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

Starting with your organic intersections you're keeping your forms reasonably simple and I can see that you're working towards having them slump and sag around each other with a shared sense of gravity. Be aware that when you leave an end of a form sticking up in the air unsupported (like the one on the left of the second page) it makes the forms feel stiff or weightless, so keep working on having your forms wrap around each other for this exercise.

You're pushing some of your shadows far enough that they cast onto the form below, which is a good start. However you're not consistent with their depth or direction, even within the shadow from a single form. Think about what shape the whole shadow for the entire form will be, even though we won't see all of it. Then you can draw the visible parts of that shadow. I've made some suggested alterations to your shadows here and here mostly extending them in red, but also removing a section in blue. I hope that helps.

When you practice this exercise in future I suggest you draw your forms bigger. There is a lot of unused space on the page. Drawing bigger will encourage you to use your whole arm, and will help your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning.

Moving on to your animal constructions I'm going to split your feedback into the following key points: core construction, leg construction, additional masses, head construction, texture and detail.

Core construction

You're doing a good job of starting with your 3 major masses for the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis, and then joining them together with a torso sausage and a simple solid neck, good work. I noticed that you often forget to draw through the ellipses for these primary forms 2 full times before lifting your pen. For example the rib cage and pelvis masses on this fox were done with a single pass. This was mentioned up in your lesson 3 and 4 critiques as well, so make sure that you are doing whatever you need to, to remember to apply the feedback that you have received. We ask you to draw through every ellipse you freehand in this course as explained here. Even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass, please draw through them in this course, it is all good practice and extra muscle memory.

There are some constructions where you draw your initial forms in more lightly than the final steps of your construction. Such as this elephant. In some cases you're starting your constructions out with lines that are effectively designed to be replaced, and then going back in to apply a clean-up pass of thicker lines to replace them. While this is a valid approach in general, it is one we firmly avoid in this course, as discussed here in Lesson 2. These initial forms are not a loose underdrawing, but solid forms that form the backbone of your constructions, so draw them clearly.

Leg construction

I'm happy to see that you're making a real effort to employ the sausage method of leg construction in your homework. You're doing pretty well but there are a few places where you forgot to add the contour curve to reinforce the joints. These little contour curves might seem insignificant but they do tell the viewer a lot of information about how the forms are orientated in space as well as reinforcing the structure of your legs by establishing how the forms connect together. So try to remember to include them in future. You're generally using the sausage method well, but on this rat your forms aren't really sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as introduced here. If I'm honest, it looks like you drew the shape you wanted for the front legs, then added some contour lines after the fact. On this construction you also deviated quite far from the simple ellipses for shoulder masses that are shown in the demos.

Additional masses

Before I get into the meat of dealing with additional masses, I need to restate something from your lesson 4 critique: once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Please refer back to your previous critique for a detailed explanation as to why.

So, I've marked on your lion in red where you cut back inside the shape you had established for the leg. This is something you're doing less often than in your lesson 4 work, but there are a couple of spots where you're not respecting the solidity of the forms you have established on the page, such as the inside of the mouth on this fox.

On the same lion I marked in blue some places where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene.

This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

Where the concept of adding whole forms to our constructions was introduced in lesson 4, in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design the shape of these 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.

So, I've done a fairly extensive draw over of your additional masses on your lion here. I've altered the 2D extensions on the top of the head and the back of the rump to be their own complete forms with fully enclosed silhouettes. I also established a contour where the tail attaches, connecting your forms together in this manner is important for keeping your constructions 3D. I also took the opportunity to take some of your existing additional masses and wrapped them around the underlying structures of the shoulders, thigh, cranial ball etc. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I noticed it appears that there are a lot of cases where you're using extra contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid - unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using contour lines in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

I wanted to mention that you're off to a great start in the use of additional masses along 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.

As an extra bonus, these notes on foot construction may also be useful.

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.

Looking through your head constructions I get the impression that you're jumping ahead into drawing the shape you see in your reference (which is often quite complex) then popping a contour line or two onto your construction to try to make it feel 3D. As I explained when discussing additional masses, this is backwards. Instead with constructional drawing we are building things slowly, step-by-step, using simple forms. If you try to add too much complexity all at once your drawing will fall flat, even if you go back and add contour lines to it. So, for example, I've taken your reindeer head and demonstrated step-by-step here how to take a more constructional approach to it. Notice how I created a footprint for the muzzle before extending it, so that it has a specific 3D connection to the cranial ball. Everything I added is a complete 3D form with its own silhouette. Admittedly I did not complete the antlers, but they were one of your stronger elements so I didn't feel that you needed a full demonstration for those.

Texture and detail

Looking at this tiger head I can understand why you filled the stripes in black, given that this is something that Uncomfortable does during the intro video for lesson 5, but in the tiger head demo he does point out in bold, block capitals: "Lastly, an important note - when drawing eyes, or really anything that appears black in your reference image, DO NOT FILL IT IN WITH SOLID BLACK. I cannot stress this enough - we have an urge to fill in what we see as black, but this is no different from the orange of the tiger's fur. Just because it lines up with the colour we're drawing with does not mean that there is any benefit to filling it in. Instead, you should be treating everything in your subject matter as though it were solid white or grey." I would suggest giving these reminders on how to approach texture in this course another read.

Conclusion You have plenty to work on, but I feel you're showing a strong enough understanding of the lesson material to be able to apply this feedback on your own. Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions. The 250 cylinder challenge is next, best of luck!