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

Starting with your organic intersections these are coming together nicely, your forms feel solid, and I’m happy to see that you’re “drawing through” and completing your forms as this will help you develop a stronger understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space.

You appear to be thinking about how gravity will affect your forms, and most of them are slumping and sagging over the forms below to come to rest in a stable position.

I think the aspect of this exercise that shows room for growth is the application of shadows.

• Aim to keep the order your forms are stacked in mind when designing your shadows. I noticed a couple of spots where you’d added a shadow that logically the viewer won’t be able to see. I’ve marked one example on this page.

• You’re doing a good job of pushing most of your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the surfaces below. There are a few places where your shadows are tentative, so they read more like heavy lineweight, and I’ve marked a couple of examples on the same image.

• Try experimenting with placing your light source in a different location for each pile, and thinking about how this will affect your shadows. I noticed both your piles appear to be lit from above, but there are many more lighting angles you could explore, to get a bit more out of this exercise in future.

Moving on to your animal constructions, you’re off to a great start with your core construction, where you lay down the major masses of the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis, and connect them together using a “torso sausage” and simple solid neck. You’re also doing well with constructing your leg armatures using chains of simple sausage forms.

Once you have your basic structures in place I’m noticing a tendency to hop back and forth between taking “actions in 3D” where you’re attaching complete new forms to the existing structures, and fitting everything together like a 3D puzzle, and taking “actions in 2D” where you’re refining the drawing with one off lines, making marks without fully explaining how these additions relate to the existing forms in 3D. This was the first point I discussed in the feedback for your insects in the previous lesson, and I went over it in some detail.

As an example of what I mean, I’ve marked out a number of these 2D alterations on your okapi using blue where you’d extended off existing forms with one off lines and partial shapes, and red for some smaller spots where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you had already drawn. The areas hatched in blue exist only in two dimensions - there is no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how it is meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. Creating believable, solid, three dimensional constructions despite drawing on a flat page requires us to first and foremost convince ourselves of this illusion, this lie we're telling, as discussed here back in Lesson 2. The more our approach reinforces the illusion, the more we make new marks that reinforce it even further. The more our marks break the illusion, the more marks we make that then further break the illusion, for us and for everyone else.

While in this course we're doing everything very explicitly, it's to create such a solid belief and understanding of how the things we draw exist in 3D space, that when we draw them more loosely with sketching and other less explicit approaches, we can still produce marks that fall in line with the idea that this thing we're drawing exists in 3D. So, here I’ve redrawn a lot of the flat additions using complete 3D forms. You can also find links to several examples of how to do this in your lesson 4 critique.

Where in the previous lesson we introduced the idea of building onto our basic constructions with additional forms, here in lesson 5 we use additional masses as a tool to help us think about how to design our additional forms to flesh out our constructions.

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, here I’ve taken this idea and applied it to the additional masses on the torso. Instead of leaving them perched on top of the spine, precariously balanced, I’ve pulled the additional masses around the side of the torso, pressing them against your protruding shoulder and thigh masses to help anchor them to the construction more securely. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

We can take the idea of using additional forms and push it further. You tend to use them sparingly (often relying on one off lines and partial shapes instead of complete 3D forms) and focus primarily on forms that actually impact the silhouette of the overall construction, 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.

As a quick bonus for tackling paws, I’d like you to take a look at 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.

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.

Before I wrap this up, I see you had a question:

I really try to observe a ton yet many perspectives still get Messy - aside from practice, what can I do to work on this?

We’re not really taking a deep dive into perspective in this course, as explained here in lesson 1. So, I think what you may be referring to here is constructing animals in challenging angles and poses, such as shown in the puma demo. I can see from your pages that you are tackling foreshortened poses, and in many cases you’re doing so pretty well, your rhinos for example both have a strong feeling of depth to them, and you’ve observed things carefully and kept your forms organised. As far as this lesson is concerned, you’re doing really well with this aspect of your constructions, and it will get easier as you continue to practice.

All right, I’ve covered a couple of things you could do to make your work more 3D and ultimately get more out of these exercises, but your underlying spatial reasoning skills are developing nicely so I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.