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

I’m happy to hear that you’re adhering to the 50% rule, it can be difficult at first and it is great that you’re getting into the swing of it.

Starting with your organic intersections these are working pretty well, in particular you are doing a great job of giving your forms a feeling of weight, as you allow them to slump and sag over one another with the effects of gravity. I’ve got a few quick points for you to keep in mind when practising this exercise in future:

• With each form you add, imagine you are dropping it in from above, allowing it to land on the pile and come to rest in a position where it feels stable and supported. Avoid trying to fit forms underneath forms you have already drawn. If the existing forms are stable, there shouldn’t be a void beneath them to fit new forms into. This appears to be what happened with the two forms on the lower left of your second page, which just get cut off where they pass behind the forms above them.

• You’re doing well with your shadows, projecting them boldly so that they cast onto the surfaces below. Remember to include the shadows that the pile casts onto the ground plane too, this will help explain how the pile is supported as a whole. Right now your piles appear to float in space.

• Remember to draw around the small ellipses on the tips of your forms 2-3 times to help execute them smoothly. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse freehanded in this course, as discussed here.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are coming together well. I’m noticing right away that you’ve made a real effort to stick to building your constructions up “in 3D” by adding new forms when you want to change your construction, and thinking through how these new pieces will connect to the existing structures with specific relationships. I’ve got a few pointers for you to keep in mind when tackling these constructional exercises in future, but you’ve done a good job here and I’m seeing promising signs that your spatial reasoning skills are developing nicely.

An issue that occurs to varying degrees across the set is that you’re still struggling to come out of the habit of applying line weight to arbitrary places, rather than reserving it strictly for clarifying overlaps. Generally not a huge deal, but additional line weight can actually start to flatten the construction when used for other purposes, such as here on your lion’s leg, where it jumps from one form to another, making a little bridge and extending the silhouette of the construction. This softens the distinction between your forms, sort of like stuffing the construction inside a fuzzy sock, which makes it appear a bit vague and mushy. If you really want to change your construction here, you should do so by building additional forms, as I’ve shown over on the right.

Fortunately, most of the time you do use additional forms to build upon your constructions, both for bulky areas on the torso, and along finer elements such as legs. I wanted to mention that you’re off to a great start with building onto your sausage armatures, but there is a way we can push this 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, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

I’m happy to see that you’ve made extensive use of additional masses on many of your constructions, and you’re clearly thinking about how to design them in a way that shows how they wrap around the existing structures in a convincing manner.

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.

I think the designs of your additional masses are usually working well, and that you don’t actually need the additional contour lines you’re adding to most of them. I think in most cases your masses will feel 3D through the deliberate design of their silhouette, and that the contour lines aren’t actively contributing much. While adding unnecessary contour lines isn’t a significant problem in itself, it can become a problem if the contour lines are applied thoughtlessly. If we look at this lion I’ve pointed out where the contour lines on the mass on top of the back contradict the lines on the mass under the belly, which will confuse the viewer and does more harm than good. Long story short, when you’re going through the planning phase of each line you wish to add, always be asking yourself what purpose it is serving, and if it is the best tool for the job.

I’m happy to see that you’re giving your animal constructions more space on the page than you did with your initial set of insect constructions back in lesson 4, which makes it easier to engage the whole arm and draw form the shoulder, as well as providing more room to think through compact areas such as heads. Be sure to ask yourself how you can make full use of the space on the page with each construction, for example this camel could have been drawn much larger by orienting the page so that the long edge is vertical, as the camel construction is tall and narrow.

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 fairly familiar with this demo, as I’m seeing you working through a similar process with some of your head constructions. I encourage you 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.

Lastly let’s touch on texture and detail. This Owl is getting quite busy, with the feathery texture applied all over its surface. I can certainly see that you’re using cast shadows here, but I think you may have also been explicitly outlining some of the feathers, which made it difficult for you to vary the density of detail. I really like the direction you took with this fish where you’re implying the scales with their cast shadows, rather than outlining them, which has allowed you to effectively control the detail density, nice work!

All right, I think that should cover it. It looks like you’ve got a good grasp on these constructional exercises, and I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete so you can move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6. Keep up the good work.