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

Starting with your organic intersections you're showing a strong understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space, and you're doing a great job of thinking about how gravity will affect your forms, piling them up in a manner where they feel stable and supported.

it is worth noting that this exercise isn't so much about getting these forms to penetrate through one another (as we do with the geometric forms in the form intersections exercise) and more about how they'd sag and wrap around one another as we pile them up.

On the first page some of your line weight is thick enough to be mistaken for shadows (and some of your shadows are clinging to the forms like line weight) but the second page is significantly better.

Moving on to your animal constructions, you're demonstrating strong spatial reasoning skills, and I have zero doubts about your ability, however it is unfortunate to see that so much of the advice in your lesson 4 critique was not applied. Keep in mind that the advice in these critiques is designed to be applied by the student as they move forward, so issues do not need to be called out repeatedly. The more the TA has to repeat previous feedback, the less we're able to provide new information and move the student forward. 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. 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 feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely.

The points that stand out as having been called out previously are as follows:

1- Working in 2D by altering the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn. I can see in your work that you do understand how your forms exist in 3D space, but sometimes you just imply this using overlaps, rather than fully constructing each addition by using a complete form with its own fully enclosed silhouette, and establishing how it connects to the existing structures in 3D space. I've marked an example on your hyena in red where you appear to have cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had established for the neck, undermining its solidity and reminding the viewer (and yourself) that the drawing is just lines on a flat piece of paper. In blue I marked an example where it looks like you'd extended the torso with a one-off line, not providing enough information for the viewer to understand how it is supposed to exist in 3D space. While in this course we're doing everything very explicitly, it's to create such a solid belief and understanding of how the things we draw exist in 3D space, that when we draw them more loosely outside of this course with sketching and other less explicit approaches, we can still produce marks that fall in line with the idea that this thing we're drawing exists in 3D. Remember these constructions are all exercises, and the end result is less significant than the specific steps we take during the process.

2- Redrawing your lines and inappropriate use of additional lineweight. I talked bout how the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only, how going back over your lines makes them unclear and confusing, undermining the solidity of your forms, and how additional line weight should be used for clarifying overlaps between forms, and restricted to localised areas where those overlaps occur. This is still an issue. If we take a look at the hybrid for example, all of the lines along the back and the tail have been drawn 2, 3 or even 4 times, without a clear purpose. Every line you add to these exercises should serve a clearly defined purpose. Make sure you're using the ghosting method throughout, to help you plan each mark and avoid arbitrarily redrawing lines on autopilot.

3- Not using the sausage method of leg construction. This is pretty straightforward, I walked you through the merits of the sausage method, gave you specific advice based on your work to help you apply it more correctly, as well as sharing some diagrams and demos. I made a point of stating in italics that this method should be used throughout lesson 5. As far as I can tell none of this has been applied to any of your pages.

4- Excessive use of additional contour lines. I discussed how additional contour lines running along the surface of individual forms suffer from diminishing returns, and encouraged you to think through what each contour line will contribute before adding it. This camel is an example of where you seemed to be piling a ton of them to he construction, and most of them are unnecessary. While adding contour lines that don't contribute anything isn't the worst thing in the world, using them in this manner can lead to students thinking that they're making the construction "more 3D" when we have other, more effective ways to do this. Those contour lines aside, there are two main tools we have at our disposal when building up our constructions with new forms, and making those forms feel solid and 3D:

• Purposeful design of the form's silhouette. This is the tool to use if you're adding something that wraps around the existing structure.

• A contour line more similar to those used in Lesson 2's form intersections - which defines the joint or seam between two intersecting/interpenetrating forms. This is the tool to use if you actually have forms that are being "welded" together, like how the individual sausage segments in the sausage method have their joints defined with a contour line.

Please reread your lesson 4 critique and do whatever it is you need to do to make sure you apply that advice to your animal constructions. If anything said to you in that critique (or here) is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.

Moving on to the specifics of lesson 5, you're doing pretty well. You're doing a good job of laying down the major masses of the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis, and combining the rib cage and pelvis into a torso sausage. In the places where you're using additional masses to build onto your constructions you're designing them in a way that demonstrated an understanding of the 3D surfaces you're attaching them to.

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 thought the additional masses on this bear worked very well. I like that you'd used the protruding shoulder and thigh masses to effectively anchor your additional masses to the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. The most significant concern with your additional masses is that sometimes you'll add a one off line or partial shape instead of an additional mass. Here is how the addition to the rump of the hyena could be constructed with an additional mass instead of a one-off line. I've also pulled your existing additional mass above the shoulder down around the side of the neck and pressed it against the shoulder, in a similar manner to the masses on your bear.

As a quick bonus on constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to use the approach you're already using quite well- leveraging a boxy form to lay down a structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional, and takes it a step further, using similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

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. I can see you working through similar principles when you approach some of your head constructions, and there are areas where you're following some of the process shown in that informal demo - but bring it all together in the way the demo shows, and you should be able to get more out of the exercise. 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.

As there are a number of points which have been called out previously which have not been addressed, I will need to assign some revisions for you to demonstrate your understanding of the information that has been provided.

Please complete 3 pages of animal constructions.