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

Starting with your organic intersections you’ve done a good job of keeping your sausage forms simple, and they’re wrapping around each other with a sense of weight and solidity, well done. I'm happy to see that you're drawing through them, (looking at the second two pages) as this helps reinforce your understanding of 3D space. You've done a good job with your shadows, they're clearly being cast from one form onto another and you appear to be sticking with a consistent light source, good work.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see you're generally using the construction methods taught in this lesson to good effect. I do have a few pointers to help you with your constructions but first I have a couple of reminders about markmaking.

Your markmaking is generally pretty good, for example on this page of dogs most of your lines are smooth, continuous and unbroken and everything looks intentional, good job. I've marked on your elephant a couple of ways you're not always sticking to the principles of markmaking by making scratchy marks, or redrawing lines to correct them, or tracing back over the silhouette to add line weight instead of reserving additional line weight for clarifying overlaps. We'd also like you to draw through all your ellipses as explained here.

You're doing a good job of starting your constructions with simple forms for your three major masses. I noticed you usually draw a sphere for your rib cage, but it should normally be a bit longer than that, approximately half the length of the torso as explained here on the lesson page.

You're usually sticking to the sausage method for constructing your legs, good work. There were a couple of exceptions, including this ferret where you constructed your legs from ellipses instead of sausage forms. This can make the limbs feel stiff and unnatural. Another exception was your elephant, though I'm less concerned with this one because it looks like you were using the informal elephant demo to help figure it out. That is an older demo though, and there is an explanation in the text next to it, as well as a disclaimer at the top of the informal demos page. Just to be clear, we would like you to stick with the sausage method for leg construction during this course.

Once you have your basic structure in place, I can see that you're working to build complexity through the use of additional masses, and designing these masses in such a way that they reinforce the 3D illusion of your construction instead of undermining it.

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 marked on your elephant some suggested alterations for some of your additional masses. For the alteration to the leg mass I'm using the logic from this diagram and on the belly mass I'm wrapping it round the inside of the legs. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Some of your constructions are quite simplified, not that they're inherently wrong, just that there's a lot more information in your references that you could attempt to add if you spent a bit more time on them. For example I've done some work on one of your deer here where the actual corrections are minimal (added eye sockets and beefier shoulder masses) but I've added a lot more forms to replicate some of the complexity seen in a photo as well as giving him some more structured feet.

Speaking of feet, these notes on foot construction should be useful.

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

Some of your head constructions like this ferret are either missing eye sockets or eyeballs (I'm not sure which) and it is important that both are present in your construction.

I'm going to assign some fairly minimal revisions so you have the chance to apply the information in this critique to your constructions before moving on. I'm only asking for 2 pages because I want you to take your time on each one. Time to observe your reference, time to plan your construction, time to use the ghosting method to full effect for every mark you draw, and time to push yourself to include as much structural information in each drawing as you can.