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

Starting with your organic intersections You're clearly capturing how the sausages slump and sag over one another under their shared gravity, and your cast shadows demonstrate a good sense of how the forms relate to one another in space, in relation to the light source.

Just remember this piece of feedback for this exercise from your lesson 2 critique-

"In the future keep drawing through all of your forms, it helps reinforce your understanding of 3D space."

It will help you get more out of this exercise by drawing every form in its entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they go behind another form.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see you spent a great deal of time and effort on your work here, and on the whole your constructions are coming along really well. There are a couple of points to address, as well as some notes to help you make the most out of these exercises in the future.

The first is while you're generally doing a really good job of taking actions in 3D space and treating your constructions as though they are made of solid forms, you do occasionally cut inside the silhouette of a form you have already drawn, as marked in red on your dog here. On the same image I marked in blue some places where you extended your silhouettes without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space. Uncomfortable gave you a detailed explanation on why altering the silhouette of your forms can break the 3D illusion of your constructions during your lesson 4 critique, so please refer back to that feedback if you are unsure why I am raising this point.

On some of your constructions you appear to be tracing back over sections of your silhouette to add line weight. Going back over your lines in this manner causes small sections of silhouettes to be cut out, and small sections to be extended. These extensions are all the more likely to occur when we allow that line weight to "bridge" from the silhouette of one form to another.

Instead, line weight should always follow the silhouette of one form at a time, and should be reserved to the specific localised areas where overlaps occur between forms, in order to help clarify those overlaps.

I can see that you're making really good use of additional masses to build complexity in your constructions, nicely done. On the whole you're doing a good job of designing these masses to reinforce the 3D illusion of your construction instead of undermining it.

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 made some suggested alterations to one of your pigs here. On the rump I've altered a small 2D extension to be a complete form. On the belly I adjusted a mass to include some of your 2D extension, as well as tucking it around and in between the legs. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. The mass on top of the neck and shoulders was already pretty well done, but it was getting rather complex in places on the outer silhouette where there was nothing to press against it to cause those inward curves. I broke it into a few separate masses, rather than trying to accomplish quite so much with one.

Another thing you can bear in mind, is that you don't always need to focus your additional masses on specific bumps that break the silhouette. You can also consider the "in-between" pieces that interlock with these bumps. You can see this concept in this draw-over on another student's work.

Oh, and these notes on foot construction may also be useful.

The next point that 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.

You do appear to have tried out a variety of strategies for constructing your heads, and the majority of them are fairly successful. I would recommend you try to stick to the method shown in the informal head demo for constructing animal heads in the future. Particularly the part about using angular eye sockets, as you generally favour a rounder shape for the eye socket and that makes it much more difficult to wedge the planes of the head together in a solid and specific manner. Sometimes it seems like this method is not a good fit for certain heads, but it can be adapted to suit a wide variety of heads, as shown in this banana-headed rhino. When it comes to drawing your eyelids, instead of drawing lines, think about adding the eyelids as whole forms, as shown here

The last thing I need to talk about here is texture and decoration. Uncomfortable has already gone over this in your lesson 3 and 4 critiques, so please refer to your past feedback for his thorough and eloquent explanation on the topic. I'll try to keep this fairly brief for you. You do clearly still feel the need to decorate your drawings and make them pretty, and you're very good at it! It is however, something of a distraction for you. Remember that all the drawings you do in this course are just exercises, the goal here is for you to learn, so try not to get caught up in making pretty pictures. The core focus of this lesson is construction. Now, fortunately, you're doing a good job with your construction and there were enough pages where your decoration was sparse enough that I could still see your construction and provide you with a meaningful critique. Remember that when using texture in this course you should be using the shapes of cast shadows to implicitly describe the smaller forms on an object's surface. You're telling the viewer how that surface feels. This has nothing to do with what color the surface happens to be. So for example looking at the dog head on this page there would be no reason to put more ink on the fur that is a darker color to describe the dog's markings. All the rules and instructions in this course, and all your critiques, are designed with your best interests at heart. I would urge you to follow the advice you have been given, and reserve your decoration for the other 50% of your drawing time.

All right, that's about covers it. You're doing a good job so I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.