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

Starting with your organic intersections you’re doing a great job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and your linework is looking quite smooth and confident.

On this page you’ve stacked a lot of the forms parallel which makes some of the forms appear precariously balanced. To help build up piles that feel stable and convincing, try laying the forms perpendicular to one another, as this makes it easier to draw the forms slumping over one another with the effect of gravity.

On the same page most of your shadows are timid, clinging to the edge of the forms casting them, instead of being projected onto the surfaces below.

The other page is a bit better on both points, and it is on the strengths of that one that I’ll be ticking this exercise off as complete.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are heading in the right direction. I’m happy to see that you’re treating these drawings as puzzles to develop your spatial reasoning skills, and have improved on all the points discussed in your lesson 4 critique, well done!

You’re doing reasonably well at applying the methods and techniques shown in the lesson, and I have a few things to discuss which I think will help you continue to improve still further.

Starting by taking a look at leg construction, I’m pleased to see that you’ve made an effort to stick with the sausage method, and you’re doing well at establishing chains of sausage forms for your leg armatures. You’re a bit intermittent about applying a contour curve to each joint, I noticed they are present on some constructions but not others. These little curves might seem insignificant, but they have an important role to play. By adding a contour line to the joint, we define how the forms penetrate one another in 3D space, just like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise, which is a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction.

Another thing I noticed is that while you generally do very well at building up your constructions in 3D with complete new forms, you tend to switch back to 2D when you want to refine the legs- extending their silhouettes with one-off lines, which is the mistake shown in this diagram I shared with you previously. You can find examples of these two points called out here on your gazelle, and corrected in this drawover.

Moving down to feet, keep in mind that the more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer (and more importantly, you) to understand how it is supposed to sit in 3D space, so the more likely it is to feel flat. So, for constructional drawing we want to start with simple forms that can easily be perceived as 3D, then build up complexity in stages.

Instead of trying to draw all the complexity of the foot and all of the toes with a single form (as you did with the rats and iguana), I’d like you o study 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing feet in future.

Another key point to check on is additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses on the majority of your constructions, although it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette in a way that feels convincing.

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.

On the same two gazelle images I called out a couple issues you’d run into with additional masses and provided solutions. In case my handwriting is difficult to read I’ll type it up as well.

Firstly, sometimes where you have two masses next to each other you’d cut one of them off. Once you’ve drawn a mass, it becomes part of the existing construction, and any more masses you add to that area will wrap around the existing masses just like any other form.

You’d often pressed additional masses against the ribcage or pelvis mass to introduce some specific complexity to additional masses. This is a good idea in principle, and shows that you’re thinking about these as 3D forms and not just slapping them onto the drawing like flat stickers.

The thing is, if you really think about the structure that is present as you're adding that additional mass, the ribcage and pelvis are already completely engulfed by the torso sausage, leaving no protruding forms or structures for the mass to interact with.

So instead, as shown in the drawover, those masses should not actually be worrying about the ribcage and pelvis, but rather wrapping around the whole torso sausage. Thus, we do need to put some thought into the nature of the forms we're dealing with. Note that while I'm not wrapping them around the ribcage or pelvis, I have wrapped the purple one around the thigh, which is the bulky form where the top of the leg attaches to the side of the torso. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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.

It does look like you’re fairly familiar with this method, and I’m seeing some of those key points being applied quite frequently throughout the set, especially in the rhinos. Do try to make sure you stick to constructing complete new forms even for smaller or fiddly additions, I noticed a few cases where you’d included a one-off line or partial shape, which can start to flatten the construction.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your work is moving in the right direction, and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Normally the next step is the cylinder challenge, but I see you completed it early, so feel free to move onto lesson 6.