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

Starting with your organic intersections your forms have a nice sense of volume, and you're doing a good job of exploring how they wrap around one another in 3D space, rather than just stamping them in front of one another as flat shapes.

When you practice this exercise in future I want you to think of these forms as being soft and heavy, like well-filled water balloons, and how gravity will cause them to slump and sag, and come to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported. Right now there is a tendency for some of your forms to be precariously balanced, giving the sense that the forms are either weightless, or frozen in time. We want to be able to walk away from the piles knowing that nothing will topple off.

You're doing a good job with the shadows, you're projecting them boldly, so that they cast onto the surfaces below, and appear to be keeping a consistent light source in mind.

Moving on to your animal constructions, on the whole you've done a good job, parts of your work are looking solid and 3D, and I can see you've paid close attention to the information presented in the lesson instructions.

There are a couple of things from your lesson 4 feedback which appear to have slipped your mind as you worked through the lesson.

• Remember to use the outer line of your ellipses as the silhouette of any ball forms you construct. This will help you to avoid undermining the solidity of these forms by accidentally cutting back inside their silhouettes. I think something that is contributing to the tendency to undermine the solidity of your ellipses is that they're coming out quite faintly, leading you you often tracing back over the sections you want to keep visible at a later stage. If you're not deliberately drawing the first stages of your constructions faintly, then it is possible that your pen may be getting low on ink, as looking back at your lesson 1 submission, your ellipses were showing clearly back then.

• During your lesson 4 feedback I went over the merits of the sausage method of leg construction, gave you some advice to help you to apply it more effectively, and specified that this method should be used throughout lesson 5. I can see a variety of strategies being used for your leg constructions, ranging between flat, partial shapes and what looks like a genuine effort to apply the sausage method to these frogs. Looking back at your lesson 4 submission, I think you do understand how to use the sausage method, but have missed out on some mileage with building your legs in 3D with your animals by not applying this method consistently.

These critiques don't exist just to let you know whether you're ready to move onto the next lesson, they contain important information which is designed to help you as you move forwards. It's very easy to simply come back from a break and continue forwards with the next lesson without consideration for what points may have been discussed (or perhaps having them more loosely in mind, but without specifics), and each student needs to decide what it is they need to apply the information they're given as effectively as they can. For some that means reviewing the past feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely.

Keep in mind that the principles of markmaking should be followed throughout the course. On the whole your markmaking isn't bad, but there are some places (such as these) where it is getting a little loose and sketchy, or where I can see you scratching lines together from choppy little strokes. This suggests that you might be getting a little bit lax on fully applying all of the stages of the ghosting method for each mark you make. Separating our markmaking into the planning, preparation, and execution stages allows is to be very intentional with each mark we make, so each line is the result of a conscious decision and serves a clear purpose. By doing this rigorously throughout the course, we actually train our instincts, so they become stronger when we want to rely on them for sketching other things more freely and loosely outside of these exercises.

Moving on to new information that we cover in lesson 5, much like in lesson 4, we're focused on how to build additional forms onto our constructions in a way that feels 3D, and we introduce the idea of additional masses to help students think about how to design the silhouettes of these additional forms.

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.

Now, there are a few places where you're already doing a really good job with the design of your additional masses, I've marked up an example of a mass I thought was well done on the horse at the top of this page. On the same page, I've pointed out some places where you'd introduced corners to additional masses in places that appear arbitrary. If we adjust these two masses so that the complexity occurs as a direct result of interacting with the existing structures they might look more like this. With the mass on top of the back I've made use of the shoulder mass to help anchor the additional mass to the construction, in a similar manner to how you'd pressed the more successful mass against the top of the thigh. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. The mass on the belly transitions more smoothly between curves as it wraps around the smooth rounded surface of the torso sausage.

You've made a 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 as puzzles.

As a quick bonus I'd like to share these notes on foot construction with you. They show how to introduce structure to the foot by using boxy forms (which you're already doing well in some cases) and take this a step further by constructing similarly boxy forms for each toe.

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.

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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All right, I think that should cover it. You tend to hop back and forth between taking actions in 2D (drawing partial flat shapes and one off lines) and actions in 3D (drawing complete forms and fitting them together in 3D space) but I feel that your underlying spatial reasoning skills are plenty strong enough for you to be able to take the advice in this critique and apply it to your constructions independently, 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.