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

Starting with your organic intersections you're mostly doing a pretty good job of drawing your forms slumping and sagging over one another with a shared sense of gravity. This form appears to be defying gravity, with the far end poking up in the air with nothing beneath it to support it in this position. We want each form to feel stable and supported for this exercise, like we could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off. Here is what that form might look like if we allow it to wrap around the form below. Notice that when I redrew the form I've also shifted the degree of the contour curves to show how the form turns in space. This was something we discussed in relation to your organic forms exercise in lesson 4, and it is just as relevant for the organic intersections exercise.

Your shadows are coming along well, you're projecting them boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, and their direction appears reasonably consistent. You appear to have lit both piles from directly above. Don't forget that you can experiment with having the light source in different places, top left or top right are good ones to try to start with.

I do have a couple of small corrections for your shadows here. Under the form marked A you'd split a shadow up into two pieces, which didn't seem to make sense, as it rests on top of the form below all the way along here, so I'd handle it in the same way you handled the shadow being cast from form A onto form B- having it run continuously without disappearing and reappearing. I adjusted to shadow under form B to match the direction of the other shadows in the pile.

Moving on to your animal constructions, there's quite a lot of good stuff happening here. It is good to see that you've been quite conscientious about drawing through your forms, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're trying to create. It is also quite pleasing to see that you've made a real effort to apply the advice from your lesson 4 critique, by (usually) avoiding cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn and using the sausage method for constructing your legs.

I did see a couple of spots where you'd cut back inside the silhouette of a form you'd already drawn. The one I've marked in red on this horse is probably accidental. By picking one of the inner lines of the ellipse to represent the ball of the rib cage you'd left a stray line floating outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

The other place where you'd cut back inside a form you had already established was on the wing of your hybrid, as highlighted in red here. This undermines the solidity of the form of the wing and reminds the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat piece of paper. I think you may find it helpful to study this example where Uncomfortable shows how we can give the impression of a wing being feathery using a textural approach, and adding feathers to the existing silhouette rather than cutting back inside it.

On the same image of your hybrid, I also made a quick note, if your construction won't fit on the page "cap off" your forms so they have a clearly defined edge, rather than running them off the page as lines and leaving them open-ended. You can see an example of this in the running rat demo.

Moving on to the topic of leg construction, I'm happy to see you working with the sausage method, though you don't always stick as closely to the characteristics of simple sausages as you could be. Now, I appreciate these sausage forms can be a bit tricky, and sometimes despite out best efforts and using the ghosting method they might not come out quite how we wanted, however there appear to be a number of places where you've deliberately deformed the leg sausages to conform more closely to the leg you observed. This happens most often with the upper sections of the legs, with some of them being more triangular than sausagey, as one end is much wider than the other. If you recall your lesson 4 critique where I discussed the merits of the sausage method, I explained that the sausages aren't necessarily meant to capture the entire leg, but they serve as an armature that we can build onto with additional forms. I'm happy to see that you are exploring using additional forms on a number of your leg constructions. Here is how we might apply this to one of the legs of the hybrid, keeping the sausage form simpler, then building onto that sausage with an additional form. Remember the simpler a form is, the easier it is for the viewer (and you) to understand how it exists in 3D space. This particular construction was missing the contour curves for the intersections at the joints though I see you included them on most of your other constructions. It is worth calling out because using contour curves to define the intersections between forms is an incredibly useful tool. These little curves might seem insignificant but they reinforce the solidity of the forms you're connecting, so remember to include them in future.

It looks like you tried a few different tactics for drawing feet, and your hooved animals are looking the most solid of the set in this regard. I'd like you to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms 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.

Another key area I check in this lesson is seeing how a student is getting on with applying additional masses to their constructions. I'm happy to see that you've experimented with using additional masses quite liberally throughout the set, although I think I can provide a few pieces of advice that should help you to design these masses more effectively in future.

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, I've made quite a few edits to the additional masses on this bear and numbered them to help make it clear which mass I'm referring to.

• Masses 1 and 2 looked like they should be overlapping, but mass 1 just stopped existing where it passes behind/beneath mass 2. I've drawn them both in their entirety, and allowed mass 2 to wrap around mass 1. Something you did really well with these two masses is you've used the shoulder and thigh masses to press into your additional masses and help anchor them to the construction, great work. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• Mass 3 occurs where I split mass 1 into 2 pieces. Mass 1 was trying to achieve too much with a single form, and it was getting complex, with an inward curve being pressed into it where it was exposed to fresh air and there was nothing present in the construction to cause such complexity. By breaking it into pieces, each piece can achieve a more specific purpose. I've done the same thing with masses 4, 5, 6 and 7. Generally I'd avoid having a single mass running long distances, as it is easy to accidentally make the mass over-complicated and have it fall flat.

• Masses 8,9,10 and 11 had arbitrary sharp corners. We want all complexity in additional masses to occur as a direct result of interacting with the existing structures that are present in the construction. In these cases, because there isn't any structure to create such a sharp corner, we can instead create a smoother S-curve transition, as shown here. This still allows us to "wrap" around the structure, but doesn't require such a sharp turn.

• Masses 12 and 13 replace a mass that was devoid of all complexity, staying soft and rounded all the way around it's silhouette. This lack of complexity robs us of the tools we need to explain how the additional mass actually attaches to the existing structures in 3D space, so it appears flatter, almost like a sticker that has been pasted onto the construction.

• 14 is where I redrew the tail using a complete form. Remember we want to be drawing complete forms with their own complete silhouettes wherever we want to build on our constructions, to help reinforce the 3D illusion.

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.

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.

Looking through your head constructions, you tend to draw the eye sockets too small, and the shapes you're experimenting with are highly inconsistent, often they're not a matched pair on the same head. Sometimes when lines are smaller it can lead a student into seeing them as less important, and not taking the time to plan each one carefully and ghost them thoroughly. The eye sockets are very important, as they act as a keystone for wedging the other elements of the head construction against. Do not draw these haphazardly.

There are a number of constructions such as this cat where you don't appear to have attempted to draw a footprint for the muzzle form or extrude a boxy form from that footprint. While there are inconsistencies between the various demos in this lesson, most of them do show how to construct the muzzle with a boxy form.

There are also cases like this bear where I can see an attempt was made at constructing a boxy muzzle form, but it was incomplete and looks a little incoherent. It almost looks like you may have been drawing faster than you could think through the problem. If you're not sure what you're doing, stop and think. Come up with a plan. Be sure to use the ghosting method for every line so that it is the result of a conscious decision, not an unconscious reaction. Here I've shown how to draw the eye sockets, muzzle footprint, and extrude the muzzle, to get you started on the right foot.

I've left talking about fur until the end of this critique, as it is far less important than the construction. Designing each tuft of fur is time consuming, and if the idea is new to you, it may also be difficult. It is common for students to rush drawing fur (whether consciously or not) and it takes a fair bit of patience and discipline to actually individually design each tuft. It takes careful observation as drawing from memory tends to produce repetitive patterns. It does get easier with practice, and from what I can see in your work I think you're on the right track.

Okay, I've given you quite a lot to think about here, and I'm going to assign some (fairly minimal) revisions for you to put this advice into practice before moving forward. Please complete 3 pages of animal constructions. For these I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• One page should focus on head construction, as this appears to be an area where you're having difficulty. Give the head construction as much time and space as it requires.

• 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.

• Write down beside each construction the date(s) of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.