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

Starting with your organic intersections your work is well done. You're keeping your forms simple and allowing them to slump over one another under a shared sense of gravity, in a way that feels believable.

My main suggestion for you here would be to include cast shadows on the ground plane, as right now your piles appear to float in mid air, making it hard to understand how the pile is being supported.

Moving on to your animal constructions the trend of your work being well done continues, although I do have a bit more advice to offer for this section of the homework.

You're doing a pretty good job of building your constructions from complete 3D forms, and fitting them together like a puzzle to achieve a solid, believable result. There are a few places here and there where you're hopping between taking actions in 3D (drawing complete forms) and actions in 2D (drawing individual lines and partial shapes on the flat piece of paper.) I've marked out some specific examples on this elephant for clarity. Just remember we want to be drawing complete forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes wherever we went to build on these constructions.

Continuing on, I'm happy to see that you've continued to apply the sausage method for constructing legs. You're generally using it well, though I did spot some places like this where you don't appear to have been trying to stick to simple sausage forms for each limb section. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer to understand how it exists in 3D space, so try to keep the sausage forms as simple as you can. We then add and extra bulk and complexity with the use of additional forms.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a good start in the use of additional forms along your leg structures, but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these focus primarily on forms 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 as puzzles.

Moving down to feet, for the most part you're doing a great job of building these structures from 3D forms, (I thought the feet of this bird were well done) though occasionally you'll add a partial shape instead, such as the hind foot of this bear. As a quick bonus, I'll share these notes on foot construction which show how we can take the approach you'd used for the front foot of your bear, and push it a bit further by adding similar boxy forms to construct the toes.

The next area I wanted to talk about is additional masses. Here you're making good progress, and figuring out how to design your masses in a way that feels convincing, and demonstrates an understanding of how your forms relate to one another in 3D space.

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, with that in mind, I've made a couple of edits to your elephant construction.

• The first change I made, by drawing the red mass, does not reflect an actual mistake you made, at all, but comes down to the age of the elephant demo at the bottom of the informal demos page. Here, we've found that instead of dropping a sphere on top of existing forms, it works better to use an additional mass, as this way we can create clearer 3D relationships between the new form and the existing structures. I can share another example of this being applied to this elephant construction which Uncomfortable made as part of another student's critique.

• Secondly, with the red and purple masses, I've made use of the large ellipses you'd created to represent the bulky mass of the shoulders and thighs. I've used arrows to indicate the specific use of inward curved in these additional masses where I'd pressed them against the top of the shoulder/thigh and wrapped them around these existing structures. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• Finally, with the masses in green, I've shown how we can avoid pressing an inward curve into a mass where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to cause such complexity, by breaking it into pieces and layering masses on top of one another.

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:

• 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. I can certainly see you employing some elements of this demo to some of your head constructions, but bring it all together in the way the demos shows, and you should be able to get a more solid result. 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 I noticed with the head of your fish was that when you constructed the jaws, you ended up cutting back inside the silhouette of the cranial ball, undermining its solidity. This was the only place in the set where I saw this happen, and I think you've already learned from this, as the following hybrid construction also has its beak open, but you did a good job of avoiding cutting back inside the cranial ball to do so.

Okay, I think that covers it. You're demonstrating a good grasp of the constructional methods in this lesson, and I'm happy to mark this as complete. The 250 Cylinder Challenge is up next, best of luck.