Hello Byte5115, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections your forms are reasonably well done, you’re keeping them simple which helps them to feel solid, and you’re capturing how they slump over one another with a sense of weight.

My main concern with this exercise is your shadows, which are clinging to the forms like lineweight, and appear to have been hastily applied by scribbling, instead of by outlining the shape of the shadow and then carefully filling it in. You can see Uncomfortable demonstrating this process in the video that accompanies this exercise.

On a more minor note, remember to draw around the small ellipses on the tips of the forms 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page,which we ask students to do for every ellipse freehanded in this course, as introduced here.

Moving on to your animal constructions, there are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. I strongly recommend that you stick to one construction per page and draw it big enough to make use of the space available, as I believe this will make it easier for you to tackle the other issues I’m about to call out.

In all honesty, it looks like you may be underestimating how much time these constructional exercises require, and the biggest issue comes down to your markmaking. It looks like you’re not using the ghosting method (or at least, not fully, correctly, or consistently) as there are a lot of places where your lines are loose and sketchy, wobbly, or chicken scratchy. Every effort must be made to adhere to the principles of markmaking throughout this course. By going through all 3 phases of the ghosting method for every line, we force ourselves to be very intentional with every line we draw. By making sure each mark we draw in this course is the result of a conscious decision, we eventually drill these concepts down to a subconscious level and train our instincts, so that when we want to rely on our instincts and sketch more loosely and freely outside of the exercises we do here, we can achieve a stronger result. If we try to rely on our instincts to complete the exercises, we won’t train them, we just end up with a mess. I can see from some of your larger ellipses and torso sausages that you can draw smooth, continuous lines, and maintain tight, specific relationships between them, but we really need you to be doing this consistently across the whole construction.

The markmaking issues have been called out several times before in the various rounds of feedback on your previous submissions, and you have been invited to ask questions if anything said to you in a critique is unclear or confusing. In cases where a student is repeatedly missing instructions or having extensive difficulty in applying things that have been called out several times already, we often hit the limit on how much we're able to help and will notify a student that we've gone beyond what we're able to, and recommend instead that they look for another course that may be able to commit more resources to them. I don’t think we’ve hit that limit yet, but we do need you to do more to ensure that you apply the feedback you have been given.

Another point that stands out as having been called out multiple times before is leg construction, where you’re mostly constructing your legs using ellipses, which results in them being too stiff. The characteristics of sausage forms are shown in the sausage method diagram and you demonstrated in your last round of lesson 4 revisions that you can construct these forms quite well, as long as you keep these specific properties consciously in mind. I’d like you to reread your lesson 4 feedback for the information you need on leg construction, as well as a more thorough explanation on why it is so important to stick to the principles of markmaking.

One thing I do see that you’ve applied really well from previous feedback, is that you’ve respected the solidity of your forms by avoiding cutting back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, which does help your constructions to feel 3D.

Continuing down to feet, I think you may find it helpful to study 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

In lesson 4 we talked about how to use complete new forms to build onto our existing structures, and the importance of establishing how the pieces connect together in 3D space. In lesson 5 we introduce the tool of additional masses to help students to design their additional forms in a way that feels solid and believable. I’m happy to see that you’ve explored using additional masses to build onto a number of your constructions, though as noted here you have a tendency to leave these forms incomplete. We want each additional form to have its own, complete, fully enclosed silhouette.

Another point I noticed with your additional masses is that you often pile a ton of additional contour curves onto them, possibly to try to make them feel more 3D. Unfortunately this kind of standalone contour curve running along the surface of a single form only really helps to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3D and clarify it. They don’t fix the problem at hand, which is the lack of clear 3D relationship between the existing structures and the new form. This is something we aim to achieve by clear, intentional design of the mass’ 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.

With this in mind I’ve redrawn some of the masses on your camel, notice how every form has a fully enclosed silhouette, and I haven’t used additional contour lines as a cure-all to make them feel 3D. The red mass (which was drawn first) has been pulled down around the side of the body, and pressed against the top of the protruding shoulder mass, producing a specific corner and inward curve. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. Once the red mass is on the page it becomes part of the “existing structure.” The purple mass was added next, notice how it wraps around the red one in 3D, rather than being cut off where they overlap. Finally the green masses were added. With the large mass under the belly I moved the sharp corners from arbitrary places on the side of the torso, to the edge, where they hook around and give the impression that the additional mass is gripping the torso sausage, wrapping around its surface in 3D, rather than being pasted on like a flat sticker.

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:

• 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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All right, there’s a fair bit that you’re handling quite well, in terms of starting with simple forms, and thinking about how these forms exist in 3D space. This is being undermined by the persistent markmaking issues (in places it is so messy that it is hard to tell what you were trying to do, which drastically undermines the 3D illusion) and I will be assigning some revisions for you to address the points that have been called out here. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Stick to one construction per page, making every effort to use as much of the space available as you can.

• 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 dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete:

• 1 page of organic intersections

• 5 pages of animal constructions