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

Starting with your organic intersections you’re doing pretty well with your linework in this exercise. There are a few places where it looks like you had a second go at a line you had already drawn, but for the most part your lines are smooth, clear, and confident.

Most of your forms are simple enough to feel solid, which is a good start, but on the second page in particular you’re missing an important point from the first paragraph of the exercise instructions.

"It requires a grasp of the weight of these sausage forms, and how they might slump and sag where that weight is not supported."

If you take a look here you’ll see I’ve called out a few places where your forms appear unsupported, making them feel stiff and weightless. Think about these forms as being soft and heavy for this exercise, like well filled water balloons.

Another thing I want you to keep in mind is that for this exercise you should always be placing forms at the top of your pile - don't sneak them in underneath as you did along the largest form in the pile, because there's no way to have the sausages on top respond to a newly added presence, given that they've already been drawn.

Another point (which Tofu advised you of back in your lesson 2 feedback) is to draw through and complete your forms wherever possible, currently you cut them off where the pass behind one another, which allows us to bypass thinking through how the entire form sits in 3D space. Rewatch the video demonstration for this exercise to see an example of how to do it. Once all the forms are in place we can always clarify which ones are in front by using a little bit of additional line weight to localised areas where overlaps occur.

You’re doing really well at pushing your shadows boldly so that they are projected onto the surfaces below. Remember to keep a single consistent light source in mind for any give pile. I’ve marked with red here where two sections of shadow are being cast in completely different directions to all the others, which gives the impression that the light source is moving around, confusing the viewer and undermining their suspension of disbelief. You’re also skipping some of the shadows that should be projected onto the ground plane, making it unclear how the pile s supposed to be supported, giving the feeling of the pile floating around.

Moving on to your animal constructions, the actual construction process is coming along quite well, but you’re running into a pretty significant issue which has been called out several times in your various previous critiques.

This issue is that you’re not adhering to the principles of markmaking consistently, which you should be striving to follow throughout this course. You sometimes chicken scratch your lines, or go back over them without a clear purpose, breaking the first principle of markmaking. Some pages are a bit better than others, but the issue is present on all of them, and there is no trajectory of improvement across the set. If we look at this frog from near the end of the set, it looks like you went back over a lot of those lines. I went over the problems this causes and how to address it in quite some detail in your lesson 4 feedback, and when I marked your revisions as complete I made it clear that this is something you needed to keep working on and stay on top of.

This issue is not about a lack of ability, your organic intersections clearly show that you are entirely capable of ghosting your lines and sticking to the principles of markmaking. This is about the choices you make. We need you to choose to ghost every line before you draw it, and it is clear in your constructions that this is only happening intermittently.

There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. The 20-30 minutes you seem to spend on each construction isn’t entirely unfeasible, but it is not unusual for students to spend and hour (or more) on one of these constructions, and given the amount of texture and detail on some of these pages it is pretty clear that you weren’t giving each individual mark as much time as was really required. As these exercises become more demanding and require more lines/forms it is not all that uncommon for students to slip into investing less time into each individual mark. As discussed here in the ghosted planes exercise that approach is incorrect. No matter how many lines you need to draw to complete the exercise, every one must be done intentionally using the planning and preparation stages of the ghosting method to ensure it is the result of a conscious decision. This is of course very tedious, but it is part of what makes these exercises effective as a learning tool.

As for space, you may recall this piece of advice. “The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.”

This is obviously not the approach you used throughout the set. None of your constructions use more than half the space available to them and some like this one are absurdly tiny, with tons of blank unused space around them. Drawing so much smaller than the space on the page allows makes your job unnecessarily difficult, and exacerbates your linework issues.

My previous instruction “Fill up the space on the page. I recommend you do this by drawing larger, which will make drawing smooth confident lines and fully constructing your forms easier.” is a fairly simple one, and again, not a problem with skill, but in the decisions you make. Some people do naturally feel more comfortable drawing smaller, but exercising a conscious choice to draw larger does get easier with practice.

Moving on, on the whole you’re doing a good job at following the construction process, and I’m quite pleased with your progress in building things up in 3D space.

When you lay out the major masses for your core construction, remember that the ribcage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso, as introduced here. You tend to draw it as a sphere, so sometimes it is slightly too short. Also, don’t forget to construct a simple tube for the neck. You usually do this well, but it looks like you skipped this step on the rhinos, and as I’ve called out with red here jumping straight into a wobbly complex form makes it more difficult to understand how it is supposed to sit in 3D space, so it is more likely to feel flat.

On the same image I noted in blue a few spots where you took a quick action in 2D space by extending off existing forms with partial shapes. Your work generally demonstrates a good understanding of how to build up your constructions using complete new forms and establishing specific 3D relationships between them, but just in case, here are a couple of amendments for the foot and 2D additions under the neck and belly.

Speaking of feet, as a bit of a bonus I’d like you 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, a form 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. I think you may have had similar ideas in mind for some of your feet, but the linework is so cramped it is sometimes hard to tell.

Also, if you run into a situation where the feet obscured in the reference, a good strategy is to find another reference of the same species where the feet are visible and use that information to help you fill in the missing pieces, instead of amputating the feet off your construction.

The next point I wanted to talk about is additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses liberally throughout your constructions, and in some cases their design is coming along well. If we come back to this rhino you’ll see I’ve traced over with green an example of a mass that I think was well done. Here you’ve clearly thought about how the mass would wrap around the existing structures of the torso, thigh, and red additional mass, and it feels convincing and solid.

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 think you’re off to a great start at building upon your legs with 3D forms to develop the specific character of the leg in question. It is not uncommon for students to leave the legs at the simple sausage stage, so it is really nice to see you taking your leg constructions as far as you can. I noticed a lot of these additions 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, on another student's work. 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.

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. Once again drawing your constructions larger will make it easier to follow. 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.

Unfortunately I am going to need to assign some revisions for you to tackle the points called out here. Your constructions are coming along fairly well, so I’ll only be asking for 2 pages to encourage you to take your time and ghost all your lines. I strongly recommend that you draw bigger to make better use of the space available on the page, and make it easier to engage your whole arm and draw smooth confident lines. Please don’t add texture to these pages, I don’t want to accidentality interpret fur texture as scratchy linework.

Please complete the following:

2 pages of organic intersections.

2 pages of animal constructions.