Hello Kaneda, apologies for the delay due to the promptathon. I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections your forms are slumping over one another with a sense of gravity, and all your forms feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off. This is just what aiming for in this exercise, well done. I'm happy to see you drawing through your forms here, as this will help to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

I did notice a couple of spots where the lines get just a little hesitant, double check that you're using the ghosting method to full effect and drawing from your shoulder. It may also help you if you hook your contour curves around your forms slightly, as shown in the organic forms exercise.

Your shadows are good, you're projecting them far enough to cast onto the form below, and it's great to see that you're experimenting with different light sources. I did spot a couple of tiny places where your shadows seemed to be going upwards, which doesn't really follow the light source you had established. I've marked them in red here.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see that you're tuned into treating these constructions as exercises to help you develop your spatial reasoning skills, and your work is coming along well. Of course, I still have some advice for you- you paid for critique and that's what you'll get- but rest assured you have done well.

Once again, I'm going to drop in the feedback I gave you over Discord, so it is all in one place. I was happy to see that you took this feedback on board and applied it to your remaining pages, nice one.

The following was in response to this arctic fox

In green I wanted to point out that you've done an excellent job with these additional masses on the front leg. They're wrapping around your leg sausage with a believable sense of three dimensionality, and it is great that you're thinking about adding pieces to your construction that don't directly impact the overall silhouette.

In red I've edited a couple of places where it looks like you extended your construction with partial shapes rather than forms with their own complete, fully enclosed silhouettes.

In blue, I've redrawn the eye socket to match more closely with the pentagonal shape shown in the informal head demo I shared with you a while back. This makes it a little bit easier to wedge the base of the muzzle snugly against the edge of the eye socket. I also adjusted one edge of your boxy muzzle form to curve around the cranial ball, instead of going across it with a straight line, which might imply that the surface of the cranial ball was flat.

And the following in response to this squirrel

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.

All righty, time for fresh information.

Starting with your core construction you've done a good job starting with simple solid forms for your 3 major masses, and connecting them together with a "torso sausage" and a simple, solid neck.

Remember that as shown here on the lesson intro page the rib cage should occupy roughly half the torso length, and you have it a fair bit shorter than that on some of your later pages.

As discussed here we want to incorporate a slight sag into the torso sausage. On a couple of pages, such as this deer you've pinched the middle of the torso sausage a little bit. When we to this, the torso sausage is no longer sticking to the characteristics of a simple sausage form and this gives us something of a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of the construction. Furthermore, having the torso sausage sag slightly can minimise the need for additional masses on the underside of the belly, which is conceptually more challenging than piling masses on top of the torso, where we can think of gravity helping us to hold these additional masses in place.

I'll admit sometimes animals' bodies don't look like saggy sausages, but we can still start with a simple torso sausage, then use additional masses to build up a structure that resembles the animal in question. Here is an example of this concept in action on a kangaroo construction that I put together for another student.

Moving on to your leg construction I'm happy to see you making pretty good use of the sausage method throughout the set. You're still a bit inconsistent about remembering the contour curves for the intersections where these sausage forms join together. They're present in this okapi but appear to be missing from this squirrel. Using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool, and one you use fairly well. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively.

You've done a good job constructing most of your feet from complete 3D forms, a lot of students treat them as an afterthought and lapse into working with partial shapes in 2D. I still think it may help you to take a look at these notes on foot construction which show how to give the feet structure by using a boxy form for the foot, then smaller boxy forms for the toes.

One of the key areas I look for in this lesson is additional masses. It is good to see you experimenting with these additional masses throughout your pages. I'm going to pop in an explanation on how we can think of the behaviour of these masses, before giving some more specific pointers on your work to help you take these constructions to the next level.

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'm noticing a bit of a tendency for some of your masses to run over long distances, for example on the top of the backs of a few of your earlier pages, the extended front leg of this squirrel and along the back and tail of this lizard. Try to keep your additional masses more limited in scope, having them individually accomplish a more focused, specific job. When things try to accomplish too much, they have a tendency to flatten out.

It's good that you're making use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these 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, from another student's work - as you can see, 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 and puzzles.

So, here I've applied these two points to your lizard. While I had the image open I also noted in green that you're making good use of the shoulder mass to wrap your additional masses around and help anchor them to your construction. However sometimes to seem a little reluctant to include sharp corners into the silhouette of your additional masses where they press against other forms. Rounding off the corners makes the relationship between these forms a little vague, you can see a more extreme example of this here in this diagram. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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. I had previously pointed yo to the informal head demo, but never really explained why it is the preferred method.

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. You're really not that far off, the majority of your head constructions feel pretty solid, and some of them are sticking quite closely to the informal head demo. Sometimes your brow ridge drifts away from the eye sockets instead of being wedged snugly against them (or the brow ridge is absent). Remember to draw your ears as complete forms too, the ear on this squirrel is a partial shape. You might be interested in looking at this squirrel head demo that I put together for another student. Notice that I've kept the muzzle very simple and boxy, then added more forms later for the roundness of the lips and the convex profile.

Now, I haven't forgotten about your request regarding antlers. I think something similar to this beetle horn demo would be appropriate. Here is how I might go about approaching the antlers of one of your deer constructions. Each bump is drawn with a form that stays relatively simple, and has a connection to the existing structure that acts like an intersection from the form intersections exercise from lesson 2. It's not pretty, but it doesn't need to be, its an exercise.

Anyway, you're on the right track so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6. Best of luck.