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2:18 PM, Friday June 21st 2024
Hello Tomako, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.
Starting with your organic intersections great work! You're drawing the forms such that they convey a believable impression of gravity as it presses down on the forms, causing them to slump and sag to either side. You’re also doing a good job of pushing your shadows boldly, so that they are projected onto the surfaces below.
Moving on to your animal constructions, your work is honestly very well done, and there isn’t much to criticise. You’ve done a great job of using the information available in the lesson material and combining it with the additional instructions in your lesson 4 critique, which isn’t an easy task. Your constructions feel solid and believable, and you’re maintaining clear specific relationships between the various pieces of you constructions, fitting them together like a puzzle.
I’ll talk a bit about two key topics for lesson 5, additional masses and head construction, then offer a couple of little nitpicks for things you can keep in mind in future.
So, starting with additional masses, I’m happy to see that you’ve been making liberal use of this tool to flesh out your constructions and create nuance and complexity. You’re doing really well at thinking about how these masses exist in 3D and attach to the existing structures, designing them in a way that feel s believable.
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.
As I’ve said, you’re doing really well. I did spot a few places where you’d added some unexplained complexity into a mass, and I’ve marked out a couple of examples on this doe. At the base of the neck we’ve got an inward curve where the mass is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press into it. I’ve circled a couple of places where you’d added a sharp corner to an arbitrary spot on a mass where it was attaching to a smooth, rounded sausage form. Here I’ve made some adjustments to the masses to remove the unexplained complexities. I also made use of the protruding thigh mass to help anchor the additional mass to the rump area. I saw you making use of the shoulder and thigh masses on some of your other constructions, which is great. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.
I wanted to mention that you’re off to a great start with building up your leg structures with additional forms, although this can be pushed further. 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, on another student's work. 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 as puzzles.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
I can see you’re working with similar principles when constructing your heads, and you’re often wedging the pieces together tightly to arrive at solid results. Try bringing it all together in the way the demo shows, and you may be able to get even more out of the exercise. 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.
So! Overall your work is great, though I did spot a couple of other little things you can keep in mind.
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Sometimes you draw around your sausage forms twice. We insist on students drawing around ellipses two full times before lifting the pen off the page as this leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute them smoothly. Drawing sausage forms requires a different series of motions, so drawing around them twice is less helpful, and can lead to accidentally making the sausage forms elliptical.
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When adding cast shadows, we need to be mindful of where our light source is. For example, if you look here, you'll see that you've got the shadow being cast both above and below the leg. This suggests an inconsistent light source. It should be casting below, or above, but not both simultaneously.
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I see from your little note on this page that you realised that having texture covering most of the construction was a bit much. Having detail almost everywhere can be a little overwhelming for the viewer, and leave them unsure where to look. I can see that you’re able to make use of the implicit texture technique introduced in lesson 2, see if you can leverage this to control the density of detail to create focal points that help guide the viewer’s eye. I think that’ll help make your work even stronger.
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As a quick bonus I’ll also share these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to take the approach of using a boxy form to introduce structure to the foot (which I’m happy to see you using on many pages) and take it a step further by using similarly boxy forms to construct toes.
All right, I think that should cover it. You’ve done a great job with this lesson so I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
Next Steps:
250 cylinder challenge
11:26 AM, Sunday June 23rd 2024
Thank you very much for such detailed insights into my work! I am really grateful for the feedback, and will try to improve further on all those points you mentioned!

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This is one of my favourite books. It's a fantasy-comedy romp, and the world that J. Zachary Pike has created honestly takes my breath away. There are laughs at every turn, but the story is not without its heart wrenching moments - some for which I have yet to fully forgive the author.
If you're at all curious about the kinds of nonsense I read, or just need something new to sink your teeth into, this is one I can highly recommend. On top of that, being self-published by an indie author, it's the kind of thing where your individual support can go a long way.
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