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

Starting with your organic intersections you're generally doing pretty well at making your forms slump and sag around each other with a sense of gravity, just avoid leaving gaps under your forms like this as it makes the form feel stiff or weightless. You want all your forms to feel pliable and heavy for this exercise, like well filled water balloons.

The next point isn't necessarily a mistake per se, but if you remember the feedback Tofu gave you in lesson 2, it helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space if you draw each form in its entirety for this exercise instead of cutting them off where they pass behind another form. I've completed the forms on one of your pages here to clarify what we're asking you too do.

Your cast shadows are mostly good. I've made a quick edit here to make them follow a more consistent light direction, and to include a shadow on the ground plane.

Moving on to your animal constructions you're off to a good start. I'll be splitting your feedback into 5 key topics, to make it more digestable.

Core construction

You're doing a good job of starting your constructions with the 3 major masses for the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis. You're joining the rib cage and pelvis together with a torso sausage, this is usually done well, but sometimes you pinch the underside of the torso sausage upwards, like on this rabbit and this deer. When you pinch the middle of a sausage form it is no longer sticking to the characteristics of a simple sausage, which gives us something of a weaker foundation on which to build the rest of the construction.

Sometimes animals don't exactly look like they're made from a saggy sausage, but there are strategies we can take to build these animals without compromising the solidity of our forms. This dog demo shows how to build a "waist" by changing the orientation of the ellipse for the pelvis. This kangaroo demo that I put together for another student shows how to use additional masses to build an animal with a humped back and large rear end.

You're usually attaching the cranial ball to the torso with a simple solid neck, I think this rabbit is the only case where you forgot to do so.

Leg construction

I'm happy to see that you're working with the sausage method for constructing your legs. However it looks like part way through your homework you stopped using a contour curve for the intersections where these leg forms connect together. This is something that was discussed in your lesson 4 critique, including a demonstration on your work. Using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively. Here on your rabbit I've added the missing intersections, they are not optional for correct application of the sausage method of leg construction.

Actions in 2D vs actions in 3D

While I was checking your leg constructions I noticed a tendency to draw your feet as partial shapes, as noted on this bear. If you recall your lesson 4 critique, we introduced the following rule to help you to take actions on your constructions in 3D space: Once you you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. This diagram shows the various actions we can take to alter a sphere and explains that when drawing organic constructions for this course we want you to work by adding to your constructions in 3D. These notes on foot construction show how we can construct a foot with a boxy form, then draw more boxy forms for the toes.

As well as extending your constructions with partial shapes sometimes you alter the silhouettes of your forms by tracing over large sections of your constructions to reinforce the silhouette with extra line weight. This causes your initially smooth and confident lines to get wobblier, and makes little cuts and extensions to your silhouette as highlighted here on one of your bears. I find that 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. You can read more about this here. What this keeps us from doing is putting line weight in more random places, and worse, attempting to correct mistakes with line weight.

Additional masses

Fortunately there are plenty of places where you're building on your constructions by using complete 3D forms. One thing that helps with the shape of these additional forms 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've made a few alterations to the additional masses on this bear.

1- Make sure to draw each form in its entirety. Don't cut them off where they get overlapped by something else, a leg in this case. When the silhouette is incomplete it becomes a partial shape instead of a complete 3D form.

2- Complexity in these additional masses occurs in response to the underlying structures. This diagram shows how to wrap an additional form around a rounded structure (like the torso sausage) by transitioning smoothly between curves instead of using arbitrary corners.

3- Avoid trying to do too much with a single mass. The more complicated a form is, the more difficult it is to assert as being 3D, so instead break up long and/or complicated masses into pieces as shown. Also note the green arrow where I've pushed an additional mass up against the shoulder mass and wrapped it around. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

4- Similar to the previous point, I wanted to show how we can build that inward curve you had there by layering multiple masses. This allows each mass to stay simple where it is exposed to fresh air.

A fair few of your constructions have leg constructions that are quite sparse when it comes to the use of additional forms, I'd like you to take another look at the ant leg demo and dog leg demo that I shared with you previously, as examples of how much there is to explore with these constructions.

Head construction

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.

Looking through your work I can see you understand the importance of the angular eye sockets, and you're doing well at building your muzzles with solid 3D forms. You often leave gaps between the muzzle and eye sockets so the pieces seem to float around on the head instead of fitting together snugly. You're also quite prone to extending your head constructions with one-off lines instead of complete 3D forms. I've drawn over your hybrid to show some corrections of these points.

Overall you're doing quite well but I'm going to need to ask for some revisions to make sure that you understand and apply the feedback provided, as it looks like you missed a couple of things from your previous critiques, and this is undermining your efforts to get the most out of this lesson.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- 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), 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.

2- 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.