Hello aaruj22, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, and some of them are slumping and sagging over and around each other with a sense of gravity.

I get the impression that you're a little mixed up about what order to draw your forms. The first form you draw should be at the bottom of your pile, and you draw new forms piling them up on top, figuring out how the new forms wrap around what you have already drawn. This order is shown in the exercise instructions and the accompanying video. When you try to add forms underneath what you've already drawn it will either destabilise your pile, by lifting your earlier forms up into the air, or there won't be room for the new form to exist in the 3D space that you're trying to create. I've highlighted what I'm talking about on your work, here.

When you practise this exercise the future I'd like you to draw through your forms. Much like when we drew through our boxes earlier drawing through these organic forms will help us develop a better understanding of the 3D space we're attempting to create. It will help you get more out of this exercise by drawing every form in it’s entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they go behind another form.

You're doing a good job with your shadows, you're pushing them far enough to cast onto the form below, and their direction is reasonably consistent. I've marked a couple of nitpicks on your work here. It helps your pile feel grounded if every form that is resting on the ground casts a shadow onto the ground plane. Leaving some of them out can be confusing. When you draw a shadow, consider the whole shadow, cast by the whole form (even though some of it will be hidden) then draw the parts of the shadow that are visible, this might help you to make sure you don't miss any parts of your shadows.

Moving on to your animal constructions you've made a good start, but I have a few points to cover that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises. I'll break my feedback into the following topics to help make it more digest-able: Actions in 2D vs actions in 3D, Core construction, Leg construction, Additional masses, Head construction.

Actions in 2D vs actions in 3D During your lesson 4 critique Uncomfortable introduced the following rule- "Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette." With an explanation as to why, and examples of what to do instead. I can see that you're making a real effort to perform actions in 3D and add whole forms whenever you want to build on your constructions. There are a few places where you do perform an action in 2D by extending the silhouette of your forms with a single line. I've highlighted an example on one of your dogs here in blue.

There are also a few small spots where you're cutting back inside a form you have already drawn, such as the rump on your bat-bear and the head of the bear on the right of this page. You may have accidentally cut into your construction due to there being a gap between passes of your ellipse. It is perfectly normal for there to be some looseness to your ellipses, as we ask you to prioritise confidence over accuracy. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

Core construction You're generally doing pretty well at starting with your 3 major masses for the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis, and connecting the rib cage and pelvis together into a torso sausage. You usually connect the cranial ball to the body with a simple solid neck, though there are a few places where you're starting with quite a complex neck, like these dogs. Remember the more simple a form is, the easier it is to make it feel solid and 3D. The idea with these constructional drawings is to start dead simple, and slowly build complexity step by step.

I noticed on some of your drawings that you sometimes pinch your torso sausage in the middle, as shown here When you join your rib cage and pelvis together into a torso sausage, remember that it should sag. If you pinch the underside upwards, it is no longer sticking to the characteristics of a simple sausage form. This complexity undermines the solidity of the form, giving us something of a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of our construction.

You may have noticed that I said generally doing well, this rhino came out highly simplified, as pointed out by my various notes. This over simplification starts with the core construction and extends all the way to the feet. A quick search result indicated that there is much more going on with a Rhino's foot that you could have attempted to include in your construction. As a bonus, these notes on foot construction may be useful.

Make sure that you're giving yourself enough time to follow the steps that you do understand and can apply, to give yourself a chance of working to the best of your current ability. If you're having difficulty understanding foreshortened views and tricky angles, I suggest following the puma demo from the informal demos page.

Make sure you complete each construction to the best of your current ability. The dog at the top of this page is clearly unfinished. And as I mentioned in the feedback I gave you on Discord, and as Uncomfortable explained in your lesson 3 critique, make sure you're giving each construction as much room as it needs for you to be able to follow every step of the constructional process. Drawing small makes it harder for your brain to process these spatial reasoning problems, and harder to engage your whole arm and draw from your shoulder.

Leg construction I can see that you're trying to apply the sausage method of leg construction. You're overlapping your forms and applying a contour curve at the joints where those forms intersect, which is a good start. You have a tendency to make your sausage forms too complex. Stick as closely as you can to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here, (which was one of the notes I made on your rhino earlier).

The idea with these sausage forms is not to try to capture the entire leg in one step. 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 a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a 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, here, and here on this dog leg demo. Another good example of leg construction is the donkey demo from the informal demos page. You can also see the sausage method being used in this dog demo that I put together for another student.

I've also shown this on your work for you in the past.

For example, I've corrected an overly complex leg sausage to a simple one and then added more forms to it on this antelope as well as making some corrections to your additional masses, which is what we'll talk about next.

Additional masses it is good to see that you're starting to experiment with using additional masses to build on top of your basic structures.

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.

You can see this concept at work in the way I redesigned the additional masses on your antelope. I've introduced inward curves and corners where these masses wrap around the underlying structures of the shoulders and thighs. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. You may have noticed that I made your shoulder mass bigger. These masses are a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, so don't be afraid to make them quite big. Having these structures in place is really useful when it comes to adding more masses later, it gives us something for those new forms to "grip" onto.

I noticed that sometimes when you use additional masses that there are cases where you're using a lot of contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid - unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines 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).

Head construction

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:

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.

Now, I have given you a number of things to work on here, so I am going to assign some revisions below. For these, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Do not work on more than one construction in a given day. So if you happen to put the finishing touches on one, do not move onto the next until the following day. You are however welcome and encouraged to spread your constructions across multiple days or sittings if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability. That's not a matter of skill, it's a matter of giving yourself the time to execute each mark with care (which as I noted earlier is something you sometimes don't do as well as you could).

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, as well as a rough estimate of how much time was spent on it.

Please complete 5 pages of animal constructions.