Hi there Languid , I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you seem to be tracing back over almost all the lines you want to assert as visible, which is something Uncomfortable already explained that you should not do when he gave you feedback for this exercise back in lesson 2, citing this section of the lesson material.

Other than that, think about having the pile of sausages on a table in front of you as per the demonstration rather than looking down on the pile from above (which is the impression I get from this pile.). Drawing the pile from above it makes it extremely difficult to focus on laying the sausages out one by one, and considering how they drape atop those below them.

You’ll also want to avoid laying in sausages parallel to one another as discussed in the exercise instructions, because this makes it difficult to allow the forms to sag over one another in three dimensions, and leads to forms looking like they might roll off the pile at any moment. This is happening with the 4 forms at the top of this pile.

Moving on to your animal constructions, where in the previous lesson I gently reminded you that we need you to adhere to the principles and techniques introduced in previous lessons and apply previous critique, this time I must be more blunt. Most of your work is very messy and sketchy, which completely contradicts the advice given in your lesson 4 critique (and in your lesson 3 and 2 critiques as well).

It is pretty clear that you’ve tackled most of these with a focus on adding lots of detail and making pretty animal drawings, goals that were entirely your own. In doing so, you’re undermining your own efforts to learn from these exercises- and that’s exactly what they are, exercises. The specific steps you take when going through each exercise are far more important than the end results, and you should not be modifying the process to achieve a result you find more pleasing. Now would probably be a good time for you to revisit this video from lesson 0 which explains how to get the most out of this course, and what responsibilities you have as a student.

Further down that page, you’ll find some specific restrictions that students on the official critique track need to stick to in order for us to offer the official critique service. In particular:

• Modifications to our instructions are not permitted. You may feel that our instructions do not suit your particular situation fully, and on that basis may feel that tweaking them is merited. Our instructions are not just there to ensure that students get the most out of the course and stay fully aligned to the manner in which the course was designed, but it's also there to help ease the burden on our staff. Ensuring that students make every effort to follow the instructions as they're written helps avoid time consuming pitfalls and in turn helps us keep the cost of providing official critique down. This is extremely important due to the fact that we price our feedback lower than what we pay our teaching assistants to provide it. Ensuring that we streamline their work is critical to being able to keep our prices as low as we do.

• It is the student's responsibility that they give themselves as much time as they require to go through the instructions and apply them in order to do the work to the best of their current ability. I'm not saying you need to submit perfect work, or even good work. You just need to make sure that you're giving yourself all the time you need (in other words, not rushing, not setting arbitrary deadlines that cause you to rush, etc.) to complete the work as well as you can now. This is necessary for us to be able to provide this service as cheaply as we do, and students who are repeatedly found to be rushing through may be removed from the official critique track. This is not to be mean, it's a logistical issue - those who rush put the responsibility for that choice on our TAs, increasing their workload, and increasing our expenses.

The biggest and most important point we need you to address is to USE THE GHOSTING METHOD and once you have drawn a line DO NOT DRAW IT AGAIN. We need you to think about the purpose of each line before you draw it. If you’re just making marks loosely based on instinct, rather than a conscious decision, then we cannot work with you to correct it. If I were to point to any line on your construction an ask “why did you make this kind of mark here?” you must have an answer. That answer can be wrong, in the sense that your understanding of what you were supposed to do was wrong, but it can’t be a "I don't know" based on no understanding at all.

If you try to complete these exercises based on the very instincts that you’re trying to train, it is an incredibly inefficient way to learn, and your work gets so messy that it is almost impossible to provide meaningful feedback.

• Revisit this page and refresh your memory of the principles of markmaking. Do not chicken scratch or zigzag your lines.

• Revisit the instructions for the ghosting method, and make sure you go through all 3 phases for every line you wish to add to your constructions. Do no arbitrarily redraw your lines.

• Revisit this video from lesson 1 which explains how to use line weight in this course. Do not trace back around the silhouette, or perform a clean up pass. Reserve additional line weight strictly for clarifying overlaps between forms, and use the ghosting method when applying it.

• I’m going to ask that you don’t get into texture and detail in your next round of constructions, because it is clearly such a big distraction for you and you haven’t applied the advice you’ve been given previously, but when you do come to attempt adding texture to your constructions in future at the bare minimum do not scribble. If you want more detailed feedback for your texture, revisit your lesson 4 feedback, I gave you some detailed explanations previously.

• One major point I brought up in both rounds of feedback for your lesson 4 was the importance of not altering the silhouettes of forms that are already on the page, because it undermines their solidity and reminds you that you’re just drawing lines on a flat piece of paper. I’ve noticed several constructions where you’ve continued to make this mistake, such as the examples I’ve marked with red hatching on this horse.

• Instead we want you to work solely by adding complete new forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes. Avoiding refining the silhouette with one off lines as discussed back here in lesson 3.

• In lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions in 3D- additional masses. I can see here on your hybrids page where there are less random details and clearer linework that you were using masses quite a bit. 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.

• Of the masses I can pick out, a lot of them seem to avoid any kind of complexity, staying soft and rounded all the way around. This lack of complexity robs us of the tools we need in order to explain how the mass is supposed to relate to the existing structures, leaving it feeling like a flat sticker pasted onto the drawing. Take a look at these diagrams which show how we can use some specific corners to establish how the mass wraps around and grips the underlying form. Here I've applied this to a few of the masses on your hybrids. Each mass is made up of a series of intentional strokes, which I've numbered on one of the masses. Trying to draw the whole mass with a single stroke often results in them becoming ellipsoid or bean-shaped, even if your intention was to draw something ellse.

• Before tackling your next round of constructions be sure to revisit the lesson 5 intro page and inspect the sections on major masses and the torso sausage. Follow those instructions as closely as you can. You appear to have taken a lot of liberties with those first major forms and several of your quadrupeds appear to be missing the “torso sausage” step giving you a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of the construction. Don’t forget to establish a simple solid form for the neck too, to establish how the cranial ball connects to the torso in 3D space.

• It looks like you’re working with the sausage method of leg construction in mind, but again,are taking a lot of liberties with it instead of sticking to the specific requirements laid out in the sausage method diagram. Start with the simple sausage forms as shown there, make sure they overlap at the joints so you can define the intersection where they penetrate one another by adding a contour line. Once in place, if you need to adjust them, do so by attaching more 3D forms and do not alter them with one-off lines.

The last point I need to touch on 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. (Edited on 7th Nov to update links in this paragraph)

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.

I am certain you are capable of making clearer constructions and being more deliberate with your linework. Once you do so, I should be better able to provide more positive and constructive advice for you. I’m going to be assigning some revisions for you to address the points I’ve called out here.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• All of these pages should be construction only, with no texture or detail. This should help you stay focused on the most important points, and not get distracted by decorating your drawings.

• 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), 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.