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

Starting with your organic intersections I'm happy to see you drawing through your forms here, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

On this page some of your contour curves don't "accelerate" and curve around the form, but stop abruptly. You want to hook your contour curves around your forms, as explained here.

You're starting to develop a sense of how your forms slump and sag around each other with gravity, with just a couple of exceptions. I've highlighted one of them on your work here. You want all the forms in your pile to feel stable and supported, like you could walk away from them and nothing would topple off. And you want the forms to feel soft and heavy, like well filled water balloons.

You're projecting most of your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, but some of them are incomplete. For example the form on the far right of this page should also be casting a shadow on the ground plane for the section where there are no other forms underneath it.

Moving on to your animal constructions there are a couple of points from your lesson 4 feedback that I need to repeat.

On this bird you accidentally cut into the silhouette of your head and body by using an inner line from your ellipses as the basis of your construction. This diagram shows which lines to use if there is a gap between passes on your ellipses.

I can see you're working to take actions in 3D by adding new, complete forms when you want to build on your constructions. There are a few places where you do extend your constructions with partial shapes instead of complete forms as highlighted in blue on this bird and this feline.

It looks like you're making an effort to use the sausage method for constructing your legs. You're not always sticking closely enough to the characteristics of simple sausage forms, as noted on your work here. I know you can keep your sausage forms simple, in isolation, in the organic forms exercise. Make sure you are taking your time in the planning and ghosting stages for each and every form you draw. It can be tempting to spend less time on each individual form when doing full constructions, because there are so many of them to draw in order to complete your task. Resist this temptation and draw each one to the best of your current ability, if this means that you need to spread a single construction out over several sessions, then you are encouraged to do so.

Okay, moving on to new information.

There are a few signs that suggest you may have underestimated just how much time these constructions might demand from you. One of the issues that stands out most comes down to observation. From what I can see, you're not spending as much time as is really needed studying your reference. 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. Right now, because there does appear to be a greater reliance on memory rather than direct observation (not everywhere - some parts come out stronger and more directly informed than others), there are definitely elements that come out looking highly simplified. Some examples would be the front legs of this construction which are missing a major joint, and the hind legs of this construction which are completely absent. There are subtler ways that you're not quite being observant enough, such as your drawing of the puma where you drew the pelvis directly above the rib cage, instead of off to the left as was shown in the demo, which has caused the rear end of your construction to lean awkwardly to the right.

Everything you add to these constructions- every form, every mark, needs to be the result of a conscious decision. If I were to point to something in your construction and ask "why did you do this?" the answer should not be "I don't know". The answer can be wrong, in the sense that your thinking was wrong, but as long as you're thinking it through and have some reason you can give, correct or not, that shows you thought about it. So for example, one might ask why one front leg of this construction was drawn twice as thick as the other front leg, or why you chose those particular shapes for the silhouettes of your additional masses.

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.

There is a tendency for some of your masses to stay soft and rounded all the way around, which gives them the sense of having been pasted onto your construction like stickers, instead of having a clear 3D relationship with the underlying structure. You do better with some of them, but for clarity this diagram explains the difference.

So, for example I've redrawn some of your additional masses on this construction to show you how to wrap them around the underlying structures more. I've made use of the shoulder and thigh masses, as well as the cranial ball, to press these new masses up against. Note the specific use of inward curves and sharp corners where these new masses interact with the existing structures. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I want to note that on this construction you did a great job of wrapping an additional mass on top of the back around your thigh mass, that one is spot on, great work!

Aside from the point I made earlier about your leg sausage forms being too complex, you're making a good start with your leg constructions, crafting an armature of sausage forms. I noticed that while you did place additional masses in a few spots, you were a bit sparse in doing so, focusing on capturing specific bumps. But the diagrams I shared with you in Lesson 4, especially the ant leg one, show this being taken much further. As shown here on another student's work, consider the masses that exist internally within the silhouette of your structure, not just those that break the silhouette's edge. They're important because even if we were only to focus on the silhouette, considering the inside means thinking about how all of these pieces fit together in 3D space, making the whole structure feel more grounded and solid.

As an extra bonus these notes on foot construction may 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 shown in in this banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Now, I have given you a number of things to work on here, so I am going to assign some revisions below. For these, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Do not work on more than one construction in a given day. So if you happen to put the finishing touches on one, do not move onto the next until the following day. You are however welcome and encouraged to spread your constructions across multiple days or sittings if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability. That's not a matter of skill, it's a matter of giving yourself the time to execute each mark with care.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, as well as a rough estimate of how much time was spent on it.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.