Hello jpower30, I'll be the TA handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections You've done a pretty good job at keeping your forms simple, just that one second from the top on your second pile is getting a bit too wobbly and complex, focus on having your sausage forms feel inflated and heavy for this exercise. You're doing well at wrapping the forms around one another as you pile them up, but watch out for places where you make a "bridge" leaving gaps between your sausages. That tells the viewer that the top form is either weightless, or stiff, and those aren't the properties we're aiming to express here.

You've done well with projecting your cast shadows onto the form below, they're not just hugging the form casting them, which is a mistake many students make. You did contradict yourself a little bit by including a cast shadow we shouldn't be able to see, which I've noted on your work for you here. I also pointed out one form where the contour curves were reversed, and another spot where your contour line should be much more open, considering that form is facing almost directly at the viewer. That very narrow contour line tells the viewer that they are looking more at the side of the form.

Continuing to your animal constructions You're taking care to work from simple to complex and it looks like you're being quite thoughtful and deliberate as you tackle them.

The first things I'm checking for are to see if you're applying the feedback from previous critiques. There are a few places where you're still modifying your silhouette by cutting back inside a form you've already drawn, or extending it by adding single lines. I've marked some of them on your work here with the cuts in red and the extensions in blue. While you are doing this much less than in the previous lesson, ideally we'd want you to avoid this altogether, as it breaks the illusion that what you're drawing is 3d and reminds the viewer that they're looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. Uncomfortable spoke at length about this in your lesson 4 critique, so please refer back to that for a fuller explanation.

I've also marked on the same image where you're not quite using the sausage method as instructed. You want to add the contour curve that defines the intersection between the leg sausages before you attach the additional masses. You also have a tendency to make this curve very shallow, it is unlikely that this would be the case for every joint, so consider each one individually and design the contour curve to reflect how the leg is bending and what angle we see these forms at.

Moving on, I can see that you're working on using additional masses with your drawings. While you're certainly making complete shapes in most cases, they often look more like flat stickers pasted onto your work than convincing 3d forms. This comes down to the shapes you choose to use for them, which often come in from the silhouette of the form they're being added to just a little instead of wrapping around the existing structure. Right now, it appears that there are a lot of cases where you're using 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.

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.

On this elephant it looks like you built your torso sausage then added a larger ellipse (or ball) to encapsulate his rear end. I know this is how it is shown in the informal elephant demo, and while that demo still has merit, it is a little dated. Uncomfortable is working on an overhaul of the lesson content, in the meantime students getting official critique are getting a sneak peek at more improved methods. While this is a 3d form, it may not be the best solution, as its relationship to the first stages of your construction is a little bit ambiguous. There are also some places where you're trying to build too much complexity from a single mass. I've done a draw-over here for you showing how I might go about adding some of those masses in this case. I started by tracing over your torso sausage, thighs and shoulders in green, before adding more forms, colour coding their order to try to keep things clear. Notice how these forms hug around the shoulders and hips, as well as each other, forming inward curves and sharp corners where they fit together like puzzle pieces. Where there is nothing to press against these masses I've kept them simpler, with outward curves. You'll also note that I'm stretching those masses further along the side of the animal's body, to really get a strong "grip" and avoid the feeling that the masses are just going to fall off the body as soon as it moves.

Instead of focusing your use of additional masses on capturing SPECIFIC bumps or things that break the silhouette and kind of leaving them to sit there on their own, try to think about the "in-between" pieces, as these help inform how all the masses fit together. You can see this demonstrated on another student's work here.

Now circling back to that use of contour lines, 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 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).

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:

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 students feel like it might not be a good fit for certain types of heads, but if you take a look at this banana-headed rhino, you'll see it can be adapted for a wide range of animals.

So for example with this capybara's head I can see you've started with a cranial ball, and carved out an angular eye socket. The contour line coming off the corner of the eye socket tells me that the muzzle is boxy, with a top, front, and side plane. However there is no information in your drawing to explain how the muzzle connects to the cranial ball, and you need to define that relationship.

Overall you're doing quite well but I'm going to need to ask for some revisions to make sure that you can understand and apply the feedback provided, as it looks like you misssed a couple of things from your lesson 4 feedback.