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

Starting with your organic intersections, your lines are smooth and confident, and you're doing a good job or keeping your forms simple. Your forms have a good sense of weight to them, and you're drawing them slumping and sagging over one another in a way that feels believable, great work.

I have just 2 suggestions for things for you to try when practising this exercise in future.

• Try to push yourself to draw through all of your forms and complete them, instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they pass behind another form. This will help you to develop your spatial reasoning skills even further.

• Try experimenting with putting your light source in a different location. It appears both piles have the light source directly overhead. What would the shadows look like if we move the light to the left? The right? A lower angle? Is the light slightly behind the viewer? Or maybe behind the pile of forms? Changing this up will give you some fresh challenges to think about with this exercise.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is excellent. There honestly isn't much to criticise, so I'll go over the main elements covered in this lesson to discuss what you've done well, and see if there's any advice I can offer to get more out of these constructions in future.

First off, additional masses. Here you're doing a great job of specifically designing the silhouette of those masses to have them actually wrap around the existing structure. You're using this effectively in larger areas like along the torsos where you need to build up muscle mass along the animals' backs, but also in smaller areas like building up the finer elements along their legs.

When it comes to additional masses, I always try and push students to think about their masses first as they exist on their own, in the void, as a ball of soft meat. Here they have no complexity, being made up only of outward curves with no corners to their silhouettes. Once they press up against an existing structure however, they start developing complexity, with inward curves to wrap around those existing forms as shown here. This essentially means that we need to always make sure that we understand the nature of both the additional mass, and all the forms it's pressing up against. We can't draw the silhouette to have complexity (inward curves) without a clear source of that complexity. For the most part you did a great job with this.

I've made a suggested edit to the back of one of your reindeer here. There are two things happening here, first, I noticed that one end of this additional mass had been cut off where it passed behind the mass above the shoulder area. Remember each additional mass should have its own complete silhouette, and if they should overlap, allow them to do so in 3D. Secondly I've split the mass into two pieces, to avoid pressing an inward curve into it where it is exposed to fresh air.

I also spotted a couple of extensions to the back of these giraffe knees appear to just be single lines. Of course there are loads of places where you've done a great job of building up with additional masses, including the front of these knees, so I think this was just a moment of forgetfulness, rather than any lack of understanding.

It is great that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction throughout the set, and you're sticking really to simple sausage forms for your base armatures. There are a few places where you're missing the contour line to define the intersection between sausage sections, but they are present in some cases. It's still worth mentioning that using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool (and one you use well). 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 off to a good start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be taken even further. A lot of these forms focus primarily on masses 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.

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.

Overall you're honestly not that far off, and I can see you working through similar principles when you approach head construction, and there are definitely areas where you're following the process shown in that informal demo at least in part - but bring it all together in the way the demo shows, and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise.

Oh, also worth mentioning - when drawing eyelids, it helps a lot to actually draw each eyelid as its own separate additional mass, wrapping them around the eyeball as shown here.

All right, I think that covers it. Fantastic work, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.