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

Human anatomy isn’t something we cover in this course, or something I’ve studied in detail myself. There are a lot of top quality anatomy courses available with our sponsors at New Masters Academy, and there’s a banner at the top of the page if you’d like to check them out. We also have an active Discord community, with a figure drawing channel, where you’re welcome to ask for advice and support. Many of our community members have studied anatomy with Proko, who has a free version of his course available on YouTube. I hope that gives you a few ideas of where you might learn human anatomy.

Starting with your organic intersections, this page is the stronger of the two, I can see that you’re thinking about how gravity will affect your forms, and piling them up in a manner that helps them to feel stable and supported. On the other page your forms appear to float in space. Something that will help you to establish more clearly how the pile is supported as a whole, is to include the shadows cast by the forms onto the ground plane.

It is good to see that you’re keeping a consistent light source in mind for each pile. I do think you could project your shadows a little more boldly, right now some of them seem to cling to the forms like heavy line weight.

Moving on to your animal constructions, you mentioned thinking you had trouble with birds. It is not uncommon for students to feel like birds are a struggle. If the pages are done in the order that they are assigned then the birds will be some of the first pages, where you’re just starting to learn the ropes of animal constructions. I look at the set of construction pages as a whole, and analyse the work for trends, focusing the bulk of the critique on things that appear to be a consistent issue, rather than a one-off mistake.

Overall there’s quite a bit that I think you’re handling well. You’re laying out the major masses of the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis, and connecting them together in 3D space, and I’m happy to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method of leg construction for most of your pages. I can see plenty of places where you’re making an effort to build your constructions “in 3D” by constructing complete new forms where you want to add to your constructions, and establishing relationships between the various pieces.

Remember in your lesson 4 feedback we talked about the importance of giving each construction as much space and time as it needs, in order for you to be able to get as much as possible out oof each one.

You are drawing larger than your initial lesson 4 submission, but you do still tend to leave a lot of blank space on the page, and in some cases such as this page I believe this is making things more difficult for you than they really need to be. Drawing smaller than the space con the page allows makes it more difficult to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these constructions, and can exacerbate markmaking issues by making it more challenging to execute lines smoothly, using the whole arm. This becomes particularly apparent when constructing smaller elements, such as heads and feet.

As for time, there’s a sketchiness to some of your linework that suggests you may not be fully employing the ghosting method, or at least, not consistently. By going through all 3 phases of the ghosting method for every line, we make sure all our thinking is done before the pen touches the page, making each line the result of a conscious decision, drawn with clear intent. When students try to combine the thinking and the drawing all in one step, we generally see haphazard marks that don’t serve a clear purpose, or wobbly, hesitant lines where a student was thinking through the line as they drew it. We can see example of haphazard marks on the head of this shark where some of the lines have been redrawn repeatedly, making the construction messy and confusing. It is important that students make every effort to stick to the principles of markmaking throughout this course. Lines should be continuous and unbroken. If we look at the eye sockets of this cat for example, they have been drawn with broken, dashed lines, and sections of the muzzle are drawn with chicken scratch. Its possible that this might be the result of switching to drawing from the wrist for shorter lines, make sure that you continue to use your whole arm for constructional lines, only switching to the wrist for textural marks. We also want to prioritize making a smooth, confident mark. We can see examples of wobbly, hesitant lines with this additional mass on your deer construction. Long story short, to complete these constructions to the best of your current ability I think you’re going to need to invest more time into ghosting your lines more consistently, ensuring that everything you do to your construction is the result of a conscious choice, rather than the result of relying on your instincts.

When it comes to the constructional aspect of these exercises, there are 4 topics I need to talk about. Those are leg construction, foot construction, additional masses, and head construction.

Leg Construction

It is great to see that you’ve made an effort to stick with the sausage method for most of your leg constructions, and that you usually remember to apply a contour line at each joint. The orientation of these contour lines is significant, as they show how the two sausage forms interpenetrate, much like how we used contour lines to define the intersections between forms in the form intersections exercise from lesson 2. They’re on the right track on this rhino but on your elephant they’re running vertically, making the relationship between the sausage forms a little confusing.

Something else I noticed with your legs is that you seem to leave them at the simple sausage stage, without attempting to build any additional forms onto these armatures. 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 in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo.

Foot Construction

I noticed a couple of pages, such as your hybrid and your hippo, where you omitted some of the feet. I’m guessing what happened is that the feet were obscured in the reference, so you weren’t sure how to draw them. If you encounter a similar situation in future I recommend searching for a second reference of that species, where the feet are visible, and using that information to help you to construct the missing pieces.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

Additional Masses

It is good to see that you’ve explored building onto many of your constructions with additional masses. Something to remember, is that each mass must have its own, fully enclosed silhouette. I noticed some places such as here on this hippo where you’d added to the construction with a one-off line, then tried to make it feel 3D by adding some contour lines. Another thing to note in regards to these additional masses is that adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasize the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships, and they also suffer from diminishing returns where a bunch may not be any more impactful than just one.

Instead, we focus on making these masses feel 3D by leveraging purposeful design of the masses' silhouettes. 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 logic to the masses on your hippo. The additions on the head and neck now have their own complete, fully enclosed silhouettes. I’ve included a thigh mass, with the blue ellipse, where the hind leg connects to the side of the body. This is very similar to the idea of the shoulder mass, which you had constructed successfully for the front leg. These bulky shoulder and thigh masses make very useful protrusions which we can use to help anchor additional masses to the construction. Notice with the additional mass on top of the rump, that I’ve pulled it down around the side of the torso and pressed it against the top of the thigh, creating a specific inward curve where the forms meet. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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. 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.

Something that stood out with the head of your hippo, and to a lesser extent with this cat was that you’d asserted the cranial ball and eye sockets as facing somewhat to the left, at a three-quarter angle, then built the muzzle facing directly towards the viewer. This inconsistency gives the impression that the head is bending in space, or facing different directions simultaneously. Carefully observe which way the head is tilting before you start constructing the features, then stick to that direction consistently for the whole head.

As there are a number of areas where I'd like you to demonstrate your understanding, I will need to assign some revisions. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark using the ghosting method), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.