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

Thank you for letting me know this is a redo. I'll be comparing this with your first submission and the feedback Uncomfortable wrote for you previously. I'd like to note that I think this submission is missing 2 pages of non hooved quadrupeds and the hybrid, but seeing as you're doing a full redo voluntarily and there's plenty here for me to critique it's not really a problem.

Starting with your organic intersections I can see that you've applied the two main points that Uncomfortable brought to your attention previously- none of your forms appear to be floating in mid air, they all appear to have a sense of gravity, and you've made your cast shadows broader, so they more accurately represent the form that is casting them, good work.

Something that should help you when you practise this exercise inf future, when drawing forms over one another try to avoid overlapping them at the peak of the lower form. This helps prevent your forms from looking like they're just drawn over one another as well as helps create the illusion that they're wrapping around each other. It sounds trickier than it actually is, here is a visual example, and here we can see this applied to the top sausage in one of your piles.

Moving on to your animal constructions there are some elements to your work that are quite pleasing, you're making good use of the space on the page, drawing big enough to enable your brain to think through these spatial reasoning puzzles and to engage your whole arm while drawing. You generally keep your lines smooth and confident too, which is great to see.

Actions in 2D vs 3D

It looks like you've taken steps to avoid cutting inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, good work. You're mostly doing a good job of adding complete 3D forms when you want to build on your constructions, although there are some exceptions. If we take a look at this rhino for example, the boxy form of the muzzle isn't actually attached to the cranial ball in 3D space, so it falls a little flat. I also want to draw your attention to the area under the neck, where you've extended your construction with a single line.

So, here I've made some quick diagrams to help you understand the difference between extending in 2D and extending in 3D. In blue I've shown how extending off the outer edge of the ball doesn't really sell the 3D illusion we're going for. It reads more like a flat piece of paper stapled to the side of the ball than a 3D form. In green I've shown how to connect the box to the ball in 3D space, using those curved lines which follow the surface of the ball and the box at the same time- with a side note that what we're doing is similar to the form intersections exercise from lesson 2, we're just not drawing the entire box where it exists within the ball.

Lastly I wanted to make clear, that when it comes specifically to head construction, we wedge the boxy muzzle form snugly against the edge of the eye sockets as shown. Which leads me to the next point I need to cover.

Head Construction

So, I checked your previous critique, and I can see that Uncomfortable pointed you to the informal head demo as well as sharing this rhino head demo with the following instruction:

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can.

Scrolling though both sets of homework, I don't really get the impression that you're following this method more closely now than you were before you were given this advice.

• The first step after establishing the cranial ball is to carve the pentagonal shape of the eye sockets onto the ball. There are some constructions such as this capybara where the eye socket is floating outside the cranial ball. This indicates that the muzzle was drawn first, then the eye socket was stamped on top.

• Once the eye sockets are in place we want to establish the footprint for the muzzle. You can see this shown as step 2 in the informal head demo. It is also shown in the diagram on the upper right of this page. If we take this dog as an example, we can see the the footprint for the muzzle is incomplete. You've drawn the section between the eye sockets, but not the sides.

Please study the demos provided more carefully and try to apply the method shown to your work.

Leg Construction

There are a couple of things to point out here.

Firstly, you appear to be constructing your legs using ellipses, which as noted on the lower left of the sausage method diagram is something to avoid as it makes the legs appear stiff.

Secondly, it seems like you're slightly confused with how to apply the contour curves at the joints, and what function they're meant to serve. There are also a number of pages where you've forgotten to add them at all. Right now, it looks like what you're doing is constructing your base armature, then drawing some additional forms to pad out the joint, then applying a contour curve around the whole lot. What we're actually doing with the contour curve at the joints is similar to what was introduced in the form intersections exercise from lesson 2. We're drawing an intersection that establishes how the sausage forms connect together in 3D space. For this to work, the contour curve needs to be drawn within the area where the two forms overlap on the page.

I've redrawn one of the legs on this horse to help you understand the sausage method better.

1- I started by making the shoulder mass just a smidge bigger and higher. You're doing quite well here, but I find being generous with the shoulder mass means we can use it as a helpful structure when anchoring additional masses to the construction later.

2- Make sure you're sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here. They have a consistent width along their length, and giving them a subtle curve helps to introduce gesture to the construction.

3- Contour curves at the joints. Don't forget them, they might seem insignificant but they do a lot to reinforce the solidity of your construction.

4- Additional forms. You're making a decent attempt with these, but I've given them a more generous overlap with the underlying sausage forms to emphasise how the wrap around. Having minimal overlaps can make the additional masses feel less well anchored to the construction. This ties into the next point I need to discuss.

Additional Masses

I'm happy to see that you're making use of additional masses throughout your pages, and are clearly considering how to design these additional masses in such a way that explains how they wrap around the existing structures of your constructions.

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, if we remember that complexity in the silhouette of these additional masses must occur as a direct result of interacting with other structures, then the sharp corners indicated here are difficult to explain. Please take a look at this diagram that shows how to transition smoothly between curves when wrapping a mass around a rounded form instead of introducing arbitrary corners. This doesn't mean we should avoid adding sharp corners altogether, as shown here I've redrawn some of your additional masses, making use of the shoulder and thigh masses to press the additional masses against. Note the specific use of corners and inward curves that are caused by the structures present in the construction. You can see another example of this in this draw over that Uncomfortable made for you previously. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Conclusion

Overall you're not that far from doing a good job with this lesson, but given that you've struggled to apply feedback in the past I would like to see evidence that you've understood the key areas I've given for you to work on, and addressed them with some revisions. Please review your lesson 4 and first lesson 5 critiques, as Uncomfortable gave thorough explanations of topics I have discussed more briefly here, as well as sharing a number of diagrams and demos that should help you with your constructions.

Then please complete 3 new pages of animal constructions. Note, if you have the 3 missing pages from this submission, they will not count towards your revision pages. They need to be new constructions in response to the areas I've asked you to work on here.

Of course, if anything said to you here or previously is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions. Best of luck.