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

Starting with your organic intersections, there are a few things of note:

• I'm seeing a tendency to make these forms really long, and in some places they're getting wobbly and too complex. Try to stick to simple sausage forms for this exercise.

• We want the forms to feel heavy in this exercise, try thinking about them like well filled water balloons. Whenever you leave gaps beneath forms, as seen here, it makes them appear weightless. With each new form you add to the pile, imagine you're dropping it in from above, and think about how as it lands on the forms below it will slump and sag with gravity, and come to rest in a stable position.

• Some of your contour curves are kind of hapahzard. If you are having trouble keeping your contour curves aligned don't be afraid to use a central flow line like from the organic forms exercise to help you, and of course take as much time as necessary ghosting each one.

• This next point isn't necessarily a mistake, as it is not explicitly stated in the exercise instructions. In future you will get more out of this exercise if you draw each form in its entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they pass behind another form. Here I've completed one such form as an example. Forcing yourself to think about how the entirety of these forms exist in 3D space will help you to further develop your spatial reasoning skills.

• Some of the shadows are tentative and many of them are missing entirely. We want to apply shadows consistently across the pile. Having some forms that cast shadows and others that do not will break a basic assumption we have for this little world we're trying to create and ultimately undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief and remind them that they're looking at a flat piece of paper. Here is what one of your piles might look like with the shadows completed.

Moving on to your animal constructions, it is great to see you've drawn through your forms throughout these pages, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

There are a couple of clues here that indicate that perhaps you did not take as much time as was really needed to go through the lesson material. As noted here in the homework and exercises section, you should be sure to go through all of the demonstrations before starting your homework. The dates of your homework pages start the day after you were cleared to begin the lesson, and I have a hard time believing that you thoroughly studied all of the demos in under 24 hours. This becomes particularly apparent for pages like this donkey where we actually have a detailed demo here of the same species in a similar pose, and you don't appear to have made full use of the information provided in the lesson to help you here. There are other indicators, but I guess it will be best to go over the main issues one by one in a logical order. Keep in mind that these critiques serve to help clarify anything from the lesson that a student may not understand, not as a replacement for a student's own effort in going through the lesson material.

Taking actions in 3D

During your lesson 4 critique we introduced the following rule to help you to only take actions on your constructions that support the 3D illusion. "Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette." Fortunatley you're not cutting back inside the silhouettes of forms you have drawn very often, however you are fairly prone to extending your constructions with one off lines and partial shapes. I've marked examples of both on a section of your eagle. Please refer to your lesson 4 critique for a fuller explanation of how this undermines the 3D illusion of your constructions and examples of how to add complete 3D forms to your constructions instead.

For some of your constructions you appear to have started out with very faint lines, and increased the weight of your marks as you progressed. This can encourage you to redraw more of the construction than is strictly necessary, and in going back over your lines you accidentally make small alterations to your forms' silhouettes which flattens your constructions somewhat. I encourage you to keep a more consistent line thickness throughout the various stages of your construction, so that at each stage you only add the parts that change, rather than feeling compelled to redraw a structure in its entirety.

Resist the temptation to redraw lines to make corrections. By having multiple lines representing the edge of one form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing. Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to executing each mark to the best of your current ability.

Core construction

All right, so you've generally got the hang of identifying your major masses to start off most of these constructions. There are some exceptions, such as this fish which appears to be a flat shape with a couple of random ellipses floating in it. We do have a fish demo which shows how we can build such creatures by using the same simple solid forms as usual.

Speaking of floating ellipses, when it comes to joining your rib cage and pelvis mass together into a torso sausage we want them to fit snugly inside this sausage form as discussed here in the wolf demo. Leaving the major masses floating as we see in this donkey and this mole rat gives a weaker connection between these forms, and a less solid foundation to build the rest of the construction upon.

The torso sausage should stick relatively close the the properties of a simple sausage, the torso sausage for this mole rat is far too complex.

Furthermore the torso sausage should incorporate a slight sag through the midsection, right now you tend to draw them straight across, or even arching upwards.

Lastly don't forget to define how the neck connects to the body in 3D space, using a contour ellipse. Sometimes you'll just draw the neck as a pair of simple lines.

Leg construction

For animal constructions we want to start the leg constructions by laying out ellipses for the shoulder and thigh masses, where the legs will connect to the torso sausage. You can read a fuller explanation on this here. While I can see that you're aware of this, you're not consistent with it, as we can see examples of shoulders that are bizarrely shaped or completely absent. Where you do include ellipses for your shoulder and thigh masses, they tend to be very small, and/or very low. Instead of thinking of these ellipses as holes to plug the legs into, think of them as a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, on most quadrupeds it will be located well up the sides of the body, and do not be afraid to be more generous with its size.

It is great to see that you've remembered to use the sausage method of leg construction, although your application of this method needs work.

• Construct a chain of overlapping sausage forms. These forms should stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms. Here is an example of leg forms that deviate from these characteristics significantly.

• As I have already pointed out twice previously, you need to apply a contour curve at each joint to define how these sausage forms intersect in 3D space, you can see these curves highlighted on this copy of the sausage method diagram for clarity. These curves are sometimes absent, or sometimes placed outside the reigion where it is possible for the two forms to intersect. I've made another diagram here that might help it to click for you. These contour curves might seem insignificant, but using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively.

• Take another look at this dog leg demo that I shared with you previously. Instead of deforming your leg sausages in an attempt to use them to describe the entire leg, or altering the sausage forms with one off lines, the idea here is to build onto the basic sausage chains with additional forms. I can see you've attempted to use some additional forms on the legs of this donkey, though most of the other leg constructions are completely bare. You can see some examples of how to apply additional masses to animal legs in the donkey demo I linked earlier.

For feet in particular, I feel you would benefit from taking a look at 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.

Aditional Masses

It is good that you're starting to explore using additional masses to build onto your basic constructions. When you use additional masses I am noticing that there are a some places where you tend to avoid certain kinds of complexity - like sharp corners and inward curves - resulting in a lot of softer, rounded corners instead. Unfortunately this absence of complexity robs us of the very tools we need to use to establish contact between these 3D structures, instead making the masses appear flatter and more blobby. This diagram illustrates the difference.

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've also made a couple of edits to some of the additional masses on this donkey. Notice how I've introduced some specific complexity to the mass under the chest by tucking it between the front legs,the more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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.

Conclusion

This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and I'd like you to take as much time as you need to read it thoroughly, as well as reviewing the relevant sections of lesson material and your lesson 4 critique. You may also want to take some notes in your own words to remind yourself of what to work on. Once you've done that I'd like you to complete some extra pages to address the points I've raised here. For these I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• 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.

• 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 1 page of organic intersections and 6 pages of animal constructions. If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.