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

Starting with your organic intersections these are coming along pretty well, your forms feel solid and you’re doing an excellent job of showing how they wrap over one another in three dimensions.

For the most part your forms have a good sense of weight to them, as you think through how gravity will pull them down into positions where they feel stable and supported. The form at the far right (edit) left of this pile is a bit of an outlier, the far end seems to poke upwards into the air unsupported, so the form feels weightless. If the far end is supposed to be resting on the ground plane, then it would cast a shadow onto the ground plane like this although it still looks out of place because now we’re seeing it in a more top-down perspective that doesn’t match the rest of the pile.

I’d recommend that you allow your contour curves to hook around the far sides of the forms a little bit, until you get used to making their curvature accelerate as they approach the edge of the forms. Right now some of your curves are running into this common issue so they don’t quite run over the rounded surface of the forms convincingly.

You’re doing really well at projecting your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the surfaces below, and you’re clearly thinking about how those surfaces sit in space. Keep in mind that the cast shadow is also dependant on the shape of the form casting it, as noted on your work here sometimes you’ll squeeze the shadows in the middle instead of projecting the silhouette of the form that is blocking the light.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your work is top-notch. I’m really pleased to see you making an effort to stick to the principles of markmaking, working with solid forms, and gradually building things up from simple to complex in successive passes. It is clear that you’ve been attentive to building things up with complete forms and thinking through how the new pieces are supposed to attach to the existing structure in 3D space, so your constructions feel solid throughout.

There honestly isn’t much to criticise, so let’s go over a few of the key topics of this lesson and see if I can offer any tips for you to keep in mind.

In lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions “in 3D”- additional masses. It is great to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses quite liberally throughout your constructions, although it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette in a way that feels convincing.

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.

You’re handling this quite well, you usually avoid adding random complexity to your masses, and keeping them simple is helping them to read as three dimensional. One trend I do notice across the set, is a tendency to run the silhouette of additional masses parallel to the silhouette of the form they’re attaching to, so they appear stuck around the edges of the construction. This can make the additional masses feel thin, like pieces of paper stuck to the animal. Try to pull your masses around the surfaces of the existing structure, like pressing a piece of clay or putty against your ball and sausage armatures. For example, I’ve taken the mass on the belly of this rhino and pulled it around the width of the animal to give it a firmer grip. Stroke one pulls the mass across the width of the chest, then with stroke 2 I’ve added an inward curve where the mass gets squeezed between the front legs. Stroke 3 allows the mass to wrap around the side of the torso sausage, helping give it a grip. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. Stroke 4 is just as you drew it originally, a simple outward curve where the mass is exposed to fresh air.

While I had the image open I applied this idea to a few other masses here. For the most part all I’ve done is take your existing masses and pull them around the existing forms a bit more boldly, though I also took the mass on top of the neck and broke it into two forms- one for each bump. If we try to achieve too much with one form it can start to flatten out, so aim to keep them simple where there is nothing to press against them to cause inward curves or sharp corners.

Moving along, you’re applying the sausage method to build up some solid looking legs. I did notice a few pages such as this bush dog where the leg forms are closer to ellipses than sausages, so we miss out on the gestural flow of the sausage forms. Keep striving to maintain a consistent width along the length of your sausages, and observe your references carefully to try to pick up on any subtle curvature through the length of the legs as Comfy describes in the donkey demo.

I wanted to mention that you’re off to a great start with using additional forms to develop your sausage armatures into a more characteristic representation of the specific leg in question, but this can be pushed 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 used green to block 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.

It looks like you may have already seen these notes on foot construction as I noticed you were using a similar strategy on some of your pages. Starting with a boxy form for the foot then drawing the toes one at a time as complete new forms is a good strategy. It works better than trying to draw all the complexity of the foot and the toes in one step (which makes it difficult to understand how the form sits in 3D space, so it feels flat) or adding the toes with one-off lines (which only really works when we want to add to forms that are already flat).

The last point 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. I can see you were working through similar principles on some of your pages, though I think you’ll have an easier time fitting the pieces of the head snugly together if you use a 5-sided eye socket shape with a point facing down, instead of 6 sides. Sometimes it seems like the informal head demo is 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.

And with that, I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.