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

Your organic intersections are off to a good start, you’re allowing your forms to slump over one another in three dimensions, sagging under the effects of gravity to come to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported.

You’re projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the surfaces below. To improve your shadows, remember to keep a single light source in mind for any given pile. If your light source is in the upper left corner, then all the shadows on that pile should be projected away from that light source consistently. If you project your shadows in different directions on a single pile, it will give the impression that the light source is moving around, which will confuse the viewer and undermine their belief in this little 3D world you’re creating.

Moving on to your animal constructions, there’s plenty here that you’re doing really well, you’re consistently drawing through your forms, your core construction is solid, you’re using the sausage method of leg construction, and I can see that you’ve made a concerted effort to build up your constructions with 3D forms. There are also a few areas where I have advice to offer which I hope will help you to improve the solidity of your constructions.

Firstly, there are intermittent issues with your linework. Not everywhere- your core construction and leg sausages are usually looking smooth and confident, but there are enough places where your lines get hesitant or scratchy for this to warrant being called out. For example if we look at this fox’s head I’ve noted a few places where your lines are repeated, broken up, or downright confusing.

I get that head construction is difficult, and that you were probably thinking a lot about how to construct those forms, but that does not mean your linework should suffer for it. Wobbly or scratchy lines will undermine the solidity of the construction, so it is important that your markmaking is always done to the best of your current ability. You might think that it is too tough to be thinking about your construction and linework all at the same time, and this is where the importance of using the ghosting method in full comes into play. As introduced in the ghosted lines exercise, the ghosting method allows us to break the markmaking into distinct phases, so that all of our thinking is done before the pen ever touches the page. By making effective use of the planning and preparation phases, the actual execution of each mark will not be more difficult than what we were doing in previous lessons. Now, I can certainly see evidence of you using the ghosting method some of the time, particularly for a lot of your larger forms, so there is no problem with your understanding or ability. Ultimately it comes down to exercising control, and choosing to use the ghosting method even for smaller elements, putting as much time as is required into making sure each line is the result of a conscious choice, rather than reflexively making marks that rely on the very instincts that these exercises are designed to train.

Another aspect of these exercises which sometimes gets the short end of the stick when students are devoting all their cognitive efforts on building in 3D is the time and effort required to observe the subject matter. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. This is explained in more detail in this section of lesson 2. Now, looking through your pages (and scanning the lesson 5 Discord channel) I think observation is something you’re actively working on, and I see you’ve had some good advice about using the negative shapes around the animal to help you analyse where things need to go and plan the construction more carefully. Something else that can help to keep the construction organised is to pay close attention to the placement of the feet in your reference and plan where you want them to go. The placement of the feet are a good indicator of how the animal is oriented in space, and show how the weight is supported. I like that you used a ground line to help you organise the feet of this cat however the stance of this fox seems a little more confusing, it almost looks like the animal is floating. If the ground is sloping or the pose is foreshortened it can help a lot to actually construct a ground plane, as shown in the puma demo.

While we’re on the topic of feet, as a quick bonus I’d like to share these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to take those nice boxy foot forms you’re using, and take the construction a step further by using similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

I’m happy to see that you’ve made liberal use of additional masses to flesh out your constructions and add nuance and complexity as needed, but note that the specific shape you design for the silhouette of each mass is of critical importance, as this shape is your main tool for explaining how the masses relate to the other structures in the construction.

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.

There are places where you’re starting to use this kind of logic to help you draw your masses, for example the large mass on the back of this cat is well designed. This mass stays simple where it is exposed to fresh air along the top, and gets pulled down around the side of the torso, creating a specific relationship where you’ve pressed it against the top of the protruding thigh mass, helping to anchor the additional mass to the torso. This is great, as the more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

There are however, a ton of places where the silhouettes of your masses appear far less intentional, or perhaps like you may be drawing shapes on top of your drawing without really considering how those additions have to attach to the underlying structures in 3D space, leading to an impression that some of the masses were pasted on like flat stickers.

I’ve used your rhino construction as an example to call out some of the mistakes I saw most frequently with your masses across the set.

• A are examples of masses that avoid introducing complexity, staying soft and round all the way around their silhouette. Unfortunately this lack of complexity robs us of the tools we need to explain how the mass is supposed to connect to the existing structures, so it feels flat.

• B are examples of introducing unexplained complexity into an additional mass, where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to cause any inward curves or sharper corners.

• C is an issue which sometimes crops up along the legs. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, 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.

• D is a more specific example of a general problem- not always thinking through how the existing structures sit in 3D space. Here you’d introduced an inward curve along the underside of the mass where it presses against the top of the thigh, which is a great idea, but you’d used the far side thigh, which won’t be protruding on the nearside of the torso.

This drawover provides solutions to the above issues. In the case of the legs there are multiple ways of tackling the problem, you could either start with thicker sausages for the leg armatures, or break the additional masses into pieces, or a combination of both.

Continuing on, I wanted to talk a bit more specifically about 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.

Looking through the set, I can see that you’re getting the hang of wedging the base of the muzzle snugly against the eye sockets. The shape of the eye sockets seemed a bit random on the birds and wolves but by the last couple of pages (the bunny and the hybrid) you’re getting the pentagonal eye sockets a bit more consistent. Try to bring all the elements of the informal head demo into your head constructions and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise. I notice you often omit the forehead/brow ridge area, or plop a blob on top of the head instead of wedging a more solid planar piece along the top of the eye sockets. I think you may have already seen this banana-headed rhino demo on Discord, but I’ll go ahead and share it here as it shows that even though sometimes the informal head demo seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All right, I think that should cover it. Overall you’re making good progress, and some things (like observation skills) will improve gradually over time with practice and patience. I would however like to see you put the information about additional masses into practice before moving forwards, so I am going assign some (minimal) revisions. Make sure to take as much time as you need to use the ghosting method for all of your lines, and to observe your reference frequently.

Please complete 2 pages of animal constructions.