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

This lesson is a toughie, and you're not alone with the struggles you're describing. In regards to the proportion thing, it's both important and less important than you might expect. At the end of the day, observing our reference carefully and frequently will help make our drawings more realistic in a lot of ways - proportion only being one of them. It comes down to picking up on some of the more nuanced, subtler elements that play a role in an object, being able to identify the major structural elements, and then the smaller forms that may be attached after that, gradually whittling down from big to small, simple to complex.

You're not required to look at other students' work, but it can be useful to do so. Drawabox is suitable for beginners, but that doesn't mean that all Drawabox students are beginners. I'd been drawing as a hobby for 15 years before starting the course. I'd treat other student's work as a source of information, but not as a yardstick to measure myself against. I would analyse what works and what doesn't, and take the best bits and use them in my own work.

Starting with your organic intersections, you're keeping your forms simple enough to feel solid and you're demonstrating a good understanding of how to wrap one form around another in a way that feels convincing.

One thing I noticed on your second page was that you may not necessarily be thinking about these forms as being soft and heavy, like well filled water balloons. If we look at the form at the far left and the form at the far right they are both floating upwards at one end. There's essentially nothing but empty space underneath these sections which tells the viewer that the pile itself is not stable, and thus not really abiding by a consistent gravity. When doing this exercise in the future, it's important that you always think about how you're building up a stable pile, working from bottom up. With each sausage, ask yourself whether it's being supported in space, or if it's floating.

This isn't necessarily a mistake, but it is worth calling out that Tofu asked you to draw through your forms when practicing this exercise, and you've cut off sections of some of your forms where they pass behind another form. Drawing each form in its entirety will help to push you into thinking about how the whole form exists in space, and you will get more out of this exercise as a spatial reasoning puzzle.

Your shadows are on the right track, you're projecting them boldly enough to cast onto the forms below. I've put a couple of suggestions directly onto one of your pages for you here.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see you've put a lot of effort into your work here, and there are places where you're showing a developing sense of some of your forms existing as volumes in 3D space. There are a number of areas where I can offer advice that I think will help you to make improvements, and I'll break this feedback into sections to make it more digestible.

Core construction

Just like with the previous lesson, we want to start each construction with simple solid forms. If I look at the bodies of your birds, for example, I get the distinct impression that you drew a flat "bird" shape that you observed in the reference- transferring the 2D shape from the reference image to the 2D space of your paper. We want to believe our own lie. That is critically important, and starts from the beginning. When we draw our initial masses, we don't just drop shapes on the page. We construct solid ball forms, and we have to make sure that we believe that they are three dimensional. To do this, we keep our first forms as simple as possible. In the case of birds we do this by using an ellipse to represent a ball form for the body, as discussed here on the lesson intro page.

Your major masses do generally improve once you start using the torso sausage, though the ellipses for the rib cage masses of your horses are quite deformed. I think it is possible that you may have been trying to draw the shape of the rib cage shown in a skeletal diagram when drawing your horses. While I appreciate your efforts to draw realistic constructions, this is actually flattening the form, and making things more difficult than they really need to be. For this lesson stick with ellipses to represent simple ball forms for your major masses, as shown in all of the demos.

There are a few constructions, such as this horse where you've pinched the middle of the torso sausage inwards. If we pinch the torso sausage then it no longer sticks to the characteristics of a simple sausage form. This complexity inherently makes it easier for us to understand them as flat, 2D shapes, rather than 3D forms, and impedes our ability to believe that we're really working in 3D space. On the linked horse construction you ended up adding some pretty big masses to the torso, so there was no need to pinch it in the first place. Sometimes animals don't look like the torso sausage would be a good fit, but as shown in this partial kangaroo construction we can still start with a simple torso sausage and flesh it out with additional masses.

Use of additional contour curves

The second point that really jumps out is that you're applying a ton of additional contour curves to many of your constructions, most notably on your additional masses, but sometimes on your legs too. Adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasise the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships. While adding lines that don't contribute much isn't the worst thing in the world using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses. So, I would actively avoid using surface contour lines on your additional masses in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

Leg construction

It is encouraging to see that you've made a real effort to draw through your forms. There is certainly plenty of scope for improvement with your application of the sausage method as discussed in your lesson 4 feedback.

