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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a great job of showing how these forms slump and sag over one another in 3D space, rather than just drawing 2D shapes on top of one another, well done.

Your shadows could use some work. If we look at this page as an example, your shadow shapes are extremely minimised, so they don't have a clear relationship to the form that is supposed to be casting them. Remember a cast shadow is a projection of the form's silhouette onto the surfaces below. Some of your forms aren't casting shadows at all, and this inconsistency will confuse the viewer, breaking the 3D illusion and reminding them that they're looking at lines and shapes on a flat piece of paper. This drawover shows how you might expand the shadows so they more clearly cast from one form onto the surfaces below. Notice the inclusion of a cast shadow on the ground plane, which helps give the pile a sense of weight and stability, establishing how it is supported, rather than having the pile float in space.

Remember to draw around the small ellipses on the tips of the forms two full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This helps to execute the ellipse smoothly and is something that we ask students to do for all ellipses freehanded in this course, as introduced in this section.

Moving on to your animal constructions, for the most part you're holding to the principles of markmaking reasonably well, and I can see some places where you're demonstrating an understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space. There are however, some pretty significant issues which are undermining your efforts to get the most out of these exercises, two of which stand out as they were covered at length in your lesson 4 feedback. Keep in mind that the advice in these critiques is designed to be applied by the student as they move forward, so issues do not need to be called out repeatedly. The more the TA has to repeat previous feedback, the less we're able to provide new information and move the student forward. It is often necessary for students to take their own steps in ensuring that they do what they need to in order to ensure they're addressing the issues that have been called out. Each student needs to decide what it is they need to apply the information they're given as effectively as they can. For some that means reviewing the feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely.

The first of these points is that you're frequently building large sections of your constructions in 2D, by extending off the silhouette of your existing forms using flat partial shapes. Remember that wherever you want to add to your construction or change something, you need to draw complete new forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes, and establish how the addition connects to the surface of the existing structures in 3D space. I've traced over some of these partial shapes in blue on your deer as an example.

You may notice that the legs have been highlighted in blue as being flat. As part of your lesson 4 feedback you were requested to "make every effort to stick to the sausage method when constructing insect or animal legs in this course, as closely as you can." Unfortunately is seems that (with the exception of one wolf construction) you forgot to use the sausage method once you moved onto lesson 5, despite being provided with some pretty extensive notes directly on your work to help you to apply it more effectively. You can find a fairly detailed demonstration of the sausage method being applied to animal construction in the donkey construction on the informal demos page.

I’d like you to reread both rounds of feedback on your lesson 4 submission, and apply the information provided there to your animal constructions. If anything said to you in a critique is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask for clarification.

So, let's go through how we could construct the deer to be more 3D. Starting with the major masses, make sure you're laying them out as shown here on the lesson intro page. It looks like you put the pelvis in the middle of the torso, then tried to add length to the back with a flat partial shape. Here the pelvis has been positioned more correctly, and the ribcage has been drawn a bit longer, so it occupies half the length of the torso. Notice how as I've combined the ribcage and pelvis into a torso sausage that I've allowed it to sag slightly through the midsection, as discussed in the lesson intro page.

Next, we want to establish shoulder and thigh masses, where the limbs will attach to the sides of the body. I've done this using the blue ellipses here. On the same image I've constructed the leg armatures using simple overlapping sausage forms, with a contour line at each joint. Once these simple forms are in place we add complexity with additional forms as shown in purple here. each addition has its own fully enclosed silhouette that established how it connects to the existing structure in 3D space.

This applies throughout the construction, including feet. 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, 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 - 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.

Continuing with the subject of feet, I noticed with your goat/rabbit hybrid that the back feet are basically tacked onto the bottom of the body. I'm guessing the animal was sitting down in your reference material. Even when an animal sits down, the legs still attach to the sides of the body, and still have the same number of joints, although the pieces may overlap and foreshorten. I'd like you to take a look at this step by step fox construction which shows how to tackle the challenges presented when an animal is sitting or lying down.

Your use of additional masses is a bit sparse, particularly in the second half of your submission. Keep in mind that additional masses are a vital tool for fleshing out our basic constructions, to add nuance and complexity and arrive at a more characteristic representation of the animal we're trying to build.

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, with that in mind I've taken your wolf and redrawn the masses to give them a clearer relationship to the underlying forms. Notice in particular with the mass above the shoulder area, where it meets the ellipse you'd established for the protruding shoulder mass (which you did a good job of including in this particular construction) the additional mass forms an inward curve, where it presses against that existing form and becomes more complex. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I'm noticing that sometimes you'll add quite aggressive additional line weight to places that seem arbitrary, such as along the back of the rump of this camel. try to keep additional line weight subtle, it doesn't take much additional thickness for the viewer to pick up on it. The most effective use of line weight - at least given the bounds and limitations of this course - is to use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. This video explains correct use of line weight in this course. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes behind line weight.

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 this rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Now, I have called out quite a few things to work on, and I will be assigning some revisions for you to address the points we've covered here. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark using the ghosting method), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.