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

Starting with your organic intersections these are hitting most of the right notes. You're keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid. I can see you're thinking about piling your forms on top of one another in a way that has each form feeling stable and supported. Your second page came out a bit stronger in this regard, as your forms start to slump over one another with a sense of gravity.

I'd suggest putting a little more thought into your contour curves, and how their degree will change as the forms turn in space. You can see this degree shift in action in these photos of a slinky.

Good work projecting your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the forms below.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see that you're striving to build your constructions up in 3D, though there are places where you'll switch back to working with single lines that only exist in the flat 2 dimensional space of your paper. I've marked on this deer in red where you'd cut back inside forms you had already drawn, undermining their solidity. I've highlighted in blue a number of spots where you drew a one-off mark bridging from one 3D structure to another, enclosing the hatched area. But this hatched area exists only in two dimensions - there is no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how it is meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. Creating believable, solid, three dimensional constructions despite drawing on a flat page requires us to first and foremost convince ourselves of this illusion, this lie we're telling, discussed here back in Lesson 2. The more our approach reinforces the illusion, the more we make new marks that reinforce it even further. The more our marks break the illusion, the more marks we make that then further break the illusion, for us and for everyone else.

Please refer to your lesson 4 critique for a fuller explanation of how to build your constructions in 3D by drawing complete new forms wherever you want to build on your construction, as well as several diagrams and demos of this in action. Here is how we could build those blue extensions as complete, self-enclosed forms with purposefully designed silhouettes that establish the relationships between the forms.

It looks like some of the places where you'd altered the silhouette of an existing form came down to redoing lines to make corrections. In this course it is best to leave mistakes alone rather than attempting to correct them. Correcting a mistake will create the impression in our brain that the mistake was addressed, whereas really addressing the mistake would involve reflecting upon why it may have occurred and adjusting our approach to try and avoid the mistake in the future - something we usually do by giving ourselves more time to think through the actions we take while doing the work. Leaving the mistakes alone allows us to come back after the page is complete to assess where the mistakes occurred, and how we might do better in the future. On the other hand, redoing a line generally just makes the work messier.

Another point that stands out is that you don't appear to be adhering to the specifics of the sausage method of leg construction. In your lesson 4 critique I went over the merits of the sausage method and gave you specific advice to help you apply it more effectively. To keep this as efficient as possible I'm going to paste that advice in here, rather than rephrasing it all. If something about this is unclear or confusing, you are allowed to ask questions.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

The sausage method is quite specific, so lets walk through it.

• Stick to simple sausage forms for your armatures, as closely as you can. They have the same properties as the organic forms exercise. Rounded ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width.

• Once you've drawn the sausage forms, we reinforce each joint by drawing a contour line where the forms intersect in 3D space, much like the form intersections exercise from lesson 2, except instead of intersecting boxes and cones, we're intersecting sausages.

• Next we will usually have to add more forms to the construction, to build onto the chain of sausages and lumps, bumps, or complexity that could not be captured with sausages alone.

So I've made some notes on this deer of specific deviations from the sausage method of leg construction. There are places where it looks like you're attempting to stick to simple sausage forms, and others where it looks like you're deliberately deforming the sausages in an attempt to draw the entire leg in one go. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer to understand how it is meant to exist in 3D space, so stick to simple sausages, as closely as you can. You frequently leave out the contour line for the intersection at the joint, and there are barely any attempts to build onto your leg constructions with additional forms, as you appear to opt to either deform the leg sausages or alter your construction with single lines instead. Here I've rebuilt one of the deer legs, step by step, with colour-coded instructions, I hope that makes the process clearer for you.

Fortunately, in the areas where you are building onto your constructions with complete additional forms, you're doing a pretty good job of designing your additional forms so that they connect to the existing structures believably. I'm particularly pleased to see you building your camel humps in stages, rather than trying to add too much complexity with a single form, good work.

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.

By and large the design of your additional masses is heading in the right direction, I'd just encourage you to wrap them around the underlying structures a bit more boldly as shown here which helps the additional masses to feel more firmly attached.

Something to note in regards to these additional masses is that adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasize the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships, and they also suffer from diminishing returns where a bunch may not have any more impact than just one. As such, it's always important to ask yourself for every mark you want to put down, "what is the purpose of this mark", "how can I draw this mark so it accomplishes its goal as effectively as possible", and lastly - "are there any other marks that are already accomplishing this goal".

Oh, and as a quick bonus point, I'll share these notes on foot construction. Basically they show how we can introduce structure to the foot by using "boxy" forms, meaning 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. I can see you're thinking this way about some of your feet, but I'd like you to pay attention to how Uncomfortable uses similarly boxy forms for each toe, rather than switching to drawing the toes with single lines.

The last point to discuss is more of a recommendation for how to approach head construction in next set of animals. 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.

Much of what I've discussed here I would normally leave a student to apply independently, in their own time. However as altering the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn and using the sausage method of leg construction formed a large portion of your lesson 4 feedback, it suggests you may not be able to apply said feedback independently. With this in mind I will be assigning some revisions for you to demonstrate your understanding of these points before moving forward.

Please complete 3 pages of quadruped constructions.