gone ahead and applied the same idea to the additional mass on top of the shoulder, and the one under the belly, thinking through the spatial relationships of all the forms that are present in the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

With the additional mass under the neck, its silhouette almost directly followed the edge of the neck cylinder, making it feel flimsily attached. I've pulled it around the neck more boldly, to give it a firmer grip on the construction.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. I see you tried out lots of different head construction methods, and I'd like to point you in a more concrete direction for how to approach head construction in future.

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.

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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

I did see you had a question on one of your pages about constructing antlers. I can share this step by step example with you, which also shows how to apply the informal head demo method of construction to a deer.

Okay, I think that should cover it. Overall you're not that far off what we'd hope to see in this lesson, however I would like you to take another swing at using the sausage method of leg construction, and I'll ask you to complete 3 pages of quadruped constructions to put the advice in this critique into action.