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

Starting with your organic intersections these turned out well, you're doing a good job of drawing your forms slumping and sagging over one another with a shared sense of gravity, and it is good to see you drawing through your forms here, as this helps you to develop a stronger understanding of how these forms exist in 3D space.

You're pushing your shadows far enough to cast onto the forms below, and you've mostly kept their direction consistent. I did notice that the top form on this page appears to be casting a shadow to the left and to the right at the same time, which won't happen if we have a single light source. I've done an edit to your work there, going over a shadow that felt correct in red (which you did draw) and pushing back some of your shadows in pale blue. The blue patch on the left was actually being cast towards the light source you had defined on your page. So, consistency of your shadows is something you can keep an eye on when you practise this exercise in future warm ups.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is coming along well, and you've shown quite a bit of growth across the set.

In your lesson 4 critique we talked about taking actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion that we're aiming for, and introduced the following rule to help you to achieve this."Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette." We introduced the idea of building on your constructions using complete 3D forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes instead, and I shared a number of diagrams and demos to help you to do this.

You've mostly avoided cutting back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, the only example I spotted was on the rump of this elephant where that pass of heavier line weight looks as though you changed your mind and tried to make the rump appear smaller than what you had already drawn. I can see you're making an effort to build on your constructions with complete 3D forms instead. There are a couple of areas where you're a bit prone to extending the silhouette of your forms with partial shapes and one off lines, which as I explained previously in your lesson 4 feedback, doesn't really provide enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space.

One of these areas is heads. I've marked some examples on this horse in blue. I'd like you to take a look at these notes that show how to define a 3D connection between the cranial ball and the boxy muzzle form.

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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

The other area where I notice you tend to extend your construction with partial shapes is feet. Remember each addition to your construction should have its own complete silhouette. When it comes to constructing feet, I have some advice on how you can tackle the construction of the base foot structure, and then the toes. As shown here on another student's work, we can use boxy forms - 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 structured that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is additional masses. It is good to see that you've experimented with these additional masses throughout the set, and I have some advice that should help you to design them more effectively 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.

So, with that in mind I've made some corrections and notes on your horse.

• Starting at the top of the page, I really want to stress that whenever you draw an additional mass it must have its own complete silhouette. Its is great that you're experimenting with layering multiple masses, but sometimes when you do that you'll cut one mass off where it passes behind another. I've redrawn your overlapping masses on top of this horse's back so that they overlap in 3D space.

• Also with the masses along the horse's back, I've pulled them down from the spine around the sides of the body and pressed them against the masses of the thigh and shoulder. Notice the inward curves where the mass gets more complex as it is deformed by these underlying structures. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• Under the horse's belly and at the back of the rump I have sharpened some corners in masses that you had left quite smooth and rounded throughout their silhouettes. This lack of complexity robs you of the tools you need to explain how the additional mass connects to the underlying structures and can leave the mass feeling quite flat, like it has been pasted on like a sticker.

• Of course, we want the complexity in these masses to be directly caused by structures that are present in the construction. Where a mass is exposed too fresh air, it should remain simple, as a smooth outward curve. If you want to build an inward curve in your outer silhouette with additional masses you'll want to layer multiple masses, so each individual mass can stay simple.

• This last one is a bit of a nit pick, and goes beyond the scope of what we usually cover in this lesson. This mass on the front leg struck me as odd, because it attaches to both the near front leg and the far side of the chest. We don't really get into anatomy here, but if you think about how the leg needs to be able to move forward and back so that the animal can walk, it would make more sense to build this extension either by building it off the leg and the shoulder, or going from the chest in between the front legs.

On most of your pages you've done a good job of using the sausage method of leg construction. Looks like the tigers were an exception (probably following the intro video which shows an older construction method) but from the wolf demo onward you've done a good job with the sausage method.

You've made a good start 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.

Your use of texture tends to be a bit explicit. While this is fine for describing tufts of fur that break the silhouette, when drawing fur that doesn't break the silhouette it actually works better to describe it implicitly by drawing the shadows in between the tufts as shown here. For the wrinkled skin on the elephant, remember that we can get more dynamic and characteristic shadows by designing them with a shape, instead of a line, as shown here.

Alright. I've given you quite a bit to think about there, but your work is improving and you have a good track record of applying previous feedback, so I'll leave you to apply this advice independently in your own time. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.