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

Starting with your organic intersections I see what you mean about the contour curves on those two forms.

First, remember to lay out your contour curves and ellipses so they follow the logic shown in this diagram I shared with you previously. So, with this form we won’t see the ellipse on the right-hand end of the form, as the tip faces away from the viewer. On the other hand here the ellipse is correct because this end faces towards the viewer, and we need to flip the contour curve next to it the opposite way, to keep the 3D illusion consistent.

The second thing that will help you to make these two forms more convincing is to be much bolder about pushing your contour curves wider, as demonstrated here. You appear reluctant to shift the degree of your contour curves, and that limits your ability to show how these forms turn in space. The idea of varying the degree can be a bit difficult to grasp at first, if you’re unsure why the curves get wider as the form turns towards the viewer, and narrower when we look at the form from the side, please rewatch the ellipses video from lesson 1 and pay close attention to what happens to the cardboard discs as Uncomfortable turns them in space. You can see this degree shift in action with any object with a circular cross section, but this album of photographs of a slinky provides some particularly useful examples.

Those contour curves aside, you’re doing fairly well with this exercise. You’re keeping your forms simple enough to feel solid, and you’re projecting your shadows boldly while keeping a consistent light source in mind for each pile.

When practising this exercise in future, imagine how gravity will affect your forms, and with each one you add, try to draw it in a position where it feels stable. I think you’re generally doing okay, but a couple of your forms feel precariously balanced, like they might roll off the pile at any moment, such as the small form on the lower right of this pile. In this case you could probably make the form a little bit longer, as it is difficult to make really short stubby forms sag over the form below. Also, remember to pile your forms perpendicular to one another instead of parallel as this makes building up a stable pile an easier task.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are off to a good start. It is great to see you keeping your linework smooth and purposeful, and I can see you’re putting a fair bit of attention into how to build these constructions up like 3D puzzles, establishing how all the pieces fit together with specific relationships. I think your general approach here is heading in the right direction, and I have a few pieces of advice that I hope will give you some direction on how you can get even more out of your constructions in future.

Firstly, it is important that you strive to only take actions in 3D as discussed in your lesson 4 feedback. I’m happy to see that you’ve avoided cutting back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, although sometimes you do extend off existing forms with one-off lines and partial shapes. I’ve highlighted with blue some examples on your zebra (the extension on the hind leg is one I saw repeated on a few pages) where you drew a one-off mark bridging from one 3D structure to another, enclosing the hatched area. But this hatched area exists only in two dimensions - there is no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how it is meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. Creating believable, solid, three dimensional constructions despite drawing on a flat page requires us to first and foremost convince ourselves of this illusion, this lie we're telling, as discussed here back in Lesson 2. The more our approach reinforces the illusion, the more we make new marks that reinforce it even further. The more our marks break the illusion, the more marks we make that then further break the illusion, for us and for everyone else.

In lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions “in 3D”- additional masses. It is good to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses on the majority of your constructions, although it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette in a way that feels convincing.

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.

On the same zebra construction I wanted to bring to your attention a couple of ways in which unexplained complexity can make an additional mass appear flatter that what we would hope to achieve with this tool. On this image I’ve supplied some suggested corrections to both the 2D extensions and the over-complex mass. It looks like a lot but I’ll talk you through it.

• Starting with the neck, it is okay to make your basic neck construction wider, as long as it remains simple. If you realised the neck was too skinny after you had already constructed it, you could also draw an additional mass here. Quick aside, make sure you remember to actually construct the neck, this chameleon is missing this step, so the cranial ball floats in a sea of additional masses, with no foundation to support these structures.

• In blue I’ve made the shoulder mass larger, with a simple ellipse. This is where we get a lot of bigger muscles that help the animal to walk around. We don't need to worry about this in terms of being anatomically correct, but they do serve a purpose to make the construction more solid by giving us something to press our other masses up against.

• The one-off lines on the chest and hind leg have ben replaced with complete new forms, designed to wrap around the existing elements in your construction.

• The long mass above the neck and shoulder has been separated into two masses, so each one can serve a more specific purpose. Having masses run over long distances can sometimes lead to students accidentality overcomplicating them, so don’t be afraid to build up your construction from smaller, more manageable pieces.

• The red mass above the shoulder was constructed before the purple one. Instead of including a random sharp corner in an arbitrary spot on the torso, I’ve pulled the mass down around the side of the torso and introduced some more specific complexity where it presses against the top of that blue shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• The purple mass on the neck has also been pulled more boldly around the side of the neck, instead of being perched precariously on top. The red mass above the shoulder has now become part of the existing structure, so when the purple mass meets the red one, it wraps around it like any other form in the construction.

• Not related to additional masses, but worth calling out, you’re still inconsistent about applying a contour curve to each joint, which was something I specifically called out and discussed in your previous critique. You’re including them often enough that I can see you understand the concept, but the inconsistency suggests you may benefit from slowing down and thinking through your constructions more logically, to ensure that you remember to fully apply all the construction steps that you do understand.

• The use of additional forms to build up onto your leg constructions is extremely sparse, I can only see them being added to the llama. Make sure you take the time to observe your references carefully and frequently so you can start to pick up on the smaller and subtler forms that make up the specific character of the limb in question. When you do see something you’d like to add, make sure you’re doing so with complete forms, not one-off lines, as shown in this diagram I shared with you previously. You can also see a good example of the sausage method being applied to animal construction with the donkey demo.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

The next 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. With the previous lesson I was happy to move you forward on the basis that you’d be able to apply the information provided in my feedback to your animal constructions, but that’s not something I can do with this lesson, as lesson 6 takes a different strategy to construction, working with hard surface objects rather than organic forms. I’m going to be assigning some revisions for you to put the advice in this critique into practice, which I hope will help you to clarify your understanding of these constructional methods.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• 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 3 pages of animal constructions.