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

Starting with your organic intersections it looks like you got a little mixed up on what was required here, as you've submitted 4 pages when only 2 were assigned. Not a big problem, but does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

You're doing a good job with this exercise, your forms feel solid and believable, and you're stacking them in a manner that suggests a strong sense of gravity, with your forms coming to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported.

To get your forms to sag over one another rather than cutting through each other, it helps to wrap the upper form around the lower one like a 3D contour curve. It sounds more complex than it is, this diagram shows a visual example.

Your shadows are working well, you're projecting them boldly, so they cast onto the surfaces below, and appear to be keeping a consistent light source in mind.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your work is honestly really well done. You're demonstrating strong spatial reasoning skills, and clearly put a great deal of attention into building your constructions up in 3D and fitting the various pieces together like a puzzle. Sure, there are the occasional hiccups where you'd added a flat partial shape such as this hoof and this section of penguin butt but as you're doing the majority of your work in 3D I don't think it will be particularly beneficial to go through your submission with a tooth-comb nitpicking for every 2D addition. Just make sure you complete each form before moving onto the next one.

So, you're doing well at building your constructions from 3D forms, and I think something that will help you to reinforce their solidity further is to be a little clearer about establishing relationships between your forms as you fit them together. If we take leg construction as an example, you're doing well at constructing chains of sausage forms, but quite often missing the contour curve at each joint which we draw to show how the sausage forms intersect in 3D space. These little curves might seem insignificant, but they are a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction, so please remember to include them in future.

I'm happy to see that you've gone to town with building onto your leg armatures with additional forms, and that you're sometimes using forms that don't directly impact the overall silhouette, but act as "in between" pieces, like the missing puzzle piece that helps to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. This way of thinking - about the inside of your structures, and fleshing out information that isn't just noticeable from one angle, but really exploring the construction in its entirety, will help you yet further push the value of these constructional exercises as puzzles. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, (as seen along the hind legs of this puma) it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

Moving down to feet, it is good to see that you often introduce structure to your feet by drawing boxy forms, 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. As a quick bonus I'd like you to take a look at these notes on foot construction which show how we can push this approach a step further by using similarly boxy forms to construct the toes.

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.

It looks like you're quite familiar with this demo, and I can see these key points being applied to many of your constructions. 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.

While the idea of transforming the cranial ball into a series of flatter planes works great for heads, this isn't really the goal for the additional masses we apply to the body and legs. 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.

With that in mind I've taken your horse and shown how we can use this "pieces of putty" approach to flesh out the construction, instead of enclosing the whole chest/shoulder/neck region in a complex planar structure. I don't think your approach here was incorrect, per se (I can see the 3D thinking) but there is value in keeping things simpler. Notice how each addition has its own complete, fully enclosed silhouette, and they don't get cut off where they overlap. This helps to make it clear how each form exists in 3D space, and how they all fit together. You might also notice that where the mass on top of the shoulder meets the ellipse you'd blocked in for your shoulder mass, I've allowed that purple mass to form an inward curve, effectively interlocking them. The more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Now the last thing I wanted to mention is speculative, and if I'm barking up the wrong tree you can ignore it. Looking at this puma, particularly around the head and neck area, I see a lot of extra faint greyish lines and marks that don't appear to be part of the "real" construction. These could of course be marks showing though from another drawing on the back of the page, but they do have some of the hallmarks of a drawing that was sketched in lightly before the real construction was built over the top. Relying on an underdrawing usually comes from fear of making a mistake, and a desire to do the drawings well, which I can certainly understand. The thing to remember is that all the drawings in this course are just exercises, and we don't expect students to do them perfectly, or even well. All we ask of students is to follow all of the instructions to the best of their current understanding and ability, including sticking to the recommended tools discussed on this page and not using underdrawings as discussed in this section. Mistakes are normal, and to be expected, and by having them put down boldly in ink, they become easier to identify, which we can then analyse, understand why the mistake was made, and adjust our approach accordingly in our future attempts.

Okay I think that covers it. You've done a great job and I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.