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

Before I critique your work I will try to address your comments and questions.

It is very common for students to fixate on little details to the detriment of the larger structures. Your awareness of this is a good first step towards correcting it. As I'm sure you're aware, for these constructional drawings we're starting with big, simple forms, and slowly adding more smaller forms to that structure to build complexity. For drawing in general I've found it helpful to go through a set of logical questions when beginning a drawing. First, identify the biggest thing in your drawing, then you can ask yourself questions like- What shape is it? How big is it? Whereabouts on the page do I need to draw it? Once you have enough information in your head to plan this first form, draw it, then repeat the process for the next biggest thing. This should help avoid getting into little details too soon.

In terms of the fear of making a mistake, and whether this gets better with time and practice, I would say yes. The more drawings you complete, the less each individual drawing will seem like a big deal. You'll still want to try your best, of course, but there comes a point where you realise that this is one drawing of many, and you can and will do another one. Mistakes are part of the learning process, we all make them. The fear of failure is very real, and I know it is difficult to overcome. I think the more times that you conquer these fears and draw anyway, the easier it will become, it is like a muscle that gets stronger the more you use it.

For studying other courses alongside Drawabox, you're welcome to do so, and I know many students who have have good results from doing multiple courses at once. I would say that if you're using more than one course, make sure you're following the Drawabox instructions when doing your Drawabox homework, don't mix in methods from other sources. And be sure to leave time for your personal work, as per the 50% rule.

I'm thrilled to hear that you're finding Drawabox helpful. Now, let's take a look at your work.

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple and easy to work with. Most of your forms look stable and supported, which is good. We want to be able to leave the pile and not have and of the forms topple off. You're mostly stacking new forms in front of the first one you drew. In future I'd like you to try piling your forms on top of each other more. I've done a quick diagram on one of your pages here to demonstrate the difference. Stacking the forms vertically is more challenging, but will help you to explore and understand the 3D space that you're trying to create in this exercise.

The next point isn't necessarily a mistake, since it is not clearly defined i the instructions for this exercise. In future, it will help you develop your spatial reasoning skills if you draw each form in its entirety (drawing through) instead of allowing some of them to get cut off when they pass behind another form. You do draw through most of your forms, and that's great, but I've highlighted an example of an incomplete form on your work here to illustrate the point.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, and they are following a reasonably consistent light direction, good work. I do have some notes on how they can be improved, and I've pointed them out here.

Working from left to right:

1- Sometimes you're drawing form shadows as well as cast shadows. We should only be drawing cast shadows in this exercise. The difference between them is explained in this section from lesson 2.

2- There's a confusing gap in one of your shadows here. Possibly down to you drawing the edge of one of your forms twice. It doesn't matter if you decided this gap was part of the form, or part of the ground plane, it would be in shadow either way.

3- Think of the contour curves that you draw on your forms like lines drawn on the surface of your forms to help describe their curvature, as introduced here. These imaginary lines don't have their own volume, so they don't cast shadows. This is an issue that appears in some of your animal constructions as well.

4- (Marked in red.) Sometimes your shadows are a bit small.

5- (Marked in purple) Make sure you consider the shadows cast by every form. It looks like you forgot this one, it casts a shadow on the ground plane.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see you worked really hard to follow the constructional steps shown in the lesson instructions, and to apply the feedback you have received in previous critiques. It looks like you learned quite a bit as you progressed though the set, I think the horses you did at the end are the best of the bunch, well done. I have a few points to offer advice on, to help you continue to get the most out of these constructional exercises in the future.

General approach

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. This does vary a bit across the set, but there are some pages where you're not making the most of the space available on the page. This rabbit would be an example. By artificially limiting how much space you give a drawing, you hinder your brain's capacity to process the spatial reasoning puzzles involved in these constructions, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm to draw.

On the same rabbit it looks like you panicked a little bit. Faced with a difficult challenge, it is common for students to get flustered and just draw something to get it over with. This is a natural, and understandable reaction. When this happens exercise control over yourself. It is tough, but stop for a moment, and remember every mark you make in this course should be the result of a conscious decision. Think in your head, instead of on the page. Plan everything you do, and use the ghosting method in full to maximise your chance of making confident deliberate lines.

Some other signs that it would help to invest a bit more time in some of these are when proportions get a little out of control like this deer with its rather large legs, or when things are simplified or omitted, like this lizard where there was much more structural information going on in the reference that you did not attempt to draw. For example the spines or frills on his back, and his toes and claws. As a quick bonus, these notes on foot construction may be useful.

It isn't an issue on every page, so it looks like this is something you are keenly aware of, and working to address, I just want to encourage you to continue to work on taking as much time as you need to complete each drawing, each form, each line, to the best of your current ability.

Core construction

You're doing a pretty good job here, starting with simple, solid forms for your cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis mass, and connecting them together with a torso sausage and (in most cases) a simple solid neck. Sometimes you draw your rib cage spherical- for example in this deer. Remember the rib cage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso sausage as explained on the lesson introduction page.

Leg construction

I'm happy to see that you're working on applying the sausage method of leg construction the was introduced in lesson 4. You're not always sticking to it as closely as you could, for example you drew ellipses for the legs of this rabbit instead of sausage forms. Using ellipses tends to make legs look stiff, they don't have the same sense of gesture that we get from sausage forms.

Additional masses

I'm happy to see you exploring the use of additional masses with your constructions, and it does look like you get more confident with them as you progress through the set. Where lesson 4 introduced the idea of building onto our construction with complete forms, here in lesson 5 we get more specific about how we design those forms to interact with our existing structures.

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.

To illustrate this, I've drawn on top of your work here to modify some of your additional masses. Notice that I made the shoulder mass bigger, this mass serves as a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, so don't be afraid to make it quite big. This also serves as a useful structure to wrap the additional masses around. I've given the additional masses a generous overlap with the body (or legs) to help them have a good "grip" on these underlying forms. If you keep the overlap between your existing structures and your additional forms very minimal they can feel like they're perched on top of the animal, and might wobble off as soon as it moves. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I noticed that sometimes when you use additional masses that there are a few cases where you're using a lot of contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid like under the neck of this horse - unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

Sometimes you're adding very heavy line weight (or possibly cast shadows) around parts of your additional masses. It's happening with some of the masses on the back of this horse. This emphasises the separation between the additional mass and the underlying structure, undermining your efforts to securely attach the mass to your construction. Remember additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here and should not be used to correct or cover up mistakes.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a good start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be pushed farther. 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, from another student's work - as you can see, 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:

1- 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.

2- 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.

3- 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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

I can see you made a real effort to follow a constructional approach to your heads and think in 3D. One minor point I find to help when it comes to eyelids, is instead of drawing the top and bottom eyelids as simple lines, draw them as entire forms - like a piece of putty being stuck over the eyeball, as shown here. This will help you focus more on how it wraps around the ball structure.

Conclusion Overall this submission shows a great deal of growth. I've given you plenty to work on, but I'm sure you'll be able to apply this advice independently so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. If anything I've said to you here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.