• Stick to simple sausage forms, as closely as you can. There are a lot of leg forms that continually swell through their midsection like an ellipse, or have flat ends, sharp corners, or random wobbles. Some examples.

• Contour curves should be placed for intersections at the joints and only at the joints. This is specified on the sausage method diagram. Example.

• It is good to see that you're starting to explore building onto your sausage armatures with additional forms. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, as seen on the front legs of this fox, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here.

Additional masses

It is good to see that you've jumped right in with building onto your constructions with additional masses. I see that you're making a real effort to build your constructions in 3D, though there are a fair few places where you jump back and forth between taking actions in 3D- constructing complete forms- and taking actions in 2D- drawing one-off lines that exist in the 2D space of the paper, but are difficult to understand how they are supposed to exist in 3D space. I've marked a couple of examples of where you appear to have been working in one-off lines here. Remember that whenever we want to build on our constructions we want to do so in 3D, otherwise the construction will start to feel flat.

So, when it comes to how you're designing these additional masses I can offer a few pieces of advice. 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.

With that in mind, I've noted a couple of elements to one of the masses on this horse that I felt could be improved, and here I've made some edits. There's a fair bit to unpack here, so it is color-coded to make it easier to understand.

• In green I'd simplified your core construction. Making the ellipse of the rib cage more even, so it is easier to understand as a ball form, giving the torso sausage a more consistent width and also incorporating the slight sag discussed here on the lesson intro page.

• In blue I'd made the shoulder and thigh masses larger, as well as redrawing the upper leg sausages. On this particular construction you weren't far off, but there's a general tendency for you to make your shoulders (and sometimes thigh masses) quite small. We can think of the shoulder and thigh masses as a simplification of some of the big bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, so don't be afraid to be a bit more generous with their size. They become very useful structures for helping to anchor additional masses to the construction, as shown in the next step.

• Additional masses were drawn in red, (and then further masses added in purple) each one with its own complete, fully enclosed silhouette. I've broken the large, complex masses into smaller pieces of more limited scope, so each one can achieve a more specific purpose. I'd generally avoid having a single mass running over a vary long distance (as you had on top of the back) as this often leads to accidentally introducing too much complexity and having the mass fall flat.

• The masses consist of simple outward curves where they are exposed to fresh air and there is nothing to press against them, and specific corners and inward curves where they press against the structures already present in the construction. Note the orange arrows designed to highlight how the mass on top of the shoulder area wraps around the torso sausage, and then curves inwards where it presses up against the shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Feet

Never leave a form open-ended, as we see with the legs of this bird. This makes it unclear where the edge of your form is supposed to be, flattening it out. I'm guessing for this construction the feet were not visible in the reference. Ideally what you would do in this situation is find a picture of the feet of this species of bird, and use that to help you to add feet to your construction. Sometimes we end up not having space on the page for part of the construction, when this happens you can "cap off" the form with an ellipse so it remains solid. You can see an example of this in practice with the tail of the running rat demo.

I think you may find it helpful to take 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.

Markmaking

Keep working on sticking to the principles of markmaking that were introduced back in lesson 1. You're getting a mixture of smooth confident lines (which is great) and a few which appear more hesitant. Remember to employ the ghosting method for every line. This should help not only with the hesitation issues, but also nip in the bud the occasional patch of scratchy sketchy marks- for example on the head of this fish. By taking the time to ghost each line you will be able to think through what that particular line will contribute to your construction, and plan it accordingly.

This critique is already really long so I won't go into this in depth- some of the details you've applied are pretty much scribbling, which has no place in this course. You are absolutely capable of doing better than that. Adding texture and detail is optional in this lesson, if you'd like to add it, please review your lesson 3 feedback, where ThatOneMushroomGuy went over how to think about texture in this course, and reread these reminders.

Heads

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:

• 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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Conclusion

This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and I'd like you to take as much time as you need to read it thoroughly, as well as reviewing the relevant sections of lesson material. Once you've done that I'd like you to complete some extra pages to address the points I've raised here. For these I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• 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 5 pages of animal constructions. If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.