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

Starting with your organic intersections you are keeping your forms simple which helps them to feel solid, and are doing a good job of capturing how they slump and sag over one another with the effects of gravity.

Unfortunately this exercise isn’t finished. You don’t appear to have attempted to add any cast shadows to either of your piles, and I will need to see you do so before I can mark this as complete.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall these are coming together well, and there are some moments where you are demonstrating that your spatial reasoning skills are developing really well.

Your core construction appears to be in order, you are doing a good job of laying out your major masses and connecting them together with a solid torso sausage and simple neck.

Moving onto leg construction, I am happy to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method, though you are a bit inconsistent about remembering to apply a contour line at each joint. These little lines might seem insignificant, but defining the intersections where the sausage forms connect in 3D space is a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction, so try to remember them in future.

You are also making quite good use of additional forms to flesh out your leg armatures when you choose to. On some of your pages your leg constructions are left almost completely bare, and I’d recommend spending a little longer observing your references more carefully in these cases, there will usually be some kind of complexity present in the legs, even if it is subtle. One construction where I think your additions to the legs are particularly promising is this bear, where I see you’ve added a mass to the front leg that doesn’t directly impact the overall silhouette. This kind of thinking, about the in-between pieces that don’t break the silhouette but help to give the other masses something to interlock with is great. This will help you to flesh out information that isn't just noticeable from one angle, but really explore the construction in its entirety, which will yet further push the value of these constructional exercises as puzzles.

Moving down to feet, you’re doing a good job of drawing complete forms to describe them, though I have a suggestion which I think will help you to make them appear more solid than the vague rounded blobs you usually use. I'd like you to 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 paws in future.

The next topic to cover is additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses throughout your pages, 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.

There are places where you are employing this logic quite well, and I think the two masses on the back of this bear are nice examples. You’ve kept these simple where they are exposed to fresh air, and you are clearly thinking about how they will wrap around the existing forms in 3D space. I like how you’ve used the protruding shoulder and thigh masses to press against the additional masses in this construction, helping to anchor the additional masses to the torso. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

There are other masses which definitely could be improved upon, for example the one I’ve traced over in red on this rhino has a lot of alternating inward and outward curves, and along the top edge especially there is nothing present in the construction to explain all this complexity. This makes it difficult for the viewer to understand how the form is supposed to sit in 3D space, so it feels flat. If we need to add a lot of complexity to the construction, then it should be done in stages, as shown here. I’ve broken that mass into 3 pieces, each more limited in scope, so that they can stay simple where they are exposed to fresh air. I’m also being very specific about where I place a sharp corner, or an outward or inward curve, designing each mass to wrap around the forms that are already in place in your construction. I’ve also adjusted the mass under the belly, as all it is attaching to is the smooth rounded surface of the torso sausage. You also seem to have deliberately avoided having the mass on the back overlap the mass on the rump, but it is okay for one mass to overlap another, the mass on the back can wrap over the mass on the rump like any other existing form. I’ve made a small edit to the mass on the back to show this in action.

One other quick point about additional masses, make sure you always give them a complete silhouette, as shown here, rather than cutting them off where they pass behind something such as the leg there. This will make sure you’re fully aware of how the form sits in space.

The next 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. Out of these pages I think this wolf shows signs that you are aware of this method, you’ve carved out pentagonal eye sockets and wedged them against the muzzle. Try bringing it all together in the way the demo shows (with the brow ridge and cheeks forms also fitting together) and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise. 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 righty, I think you’ve understood the animal construction exercise, I’ll just need you to finish your organic intersections, please.