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

Starting with your organic intersections these are hitting the right notes. Your forms have a good sense of weight to them, and you’re piling them up in a manner that helps them to feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off. You’re handling the shadows well, projecting them boldly onto the surfaces below and keeping a consistent light source in mind for each pile, good work.

To get a bit more out of this exercise I recommend “drawing through” and completing your forms where possible, instead of allowing them to get cut off where they pass behind one another. This’ll help you to think through how the whole forms sits in space.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your work is very well done. You’re clearly putting a lot of thought into how to build your constructions in 3D, and are establishing specific relationships between the various pieces of your constructions that help to reinforce their solidity as you develop them.

One of the key points I look for in this lesson is whether students are attempting to build onto their basic constructions with additional masses, and if they’re being designed intentionally, establishing how the mass connects to the existing structures in a manner that feels convincing. I’m happy to see you’ve made frequent use of additional masses throughout the set, and you’re doing a great job of keeping your masses simple (with an outward curve) where they are exposed to fresh air, and introducing specific complexity where they wrap around and attach to the existing forms, as shown in this diagram. Overall your additional masses are great, but I did spot this mass on one of your deer where you’d pressed an inward curve into it where it presses against the top of the thigh. This is a great strategy for helping to anchor additional masses to the torso, however in this case this appears to be the far side thigh, so it won’t be protruding on the near side of the body. Instead, we can press the mass against the thigh on the near side of the body (further back towards the rump) and then allow the mass to wrap around the smooth rounded torso sausage (towards the front) as shown here.

When it comes to leg construction, at a glance it looks like you’re using the sausage method well, but on closer inspection is looks like you may be drawing circles at the joints and then connecting them together with individual lines. While the end result is similar enough that I’m not too concerned, it is worth noting that the specific steps we take to construct a form can affect the way we think about it, and this “connecting the balls” approach can lead to students thinking more about drawing individual lines running across the surface of the paper than about drawing complete sausage forms in a 3D world. I don’t actually think you fall into that category (your spatial reasoning skills are developing really well) but it is something to keep in mind moving forward.

You’re doing a good job of building onto your leg armatures with additional forms to add bulk and complexity as needed, but there is a way to push this even further. A lot of these additions focus primarily on forms that actually impact the silhouette of the overall leg, but there's value in exploring the forms that exist "internally" within that silhouette - like the missing puzzle piece that helps to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. Here is an example of what I mean, on another student's work. Uncomfortable has blocked out masses along the leg there, and included the one fitting in between them all, even though it doesn't influence the silhouette. 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.

Moving down to feet, you’re doing a good job of constructing your feet from complete 3D forms, though I have a quick bonus to share with you. Instead of trying to capture all of the complexity of the whole foot with all of the toes in a single step (as seen in this chameleon and this cat) it helps 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, as shown in these notes, we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

Overall you’re doing really well at building up solid 3D constructions, though I did spot a couple of places where it looks like you’d extended off existing forms with a one-off line or partial shape, which doesn’t quite explain how the addition is supposed to connect to the existing forms in 3D. I’ve marked one example with blue on the head of your deer where (as far as I can tell) it looks like you may have extended off the bottom of the boxy muzzle form with a one-off line, then realised it felt flat and added some contour curves to it. The thing is, adding contour curves that run across the surface of an existing form (as they were introduced in the organic forms with contours exercise) are most useful for taking a form that can already be understood as 3D and clarifying it. They don’t fix the underlying problem, which is a lack of relationship between the existing form and the addition. Instead, as I’ve shown in red, it works better to complete the silhouette of the addition, pulling it around the side of the muzzle. I also “drew through” the antlers (which is something you normally do well) instead of cutting them off where they overlap one another.

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.

I can see you working through similar principles with some of your head constructions, most notably your cats, but try bringing it all together in the way the demo shows, and you may be able to get even more out of the exercise. 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.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your constructions are coming along strong and I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.