Hello Yoush, 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. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with, which is good. You're doing a good job of making your forms slump and sag around each other with a sense of gravity.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below and they seem to be following a consistent light source. On the second page a couple of your shadows are missing or incomplete. When you do this exercise I find it helps to check you've considered the shadow for every form you've drawn and think about the shadow cast by the entire form, even the parts that aren't visible. I've made some additions to your work here, as well as highlighting one of several places where you've gone back over a contour curve to draw it again.

There are only two cases where you should be going over a line twice in this course. The first being for ellipses, where we draw two times around because drawing through the form leans into our arm's natural desire to draw ellipsoid shapes. The second is when we need to add some extra line weight, which should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

This applies to your animal constructions too- there are a lot of places where you repeat your lines. Every mark you add should be the result of a conscious decision, and should contribute something meaningful to your construction.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see your spatial reasoning skills are developing, and you show some improvement as you go through the set. However there are a couple of important points from your lesson 4 critique that you either misunderstood or forgot to fully apply.

The most striking of these is leg construction. While there are some different techniques being used for legs in the various demos, given how the course has developed, the method that is currently deemed most effective is sausage method. Uncomfortable went over the virtues of this method in your lesson 4 critique, as well as providing diagrams to help you use it and stated that this technique is still to be used throughout lesson 5 as well. You can see a good example of how to use the sausage method to construct animal legs in this donkey demo from the informal demos page.

Through most of your work here you're using ellipses to construct your legs, instead of sausage forms (you're even drawing through them twice) which will make your legs stiff. You're also inconsistent about remembering to add the contour curve at the joints.

So- I've re-drawn one of your leg constructions here with color-coded step by step notes.

1- The shoulder mass is an ellipse, so this is something you did correctly. You did a good job on this construction, but on some of your other constructions your shoulder masses are very small (like this.) This mass is a simplification of some of the big muscles that help the animal to walk so don't be afraid to be more generous with it.

2- Use sausage forms to construct the base armature of your legs.

3- Add the contour curve for the intersection at the joints as shown in the sausage method diagram. These little lines might seem insignificant, but they convey a lot of information about how your sausages are orientated in space and how they fit together so please try to remember them in future.

4- Build on top of this basic armature to add feet (these notes on foot construction may also be useful) and any bulk or complexity that could not be captured with simple sausage forms. Every addition should be a complete form with its own fully enclosed silhouette.

Which brings me to my next point. I can see that you are working on making additions to your constructions with complete, 3D forms, but you do have a tendency to sneak in a few 2D additions as well. I've highlighted a few of them in blue on your work here. (There is also a note on how there isn't really enough information to explain how your muzzle exists in 3D space but we'll talk more on head construction later.) This goes against the rule Uncomfortable introduced in 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 feedback for a full explanation on how this rule helps you to treat your drawings as 3D constructions, and links to various diagrams to help you understand how to add new forms to your constructions instead.

So, moving on to the particulars of lesson 5. Where lesson 4 introduced the idea of building onto our construction with complete forms, here in lesson 5 we get more specific about how we design those forms to interact with our existing structures.

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.

To illustrate this, I've drawn on top of your work here to modify some of your additional masses. Notice how I've made use of the underlying structures of the shoulder and thigh masses to wrap these additional forms around. I've also broken some of your larger, more complex masses into pieces, so each bump is a separate mass. This avoids creating complexity (sharp corners and inward curves) in the masses where they are exposed to fresh air and there is nothing to press against them to cause any complexity. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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.

Also, as you chose to draw camels, Uncomfortable’s camel head demo should be useful to compare with your own attempts.

Now, I have given you a number of things to work on here, so I am going to assign some revisions.

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 5 pages of animal constructions.

Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.