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

Starting with your organic intersections I'm happy to see you drawing through your forms here, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space. You're doing a good job of making your forms slump and sag around each other with a sense of gravity.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, but you're also drawing form shadows, which we don't include for this exercise. I've highlighted the form shadows you drew in red on one of your pages here. If you're not sure what the difference between a form shadow and a cast shadow is, I recommend re watching this video from lesson 2 that explains that cast shadows occur when a form blocks the light. The key thing here is that where form shading occurs on the form in question itself, cast shadows are projected onto another surface.

On a more nit picky note, I think the shadow cast by the large form at the bottom of your stack is incomplete. I've made a suggested expansion for it here

This exercise yields more benefits in terms of giving you spatial reasoning problems to solve if you make your forms roughly equal in size, rather than the big momma and her babies arrangement you have on your pages.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see some really good 3D thinking going on in your work, but I do have a lot of points to cover to help you progress further.

The first is a reminder of the rule that was introduced during your lesson 4 critique: once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Specifically, I explained that for organic constructions we'd like you to to make any modifications through addition in 3D as shown in this diagram. I've highlighted in red on your elephant where you worked subtractively, drawing a box, then drawing the trunk inside that box. While it's entirely possible to do this correctly in 3D space, I'm advising students not to work subtractively at all when building up organic structures within this course, just because students tend to be prone to doing it wrong without realising, and then reinforcing 2D thinking instead. Sticking to working additively in 3D space will on the other hand be a lot harder to do wrong (as long as you're somewhat mindful of what you're doing), and will ultimately reinforce that 3D thinking and eventually help you subtract more effectively as well.

There are also a few places where you're extending your constructions with one-off lines instead of complete forms. I've highlighted a couple of them in blue on this cat and again on this horse. On the same image I issued a reminder to draw through your forms, please do this wherever possible, figuring out how the whole form exists in 3D space will help you hone your spatial reasoning skills, try to draw like you have X-ray vision, instead of cutting forms off wherever they pass behind something else.

The third note on that horse relates to leg construction. It looks like you've used a variety of strategies for drawing the legs of your animals. While there are some different techniques being used for legs in the various demos, given how the course has developed, the method that is currently deemed most effective is sausage method. We went over the virtues of this method in your lesson 4 critique, as well as providing diagrams to help you use it and quite clearly stressing that this technique is still to be used throughout lesson 5 as well. You can see a good example of how to use the sausage method to construct animal legs in this donkey demo from the informal demos page. To help you understand how to use the sausage method of leg construction I've redrawn one of the legs on your cat with colour coded step by step notes.

As an extra bonus, notes on foot construction may also be useful.

Your core construction is mostly on the right track, but you tend to make your rib cage spherical. As explained here on the lesson introduction page, the rib cage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso. I've made a correction to your horse, here.

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.

So, I can see you're experimenting with your additional masses, but there are a few ways they can be improved.

1- Sometimes your masses stay soft and round all the way around their silhouette, such as the two masses on the legs of this elephant. This robs them of the complexity needed to explain how they connect to the underlying structure. The difference is explained in this diagram.

2- Sometimes you try to do too much with one mass, and it gets complex on the outside, where there is nothing in the void to press against it and cause that complexity. For example the large mass on the neck of this elephant has an inward curve with nothing pressing against it to cause it, and also at the top of the nearside hind leg.

3- Sometimes there are cases where you're using extra contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid, as seen on this elephant and this page 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).

To help you to understand how to use additional masses more effectively I've redrawn many of your masses on this elephant. I've made use of the underlying structures of the shoulder and thigh masses to wrap these additional masses around, as well as wrapping them around each other. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. I've also separated some of your larger, overly complex masses into several smaller ones, crafting those inward curves from multiple masses.

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 have one final draw over for you here on your horse, where you appear to have skipped over drawing the eye sockets.

Now, I have given you a number of things to work on here, so I am going to assign some revisions.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.