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

Starting with your organic intersections these are pretty good, you're keeping your forms simple, and I'm happy to see you drawing through them as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

On the first page you've done a good job of showing how your forms slump and sag over one another with a sense of gravity. On the second page a couple of the forms feel a little bit precariously balanced, like the one highlighted here. You want all your forms to feel stable and supported in this exercise, like you could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, and their direction is consistent, good work.

Moving on to your animal constructions you are doing a good job. It's clear that you're thinking about how each form you draw exists in 3D space and you're demonstrating a good understanding of how these forms connect together with specific relationships.

Where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building on our constructions with complete 3D forms, here in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific on 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, on this llama I've made some alterations to some of your additional masses.

1- Here I've completed the mass on the belly by drawing through where it passes between the front legs. Always try to draw through your forms wherever possible, like you have X-ray vision.

2- I wanted to point out that you are off to a great start with using additional masses 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.

3- Here it looks like one mass was cut off where it passed behind another. Be sure to draw all your forms in their entirety, fully closed, and if they should overlap, allow them to overlap in 3D.

4- There are some approaches to building additional forms onto your leg structures that work better than others. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

When I was marking that llama I also noticed some for the contour curves to define the intersections where the leg sausage forms join together are missing, as marked here. They are present on most of your constructions, but it is worth noting that using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is a very 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.

You're doing a good job with constructing feet, but I still feel that sharing these notes on foot construction may be useful. Here you can see Uncomfortable making use of a boxy form for the foot, then constructing smaller boxy forms for the toes.

I noticed a couple of places such as the ears and some of the additional masses on this page where you added a fair few contour lines to a single form. Contour lines themselves fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want. The question comes down to this: how many do you really need?"

Unfortunately, that first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns. The first one you add will probably help a great deal in making that given form feel three dimensional. The second however will help much less - but this still may be enough to be useful. The third, the fourth... their effectiveness and contribution will continue to drop off sharply, and you're very quickly going to end up in a situation where adding another will not help. I find it pretty rare that more than two is really necessary. Anything else just becomes excessive.

Be sure to consider this when you go through the planning phase of the contour lines you wish to add. Ask yourself what they're meant to contribute. Furthermore, ask yourself if you can actually use the second (form intersection) type instead - these are by their very nature vastly more effective, because of how they actually define the relationship between forms. This relationship causes each form to reinforce the other, solidifying the illusion that they exist in three dimensions. They'll often make the first type somewhat obsolete in many cases.

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:

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.

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.

It looks like you're doing a good job of focusing on how all the pieces of your head constructions fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and the results are generally quite solid.

I did notice that sometimes you draw your eye sockets quite loosely- meaning that the lines don't connect together. Here is an example of leaving gaps in the shape of the eye socket. These gaps give a weaker foundation and make it harder to wedge all the elements of your head constructions together snugly, so I think taking the time to carefully connect these lines together will help you in future.

On a fairly minor note, something that can help with constructing eyelids. Instead of drawing the opening of the eye as lines, it helps to think of the eyelids as little pieces of putty wrapping around the eyeball, and drawing them as complete forms as shown here. This will help to push that 3D thinking even further and help to wrap the eyelids around the eyeball in 3D space.

All right, I think that covers it. You're doing a good job so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.