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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are hitting the right notes. You’re keeping your forms simple (which helps them to feel solid) and you’re doing a good job of capturing how the forms slump and sag over one another with a sense of weight, coming to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported.

To get more out of this exercise in future I recommend you start experimenting with putting the light source in a different position for each pile, and thinking about how this will affect the shadows. As far as I can tell you seem to be placing the light source directly overhead in both piles, but there are many other angles you could explore.

Moving on to your animal constructions, the first thing that stood out is that a lot of your drawings for this lesson appear to be quite small. It is difficult to tell exactly how big you’re drawing with the edges of the pages cropped off in the photos but I think it would be safe to say that the majority of the pages have a lot of blank empty space that could have been used to draw the construction larger. Drawing smaller than what the space on the page allows limits how much you get out of each construction in a number of ways. It limits the brain’s capacity to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these exercises, while also making it more difficult to engage the whole arm and draw from the shoulder, which can result in stiffer or clumsier linework than what you’re really capable of. When the constructions are smaller it also makes it more difficult to construct the smaller elements of the heads and feet, and can lead to constructions coming out oversimplified. So I’d definitely encourage you to draw each construction as large as the page will allow in future, to help you get more out of them.

Now, despite making things more difficult than they really need to be by having some of the constructions so small, overall you’re doing a pretty good job. You’re starting each construction with the simple major masses as specified on the lesson intro page, and seem to be making a concerted effort to build things up by taking “actions in 3D” as discussed in your lesson 4 feedback. I also appreciate that you’ve remembered to stick with the sausage method of leg construction, even though its use is inconsistent within the demos, nicely done.

When you do lay down those major masses (or indeed, any ellipse you freehand in this course) remember to draw around them two full times before lifting your pen off the page, as specified here. This leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions, and along with use of the ghosting method, helps to execute them smoothly.

It looks like you’re struggling to come out of the habit of adding line weight somewhat arbitrarily to large sections of the silhouette, as the issue pops up intermittently across the set. There are places like this section of your hybrid where the additional line weight runs over several forms, jumping from one to another and forming a small extension or “bridge” between forms. This is a bit like stuffing the construction inside a fuzzy sock, it softens the distinctions between the forms leaving us with with organic mush. If you want to alter the leg, do so by adding complete new 3D forms, like this.

When it comes to leg construction, I noticed a few places where your sausage forms got a bit bloated through the midsection (almost like ellipses) which makes them stiff. Try to keep their width consistent along their length, even for animals with shorter stubbier legs, like the hippos. You’ve applied the contour curve at the joints to a few of the legs, so I can see that you understand how to do so, though you often leave them out. It’s worth pointing out that using contour lines in this manner (to show how these forms intersect) is a very effective way to reinforce the solidity of the construction, so it is worth remembering them in future, even if they may seem small and insignificant.

It is good to see that you’ve started exploring the use of additional forms to build onto your leg armatures on some of your pages, but this can be pushed further. 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, 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.

Moving down to feet, instead of drawing rounded nubs, it helps 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. You can find a visual example in these notes on foot construction.

Continuing on, the next thing I wanted to talk about is additional masses. I think your additional masses on this hippo work pretty well, as you’re showing a clear understanding of how these additional pieces connect to the existing structures with specific relationships.

It can be tricky to figure out exactly how to design an additional mass, and 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 generally grappling with this concept quite well, and the masses that appear flatter come down to not being fully intentional with the design of their silhouette. Like perhaps you hadn’t planned them out specifically before you drew them, which led to places where you “hedged your bets” by keeping the mass soft and rounded all the way around its silhouette, which robs you of the tools you need to explain how it relates to the underlying structures, as shown here. There are also a few places where there’s some subtle wavering to some of the lines, which suggests you might be trying to decide where to put the line after you’ve already started drawing it, and allowing your brain to make little course corrections as you go. It's pretty easy to get a little too comfortable and to stop thinking about how actively you're applying all three stages of the ghosting method to each and every mark - and so if we aren't attentive and intentional with it, we shift from properly investing our time to the planning and preparation phases, then executing with confidence, to reducing how much time we're willing to invest in those planning/preparation phases, and compensating by spending more time on the execution... which brings us right around to the opposite of what the ghosting method is all about.

Now, given that Uncomfortable fills in the stripes in the tiger demo, I can totally understand why you coloured in the spots on your frog, but for future reference you’ll get more out of the texture and detail phase of the construction if you try to follow the guidance for texture introduced in lesson 2. You can review your lesson 3 feedback for a fuller explanation on how best to approach texture within this course, and these reminders are also a good section to review.

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. 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.

All right, I think that should cover it. While I’ve pointed out quite a few things for you to take on board, your constructions are heading in the right direction and I think your spatial reasoning skills are developing nicely, so I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.