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

Starting with your organic intersections these are working pretty well. You’re keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and allowing them to slump and sag over one another in three dimensions to build up piles that feel stable.

You’re pushing your shadows boldly so that they project onto the surfaces below instead of hugging the form that is casting the shadow. To help your shadows feel more believable, think about the relationship between the form casting the shadow and surface the form is being cast onto. If the surface is flat (like the ground plane) then the shadow shape will be a simple projection of the form’s silhouette. When the shadow is being cast onto multiple curving surfaces of other forms, we may need to design a more complex shape, such as this example on your work.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall I think you’ve done very well. You linework is clear and purposeful, you’re making excellent use of the space available, and I’m pleased to see that you’re treating each construction as a 3D puzzle to help develop your spatial reasoning skills.

I do have a few pieces of advice which I hope will help to keep you moving in the right direction and get as much as possible from your constructions when practising in future.

Let’s dive in with these notes on your fox.

When working on organic constructions for this course, try to always build up your constructions by adding complete new forms when you want to change something. I’ve called out a couple of places where you’d made a an alteration to the silhouette of an existing form, which tends to flatten things out. I’ve used red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the front feet, which undermines their solidity, although fortunately you didn’t do this often.

With blue I’ve called out an example where you’d extended off the silhouettes of existing forms with a one off line, which does seem to be a tactic you used quite frequently along the legs of your various constructions. You’re doing a good job of building up your constructions in 3D in other areas, and I’ve called out a couple of good examples with green on your fox, with the tail and the additional mass on the belly.

I’m happy to see that you’ve been striving to stick with the sausage method of leg construction throughout the set, and I’ve redrawn one of your hind legs on the fox, along with some tips on how to use the sausage method more effectively.

• You usually do a good job of establishing the bulky shoulder/thigh masses where the legs attach to the side of the body. Remember to draw 2 full circuits around these ellipses before lifting your pen off the page, as this leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to keep them smooth and even. This is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course, as discussed back in this section of lesson 1.

• Your sausage forms should stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as introduced in the organic forms exercise. So we’re aiming for two round ends of equal size, connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. Most of your leg forms are closer to ellipses than sausages, which makes the leg stiffer than necessary.

• Once the sausages are in place, we want to add one contour line to each joint to reinforce the construction by showing how the forms penetrate one another in 3D space. This is just like the type of contour line that was introduced in the form intersections exercise in lesson 2.

• When you want to build onto the sausage armatures to refine the leg, make sure you’re doing so in 3D by adding complete new forms, as shown in this diagram.

• When it comes to constructing paws, 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 add similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Please try using this strategy for constructing feet in future.

In lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions “in 3D”- 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.

You do (usually) keep your masses simple where there’s nothing to press against them and cause complexity, which is good. Something I do notice fairly consistently is that you’ll run the silhouette of the mass almost parallel to the outer edge of the forms it is attaching to, with minimal overlap. This limits your ability to really explore how these additional masses might wrap around the existing structures in three dimensions and create stronger relationships between them.

Lets take another look at the fox where I’ve redrawn a couple of your additional masses. With green, I’ve pulled the mass on the neck across the width of the head and neck, so it sits more symmetrically, and more balanced, instead of being precariously perched along the far edge.

With the red mass along the back of the torso, I wanted to show how when we pull the mass around the torso to give it a firmer grip, we can make use of the protruding shoulder mass to introduce some specific complexity to the additional mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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:

• 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 the rhino head demo just beneath it on the same page, it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All righty, while I was able to identify a few things that could be improved, it is clear that you’ve understood the main points of the lesson, and your spatial reasoning skills appear to be developing well. I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete so you can feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge.