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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, and they're wrapping around each other with a sense of gravity. Your forms feel stable and supported, even with the height you achieved with one of your piles, which is great.

In the future I'd like you to draw through all of your forms. Much like when we drew through our boxes earlier drawing through these organic forms will help us develop a better understanding of the 3D space we're attempting to create. It really will help you get more out of this exercise by drawing every form in it’s entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they go behind another form.

You've done a good job with your shadows, you're generally pushing them far enough that they cast onto the form below. The first page follows a consistent light source but the second page isn't quite so consistent. I made some edits to the second page here choosing one shadow and making more of the shadows cast in that same direction. I extended some of your shadows in red, and pushed others back with blue.

Moving on to your animal constructions you're showing a developing understanding of how your constructions exist in 3D space, but there are some things that could be improved, some of which have been brought up in your critiques before, suggesting you may need to spend more time rereading or referring back to the information that has been shared with you.

First, make sure that every line you draw in these exercises is the result of a conscious decision. Take your time to plan, ghost and execute each mark to the best of your current ability. Do your best to connect everything together with specific relationships. Do not arbitrarily or reactively redraw your lines, and do not scratch multiple little marks together where one line would do. Please refer back to the principles of markmaking to remind yourself what we're aiming for. Here are a few examples of broken, disconnected lines on your horse.

Second, once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Please refer back to your lesson 4 critique for an explanation as to why, and examples of how to build on your construction with additional forms instead. Occasionally you're still cutting into your forms, as marked in red on your bear. Much more prevalent is your tendency to extend your constructions with one off lines or partial shapes. I've marked a couple of them in blue on this construction as well as establishing a more solid connection between the head and the body.

The third point that we've covered previously is leg construction. It looks like you've used a variety of strategies for drawing the legs of your animals. While there are some different techniques being used for legs in the various demos, given how the course has developed, the method that is currently deemed most effective is sausage method. I went over the virtues of this method in your lesson 4 critique, as well as providing diagrams to help you use it and quite clearly stressing that this technique is still to be used throughout lesson 5 as well. I can see that you're trying to use the sausage method on some of your pages, your deer and alligator(crocodile?) show some pretty good attempts at sticking to simple sausage forms and connecting them together with a contour curve at the joints. This one is quite a long way from what we're asking for, I made a quick edit for you here. Some other issues I can see are using ellipses instead of sausage forms, starting with forms that are too complex, and forgetting the intersection at the joints. If you're looking for a good example of leg construction in the lesson material, I recommend you follow the donkey demo from the informal demos page. There's also this dog demo that I put together for another student. You can see this in action with this draw over on your horse.

Right, so with all that out of the way, let's get to the particulars of lesson 5. Where the concept of adding whole forms to our constructions was introduced in lesson 4, in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design the shape of these forms.

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 for example, I've marked on your bear where you did a good job of wrapping an additional mass around the thigh, and redrew some 2D extensions to have their own complete, fully enclosed silhouette. I took advantage of the large mass of the shoulder- which is a simplification of some of the big muscles that help the animal to walk- to wrap these masses around. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I noticed when you do use additional masses that there are cases where you're using a lot of contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid - unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

Whenever you're adding contour lines to your construction in general, consider the following:

Contour lines themselves fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want. The question comes down to this: how many do you really need?"

Unfortunately, that first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns. The first one you add will probably help a great deal in making that given form feel three dimensional. The second however will help much less - but this still may be enough to be useful. The third, the fourth... their effectiveness and contribution will continue to drop off sharply, and you're very quickly going to end up in a situation where adding another will not help. I find it pretty rare that more than two is really necessary. Anything else just becomes excessive.

Be sure to consider this when you go through the planning phase of the contour lines you wish to add. Ask yourself what they're meant to contribute. Furthermore, ask yourself if you can actually use the second (form intersection) type instead - these are by their very nature vastly more effective, because of how they actually define the relationship between forms. This relationship causes each form to reinforce the other, solidifying the illusion that they exist in three dimensions. They'll often make the first type somewhat obsolete in many cases.

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:

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.

Finally when it comes to fur make sure every mark you add serves a purpose. If you choose to add a mark, make sure it is actively contributing to your drawing and not done mindlessly or repetitively for the sake of it. Remember to leave the interior sparse and design each tuft individually.

Conclusion There are some things from your previous critique that have not been applied as faithfully as I had hoped, and that are undermining your efforts to follow the instructions in this lesson. So, I'll be asking you to complete some revisions to demonstrate that you can understand and apply the feedback that has been provided. Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.

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 5 pages of animal constructions.