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

Before I get to critiquing your actual work, in future when you take photos of your homework, try to have the camera perpendicular to the page. There's a lot of distortion in some of these pictures as they were taken at an angle to the paper. It's not a big deal for organic constructions but it will matter more in the upcoming lessons.

Starting with your organic intersections you're generally keeping your forms simple and easy to work with, and I'm happy to see you're drawing through them as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

You're drawing your forms slumping and sagging as they wrap around one another with a shared sense of gravity, well done. I have a couple of pointers that should help you with this exercise as you continue to practise it in your warm ups.

• Try to avoid leaving gaps underneath forms, as t tends to make them feel stiff or weightless. It's only happening in that one small spot in your work, but I thought I'd better call it out anyway.

• There are a couple of places where you'd introduced a sharp corner to a form at the apex of where it wraps around a lower form. I've traced over one such case, in red in this image. Try to use a smooth curve where one organic form wraps around another, using the logic of contour curves to help you.

• Your cast shadows are pretty good, you're projecting them far enough to cast onto the form below and their direction is fairly consistent. As noted on your work here there are a couple of spots where the shadows appear to be being cast from a different light direction to all the others, so keep that in mind in future.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is coming along quite well, your markmaking is clear and purposeful and most of your constructions feel fairly solid and three dimensional.

Just a quick reminder- remember to draw around your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page. You do this sometimes, but there are a fair few where you only make about one and a half turns.

In lesson 4 we went over the importance of taking actions in 3D by adding complete 3D forms to your constructions whenever you want to build or change something, instead of adding one off lines or partial shapes. I can see that you've taken this into consideration and are mostly taking actions that reinforce the 3D illusion of your constructions, but there are a few exceptions.

If we take the underside of this hippo as an example, there are a few extensions made of one-off lines and partial shapes, instead of complete forms. It's almost impossible to understand how these additions were meant to exist in 3D space.

There are a few spots like this where I can see you clearly intended to draw a complete form, but cut it off where it passed behind another structure. As discussed in your lesson 3 and 4 critiques it is important to draw through your forms and complete them, even if they are overlapped by another form.

Fortunately there are plenty of places where you do build on your constructions with complete 3D forms. 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.

So, I've redrawn some of the additional masses and partial shapes on this hippo as an example. Notice how each new addition has a complete silhouette composed of specifically designed curves and corners. They stay simple where they are exposed to fresh air, and get more complex where they interact with the existing structures in the construction. Where the masses overlap I've drawn through to complete each form, and wrapped them around each other. Also notice the sharp corners and inward curves where I've pressed some of the masses up against the shoulder and thigh masses to help anchor them to the construction.The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define b between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

During your lesson 4 critique and subsequent revisions we discussed using the sausage method of leg construction. I also shared this dog leg demo and stated that we'd like you to use this strategy for animal constructions too. You appear to be using the sausage method to varying degrees throughout your pages. Ranging from not at all on the hind legs of this construction to a pretty decent attempt on your hybrid. You're pretty inconsistent about applying the contour curve at the joints, which I called out in your lesson 4 revisions. I'd like you to review your lesson 4 critique and do your best to employ the sausage method of leg construction when practising these exercises in future.

As an extra bonus, these notes on foot construction should be useful.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. It looks like you put a lot of thought into how all the pieces of your head constructions exist in 3D space and connect together, and most of them feel solid. 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.

All righty. I've given you some things to work on, but you're showing strong spatial reasoning skills so I'll leave you to apply these points independently in your own time. If anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.