Hello E55douglas, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections, your forms are looking solid, and you're demonstrating that you have a good grasp of how they wrap around one another in 3D space and sag with a sense of gravity.

There are a couple of points to note that weren't an issue in your lesson 2 submission, which indicate that you would benefit from reviewing the exercise instructions more frequently.

• Your first page seems to consist of two attempts at this exercise, which don't appear to occupy the same 3D space. There's a pile on the left which looks like we're looking down at it, and a pile on the right that appears to be more directly in front of the viewer. As noted here each page should contain only one pile of forms. It does look like you corrected this in your second page, but it is worth calling out.

• Many of the cast shadows you've included are hugging the form casting them rather than being projected onto the forms below.

Something Tofu called out in your previous attempts at this exercise is that your shadows don't appear to be following a consistent light source. Some of your forms are casting multiple shadows in different directions, which won't happen if we set out a single, consistent light source for the pile of forms. Some forms aren't casting shadows at all. If we create a rule for a page of forms, such as "shadows are cast downwards and to the right" then we need to apply it across the whole pile, or it breaks a basic assumption that the viewer has for this little 3D world we've created, undermining their suspension of disbelief and reminding them that they're just looking at a flat piece of paper.

So here I've made some edits to one of your piles, which should hopefully help you with your future attempts at this exercise, (which you should continue to practise in your warm ups.) I've projected the shadows more boldly, and added some shadows that were missing. Note that the shadows are all being projected in roughly the same direction, corresponding to the arrow. Also note the importance of including the shadows cast onto the ground plane, they do a great deal to assert how the whole pile exists in 3D space, and help it to feel supported.

Moving on to your animal constructions, I can see that you're thinking of building these constructions up as 3D puzzles, and considering how these puzzle pieces fit together. These are generally moving in the right direction, though I am seeing a tendency to switch back and forth between working in 3D and in 2D.

During your lesson 4 critique Uncomfortable introduced the following rule to help you to only take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion. "Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette." I can see you've been quite conscientious about not cutting back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, which is great. However I do see a few places where you'd done the opposite and extended off existing forms with single lines or flat partial shapes, which doesn't quite provide the viewer with enough information to understand how those new additions are supposed to exist in 3D space. I've highlighted a couple of examples in blue on this shark. Please refer to your lesson 4 critique for a fuller explanation of how this flattens the construction, and links to several examples of how to add complete 3D forms instead.

On the same shark construction it looks like you were adapting the leaves exercise from lesson 3 to construct the fins. That is a good strategy for drawing these flat forms flowing through 3D space. However remember that each step of your construction is a decision being made. With the central flow line you've decided how long the fin will be, and in order to keep your construction solid you need to stick to that decision and have the sides of the fin connect to the flow line without arbitrary gaps.

If we take a look at this falcon I've circled a number of places where it looks like you've redrawn lines to make corrections. In ending up with multiple lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another line present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing. Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to executing each mark to the best of your current ability. I think it is possible that some of these extra lines might be attempts to add line weight. The most effective use of additional line weight, given the bounds and limitations of this course is to reserve it for clarifying overlaps as explained here, and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. What this keeps us from doing is adding line weight to more random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes with additional line weight.

The next area I need to talk about is leg construction. While you are (mostly) constructing your legs using complete forms, it doesn't look like you're making a particular effort to use the sausage method of leg construction that was introduced in lesson 4. In your lesson 4 critique Uncomfortable explained the virtues of this method, as well as providing several diagrams and specific advice to help you to apply this method more effectively, and stating that this method should be used throughout lesson 5. Granted this was almost a year ago, but It is often necessary for students to take their own steps in ensuring that they do what they need to in order to ensure they're addressing the issues that have been called out. It's very easy to simply come back from a break and continue forwards with the next lesson without consideration for what issues may have been called out (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.

Here I've redrawn one of the legs of your stag using the sausage method. The steps are as follows:

1- Ellipse for the thigh mass. You generally do this correctly, although as we're treating this as a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that help the animal to walk we can be a little more generous with its size.

2- Chain of overlapping sausage forms. They should stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms introduced here.

3- Contour curves for the intersections where these sausage forms connect together, as highlighted in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram

4- Additional forms are used to build extra bulk and complexity as needed. Given that animal legs seldom actually look like a chain of sausages, it will usually be necessary to use additional forms.

Speaking of additional forms, I'm happy to see that you're exploring building on your basic constructions with additional masses. I do have some advice to offer that should help you to design these additional masses more effectively in future.

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.

I've also made some more specific corrections to the additional masses on this stag.

1- Looking at the purple mass on top of the rump, I can see that you've introduced an inward curve and corner where it presses against the front of the pelvis mass. This is some good thinking, in terms of the behaviour of additional masses and how to wrap them around the underlying structures. However, if we think carefully about what structures are actually present, the pelvis mass is already fully enclosed within the torso sausage, so it will not protrude from the torso sausage and cannot cause complexity in the additional mass here. We can use the shoulder and thigh masses for this purpose though, as these masses do protrude from the torso sausage.

2- This red mass on top of the rump had a good overlap with the torso sausage, but where it met the back of the mass I've drawn in purple, the overlap disappears and you'd got the edges of the two masses sharing a line. That's a 2D relationship between the 2 forms, rather than a 3D one. What I've done here is wrap the red form around the purple one in 3D space. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

3- This mass had been cut off here it passes between the hind legs. If you cut your forms off like this, then they're no longer complete 3d forms, they're just flat partial shapes. So it is important to "draw through" and complete the form by including the parts you can't see. In addition to completing this form I've also wrapped it more boldly around the torso sausage, really pulling it up the sides of the body to give it a firmer grip. There's a general tendency for some of your additional masses to overlap the underlying structures juuust slightly, rather than really wrapping around. This can leave the additional masses feeling precariously balanced, like they might wobble off if the animal were to move.

4- If we consider the additional mass as staying as a round ball of clay where there is nothing present in the construction to cause complexity, then we cannot push inward curves into an additional mass where it is exposed to fresh air. If we want to build an inward curve in the outer silhouette using additional masses, then this can be done by layering masses on top of each other, allowing for each individual mass to stay simpler.

It is good to see that you're using 3D forms to construct the majority of your feet. As a bonus, I think you might benefit from taking a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms 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.

Just a quick note, when working on these constructions it is best to reserve any areas of solid black for cast shadows only. It took me a moment to realise that you'd coloured in the nose of your hybrid, I was trying to figure out what was casting a shadow on the middle of his face. Imagine your animal has been painted solid white and ignore any color patterns. And of course, remember areas of filled black should not be used to try to correct or hide mistakes.

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.

I have one final image to share with you here. I noticed there are a few of your head constructions that are missing the eye sockets. Regardless of which demo you were using as a basis for your head constructions, Uncomfortable makes a point of constructing eye sockets, so it does seem that perhaps you weren't paying as much attention to the lesson material as was really needed. You also missed the ears on this construction, which are rather low hanging fruit as they are easily observed and fairly straightforward to construct. For the antlers, I'm not sure if you were trying to use the "branch" method of construction or not. If you were, you'll want to give the instructions for branches another read. Alternatively they can be constructed from simple forms, adding complexity piece by piece in a similar way to what is shown in this beetle horn demo.

Conclusion On the whole your work here is showing a fair bit of progress. There are enough issues here (some of which have been called out in previous critiques) that I think it is best to ask you to address them through some additional pages, rather than expect you to apply everything said here on your own.

Please complete 4 additional pages of animal constructions.

If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.