Hello Meli55, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job 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 and come to rest in a position that feels stable and supported.

As explained in the feedback for your previous submission, we encourage students to resist the temptation to redo lines to make corrections, as adding more ink to a mistake generally results in making the work messier and confusing.

An aspect of this exercise that shows room for improvement is the cast shadows. Some (not all) of your shadows are a little bit tentative, as though you're concerned about pushing them boldly, this causes some of the shadows to cling to the form casting them instead of being projected onto the forms below. Of greater concern here is that some of the shadows are missing completely. When we apply a rule to the little 3D world we're creating, such as "forms cast shadows away from a light source in the upper left" we need to apply that rule consistently to all the forms in the pile. Having some forms cast shadows but not others will be confusing to the viewer, undermining their suspension of disbelief and reminding them that they're just looking at lines and shapes on a flat piece of paper. On both pages there are sections where you outlined shadows and did not fill them in, which suggests it would be helpful for you to take a little extra time at the end of each page to check your work and make sure it is really finished before moving on to the next task.

Moving on to your animal constructions you're off to a pretty good start. There's plenty to praise here, I can see you making an effort to build your constructions up with 3D forms, and figuring out how to fit these pieces together in a way that feels believable. I'm happy to see that you've continued drawing through most of your forms and striving to use the sausage method of leg construction. I do however have a number of suggestions to offer that will help you make use of the concepts we tackle in this lesson more effectively, and ultimately get as much as you can out of these kinds of exercises.

Looking through these pages, there's a general trend for these constructions to be a little oversimplified. You're doing a decent job putting most of the major elements down, but it almost looks like you might get a bit eager to move onto the next construction without asking yourself if you've really got as much as possible out of the current one. A lot of this comes down to observation. By observing the reference carefully and frequently we can pick up on some of the more nuanced, subtler elements that play a role in an object, and transfer that information to our construction. We want to be able to identify the major structural elements, and then the smaller forms that may be attached after that, gradually whittling down from big to small, simple to complex. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. This is explained in more detail in this section of lesson 2.

When constructing with ball forms, it is best to always use the outer line of your ellipses to represent your form's silhouette. This will prevent accidentally cutting back inside your forms and undermining their solidity, as seen here on your cat. . Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion.

I can see you're making an effort to take actions on your constructions "in 3D" though there are still quite a few places where you switch to taking actions in 2D, where you'll add one off lines or partial shapes to a construction, which doesn't provide enough information to explain how the addition connects to the construction in 3D. I've marked some examples of this in blue on your horse. Instead, we want you to draw complete new forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes wherever you want to add to your construction, as shown here. By designing the silhouette of these additional forms in a way that communicates how they attach to the existing structures in 3D space, we can actively reinforce the solidity of the construction as we build it.

Moving on, it is clear that you've been working towards using the sausage method of leg construction across the set, which is a great start. There are some good sausage forms in your set, although they do tend to be a bit erratic, as though you're having difficulty keeping your sausage forms simple and getting them to the correct size and placement simultaneously. I do appreciate that this can be quite challenging, and you do get credit for sticking to your guns and working with your forms once they are on the page, rather than redrawing them to try to correct them. I do think investing a little more time into planning and ghosting each sausage form may be helpful for keeping your leg sausages under control. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming when there are a lot of forms to draw for a particular construction, or frustrating if we think we've already made a mistake earlier in the construction. Focus on each form you're working on, one at a time, and executing the form at hand to the best of your current ability.

When it comes to reinforcing the joints of your leg constructions with a contour curve to define the intersections, things are a bit variable. As noted here on your cat you're doing this correctly some of the time, but you're a bit prone to placing the contour curves outside the region where it is possible for the sausage forms to intersect, (this will be the area where the forms overlap on the page, as explained in this section of the form intersections exercise) or sometimes they're absent. You can find a pretty detailed demonstration that utilises the sausage method with this donkey construction on the informal demos page.

Usually we'll find that the animal's leg doesn't look much like a chain of sausages, and it becomes necessary to build onto those sausage armatures with additional forms to capture various pieces of bulk, bumps, and complexity that couldn't be captured with simple sausage forms alone. I can see a few spots where you're starting to explore this idea, though you do tend to leave the majority of your legs bare. You can see some examples of how far we can push this method with the ant leg demo and dog leg demo I shared with you previously.

While we're on the topic of legs, let's take a moment to cover feet. I think you may find it helpful to take 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.

Another key area I wanted to talk about is how we go about designing these additional masses when we want to build onto our basic armatures. 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.

With this in mind I've made edits to some of your additional masses on this cat with notes explaining why each change was made.

• With the mass on top of the neck I've wrapped the mass more boldly around the underlying structures to give it a firmer grip. The green arrows show the thinking behind this design, pulling the mass around the rounded cranial ball and neck cylinder. When we run the silhouette of an additional mass parallel with the silhouette of the form it is attaching to, with minimal overlap, it can leave the additional mass feeling flimsily attached, like it might fall off if the animal were to move.

• The mass at the front of the chest and the mass on top of the back are both cases where I can see you've put some thought into how your additional mass would wrap around the existing structures. At the front of the chest, instead of pushing the mass against the far side of the base of the neck, I've pressed it against the near (visible) side of the base of the neck. On top of the back, rather than pressing the additional mass against the pelvis mass (which is already fully engulfed at an earlier stage, when we combine the pelvis and rib cage into a "torso sausage") I've used the top of your thigh mass to help anchor the additional mass to the construction instead. The thigh and shoulder masses do protrude from the torso sausage, whereas the rib cage and pelvis masses do not. This makes the shoulder and thigh masses particularly useful for pressing additional masses against. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• I'd also added a couple of additional masses to one of the legs, to show how they can be used to develop leg constructions to look more natural- although without seeing the reference I'm only guessing at where they might be added.

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:

• 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.

Scanning through your constructions, it looks like you're at least somewhat familiar with this method, as you appear to be using pentagonal eye sockets and wedging the muzzle snugly against them for the cat on the left of this page. Try your best to employ this method in its entirety 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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

If we take a look at the head of this deer and compare it with this step by step example that I made as part of another student's critique, we can see that there's a lot more structure we can capture, and that by delving into the forms of the cheek, forehead, nose etc we can arrive at a more convincing and characteristic construction.

Alright, I can see you've made a concerted effort to follow the instructions for these constructions and you're largely heading in the right direction. I do think that you could get more out of these constructional exercises by taking more time carefully observing your references, and using those observations to take your constructions a step further than the bare essentials. I've given you quite a bit of advice here, and I expect you may need to read through it all a few times to absorb it. To help you to apply the advice provided I will be assigning some revisions below.

In addition, when tackling these pages I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Stick to one construction on each page, and try to make full use of the space available on the page for that one construction. I think drawing your constructions large will help give you room to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these constructions, especially for finer elements like heads and feet.

• 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 4 pages of animal constructions.