Hello Daniel, I can certainly empathise with the feelings of anxiety that come from submitting for critique. It is clear that you’ve put a lot of effort into your work, and by and large you’ve done a good job. There are a few points to discuss which should help you get a bit more out of these exercises in future.

Starting with your organic intersections these are working pretty well. Your forms have a good sense of weight to them, as you allow them to sump over one another in three dimensions, paying attention to how gravity pulls the forms down into positions where they feel stable and supported. Your application of cast shadows shows a good understanding of how your piles sit in 3D space, and help to clarify the relationships between your forms.

Aim to stick to simple sausage forms for this exercise, as simpler forms are easier to convey as solid. You usually do this well, with just a couple of wobbly or deflated forms (like the one at the far right of this pile which start to feel a little flatter.

This isn’t currently stressed in the exercise instructions, but as a bit of a bonus, try to draw through and complete your forms wherever possible as shown in blue here instead of cutting some of them off where they overlap. This will push you into thinking through how the whole form sits in space, and help you to get even more out of the exercise.

Moving on to your animal constructions, there’s quite a lot here that’s coming along very well. You do a great job of starting with simple solid forms, and usually build things up piece by piece, without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given stage. Your application of additional masses shows that you’re thinking about how to attach these new pieces to the construction “in 3D” and you’re clearly making careful and frequent observations of your reference images.

One thing to keep in mind for these constructions, is that you should strive to only take actions in 3D, by constructing complete new forms with their own fully-enclosed silhouettes whenever you want to add to the construction or alter something. Right now there’s a fair bit of hopping back and forth between taking actions in 2D and 3D, often enough to suggest that you might not always be consciously distinguishing between the two.

For example if you look here you’ll see I’ve used blue to trace over an example of extending the silhouette of the construction with a one-off line, and highlighted the extended areas. But these blue areas exist only in two dimensions - there are no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how it is meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. Creating believable, solid, three dimensional constructions despite drawing on a flat page requires us to first and foremost convince ourselves of this illusion, this lie we're telling, as discussed here back in Lesson 2. The more our approach reinforces the illusion, the more we make new marks that reinforce it even further. The more our marks break the illusion, the more marks we make that then further break the illusion, for us and for everyone else.

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 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.

These actions in 2D occur on the majority of the legs in your submission (highlighted with blue here), and here I think it is best to paste in the advice for legs from your previous critique:

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are- it is about laying in the base structure or armature that captures that captures both the solidity and gestural flow of the limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to build up the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this ant leg demo. I'll also share this dog leg demo as an example of how to apply the sausage method to animal legs as we would like you to stick with the sausage method as closely as you can throughout lesson 5

It appears that you may have had some difficulty implementing the sausage method of leg construction, and I would suggest going through the donkey construction from the informal demos page, which goes over how to apply the method step by step in some detail. Here is another example drawn over the front leg of one of your constructions. As I’m not seeing the method being used in your submission, I will be asking for some minor revisions for you to demonstrate that you’ve understood the technique.

Moving down to feet, I'd like you to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot using a boxy form. By that I mean a form whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define the edges themselves, to lay down a structure that reads as solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Please try using this strategy for constructing feet in future.

So, one of the main tools we introduce in lesson 5 to help students build up their constructions in 3D (instead of adding one-off lines or flat partial shapes) is additional masses. I’m pleased to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses quite a bit, and by and large you do a great job of wrapping them around the basic structures of the torso convincingly. I do notice that (as with the masses traced over with red and purple here) sometimes you’ll cut additional masses off where they overlap with one another, but this is not correct. In situations where you've got two masses overlapping one another, remember that these are 3D forms - that means that when you drop a new form on top of another one, it should wrap around the existing mass in 3D space, just like any other part of the construction that you’ve already drawn.

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, here I’ve applied this to some of the masses on your wolf. Completing them where they overlap so we can more clearly define 3D relationships between them, as well as replacing the flat 2D extension under the belly with some additional masses.

Another thing to keep in mind with additional masses (or any form) is that additional contour lines as introduced in the sausage forms suffer from diminishing returns, where the first one you add may be quite helpful in clarifying how the form sits in space, but the second much less so, and the third (and fourth etc) will be largely redundant. While adding contour lines that don’t contribute isn’t a big deal, they can sometimes lead to people investing less effort into careful design of the mass, with the idea that additional contour lines can be used to “fix” the construction and make it more 3D, when they don’t actually help fix the underlying issue, which is a lack of a clear relationship between the forms, or individual forms that try to achieve too much in one step and are overly complex. So before you draw a contour line as part of a construction - or really, before you draw any line - think about what it is meant to accomplish as part of your drawing. If it isn't going to be contributing much, or if that task can be done better with a different mark (or is already being accomplished by another), don't draw it.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. This is due to how the course had developed over time, 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 (5-sided) 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 the rhino head demo just beneath it on the same page, it can be adapted to work for a wide array of animals.

The last point to mention is texture and detail. I really like how you approached the texture on your tortoise construction. Here I can see you were leveraging the shadows cast by the scales, rather than explicitly outlining all of the scales themselves, and this has allowed you to control the density of detail. This is excellent use of the methodology introduced in the texture section of lesson 2, well done!

On the zebra and leopard it looks like you got distracted by the colour patterns, but the fur has the same texture, whether it is part of a black stripe, or a white stripe. What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice. I understand that it is quite possible that you took to filling in stripes and spots with black based on Uncomfortable filling in some tiger stripes in the lesson intro video. The instructions on texture that are the most up to date, and also the most helpful in terms of all these drawings being exercises in spatial reasoning, are what you’ll find in the texture section of lesson 2, in particular, going through the steps in these reminders should ensure you stay on the right track.

All right, I think that should cover it. Overall your constructions are coming along well, although I am going to ask for some minor revisions. Please pay close attention to sticking to the specific requirements of the sausage method of leg construction, and make every effort to give each form you add to your constructions its own complete silhouette.

Please complete 2 pages of quadruped constructions.