Hello Redoakleaf, 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 it is great to see that you're drawing through them all, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

For this exercise we want the forms to feel heavy, like well filled water balloons. Imagine that you're looking at a plate of sausages on a table in front of you, and think about dropping each form in from above, one at a time, imagining how each form will slump and sag over the forms you have already drawn, coming to rest in a position where it feels stable and supported.

We want to avoid leaving gaps beneath forms, as this makes them appear to float in space, either being stiff or weightless.

You're handling your shadows well, you're projecting them far enough to cast onto the forms below, and are following a consistent light source.

Moving on to your animal constructions these are coming along well, and I'm very happy to see that you're continuing to follow instructions from previous lessons, such as following the principles of markmaking introduced in lesson 1, using the sausage method of leg construction introduced in lesson 4, and drawing through all your forms.

You've done a good job with these and on the whole they're pretty solid, so this should be a straightforward critique, with just a few things for you to keep in mind when practising these constructions in the future.

Most of your core construction is working well, though I did notice that the head of the bear cub appears to be floating in front of his body. Be sure to draw a neck to connect the head to the body in 3D space, even if the neck is mostly behind the head.

It is great that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction throughout the set, and you're sticking to simple sausage forms for your base armatures, as well as building onto these structures with additional forms. I can see that you've remembered to apply a contour curve at the joints, although I think you may be a little confused about what this curve represents. The contour curve at each joint is an intersection, as introduced in the form intersections exercise. The intersection runs along both sausage forms simultaneously, so can only occur in the region where these two sausage forms overlap on the page. I noticed several places where you'd draw the leg, complete with additional forms, then wrap a contour curve around the surface of the whole lot. I've made a diagram here to show a visual comparison between the two approaches, I hope that makes things clear for you. Using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively.

Moving on to how you're tackling your feet constructions, you're maintaining the 3D illusion quite effectively by making an effort to build them with complete 3D forms. I think you may still 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.

The next area I wanted to discuss is additional masses. It is good that you've been using these liberally to build on your basic constructions wherever you need to add bulk or complexity, and have even explored layering them on top of one another when you need to build a large or complex addition to your constrcutions. I do have some advice that should help you to design these masses to have them actually wrap around the existing structure.

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 noticed a general tendency for quite a few of your additional masses to overlap the underlying structures just a tiny bit, with the silhouette of the existing form and the additional mass running almost parallel. This can leave the additional masses feeling precariously balanced, like they might peel off if the animal were to move.

So, with that in mind, I've redrawn a few of the additional masses on this bear cub. I've pulled the two masses on top of his back down from the spine and wrapped them around the sides of the body, giving them a firmer grip onto the construction. I've also made use of the big shoulder and thigh masses to help anchor the additional masses to the construction, I've pressed the additional masses right up against the shoulder and thigh, creating an inward curve where they meet. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I've made some adjustments to the additional mass at the back of the leg- attaching it to the outer line of the ellipse for the thigh, to prevent any stray lines going outside the construction, and giving the mass a subtle outward curve where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press into it and cause an inward curve.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a good start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be taken further. A lot of these forms focus primarily on masses that actually impact the silhouette of the overall leg, but there's value in exploring the forms that exist "internally" within that silhouette - like the missing puzzle piece that helps to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. Here is an example of what I mean, from another student's work - as you can see, Uncomfortable has blocked out masses along the leg there, and included the one fitting in between them all, even though it doesn't influence the silhouette. This way of thinking - about the inside of your structures, and fleshing out information that isn't just noticeable from one angle, but really exploring the construction in its entirety, will help you yet further push the value of these constructional exercises and puzzles.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. On the whole these are looking solid, as I can see you've made a real effort to treat these as three dimensional puzzles, and paid attention to how the pieces fit together. 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.

On a fairly minor note, something that may help when it comes to eyelids, is instead of drawing the top and bottom eyelids as simple lines, draw them as entire forms - like a piece of putty being stuck over the eyeball, as shown here. This will help you focus more on how it wraps around the ball structure.

You've shown a strong understanding of this lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark it as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.