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

Starting with your organic intersections you've done a pretty good job of drawing simple forms here, but some of your contour curves are undermining their solidity. I've corrected one here that was quite wobbly, adding unwanted complexity to your form. These forms have a round cross-section so you should be aiming to have the curve be a portion of an ellipse, and the ends of your contour curve should hook around the form. I find it helps to ghost the whole ellipse, and just place the pen down for the visible portion I want to draw.

Some of your contour curves are very shallow and hit the edge of the form at a near perpendicular angle, this flattens the form as explained here.

Remember to draw through your ellipses two full times before you lift your pen. You may feel like you are doing this already, but in most cases you are not. This applies to your animal constructions as well. I've pointed to a few ellipses not drawn through here and also drew two example ellipses to show you the difference. This is something we ask you to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course and is explained in this section in lesson 1.

In the future I'd like you to draw through all of your forms in this exercise. Much like when we drew through the forms in the form intersections exercise, drawing through these organic forms will help us develop a better understanding of the 3D space we're attempting to create. It will help you get more out of this exercise by drawing every form in it’s entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they go behind another form.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, well done. The first page has the shadows being cast in a reasonably consistent direction, it's very clear that you're using a light source on the upper right.

The shadows are less consistent in your second page, and some are missing. I've done some corrections on your work here, mostly completing shadows that were partial in dark red, but also pushing back some irregularly shaped shadows in purple.

You're mostly doing a good job of having your forms sag and slump around each other with a shared sense of gravity. Your forms should feel stable and supported, and I pointed to one on the image where I edited your shadows, because I'm not sure what is supporting it stuck up in the air like that. The others do feel pretty stable though, so you're generally doing a good job.

Moving on to your animals.

Markmaking

Before I talk about your construction, I'd like you to review the principles of markmaking from lesson 1.

Marks should be continuous and unbroken. There are at least 4 scratchy little marks here where you only needed to draw one line. Another example here.

Marks must maintain a consistent trajectory. There's an awful lot of zigzagging going on in the fur of this tail. Uncomfortable discusses how to approach fur here.

And as for the textural marks inside the silhouette of that tail all I can really say is don't scribble. This diagram may help you.

You're tending to add a lot of extra stray lines that don't serve a clear purpose. There are some places in your constructions where I can't quite tell what you were trying to do.

Every mark you make in these exercises should serve a clear purpose. Always use the ghosting method in full. Take your time to plan every single line.

Furthermore, you leave a lot of gaps between your lines and every single one of them is undermining the solidity of your constructions and reminding the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat page. Uncomfortable went over the importance of not leaving gaps in your constructions in your lesson 3 critique so please give that another read if you're not sure why I'm raising this as an issue.

I've seen in your previous homework that you are capable of drawing smooth continuous lines and connecting them together. So it is likely a matter of taking more time and paying attention to what you're doing.

Try to reserve using additional line weight for for clarifying overlaps as explained here. When you want to add line weight it should be done with a single, confident, ghosted, super imposed stroke, as shown here. Please avoid tracing back over large portions of your silhouette as seen in this lizard in the future. Tracing over your lines in this manner usually results in your initially confident lines becoming wobblier, and in making small alterations to your silhouette, which undermines the solidity of your construction.

Construction

1-Major masses- The lesson overview explains how to start your constructions with 3 major masses which you generally do, but skipped over on this cat. The next step is to connect the rib cage and pelvis together with a torso sausage and attach the cranial ball to the body with a simple, solid neck. You sometimes draw an ellipse for the base of the neck but forget to attach the head to it as seen here As the torso sausage should be completed before drawing the legs there would be no reason for it to be cut off where it passes behind the legs Some of your constructions do follow these first steps quite well, this rhino seems to have all the foundational forms in place and this lizard had a solid start.

Try to follow the lesson instructions to the best of your ability. By skipping over these basic first steps you often end up with a much weaker foundation to build the rest of your construction from.

2-Legs- It looks like you've used a variety of strategies for drawing the legs of your animals. While there are some different techniques being used for legs in the various demos, given how the course has developed, the method that is currently deemed most effective is sausage method. Uncomfortable went over the virtues of this method in your lesson 4 critique, as well as providing diagrams to help you use it and quite clearly stressing that this technique is still to be used throughout lesson 5 as well. It doesn't look like you're applying the sausage method of leg construction in any of your work here. You can see a good example of how to use the sausage method to construct animal legs in this donkey demo from the informal demos page.

As an extra bonus, notes on foot construction may also be useful.

3-Additional masses- I can see that you're making use of additional masses on some of your constructions.

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, for example I've made some suggested edits to some of the additional masses on your hybrid here. I've wrapped the mass on top of the shoulders around that underlying shoulder mass, and similarly I've made use of the thigh mass to wrap another mass round. I've made an edit to the neck to define a solid underlying structure before wrapping that additional neck bulge around it. I also tucked the belly mass around and between the front legs.The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I noticed it appears that there are a lot of cases where you're using additional 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. 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).

On some of your constructions you're not using additional masses much, but rather extending your silhouette with one-off lines or partial shapes. I've highlighted some examples in blue on your bull where you extended the silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space. Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3d forms to the existing structure. forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here. This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

4- heads- 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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

I can see that you're definitely making a real effort to apply the constructional method of head drawing, though not quite following it to the letter. In addition to all the above general advice on markmaking and drawing complete 3D forms instead of partial shapes I would add that the eye socket is much bigger than you think it is, and that you need to draw the whole form of the eyeball, not just the opening of the eyelids.

Conclusion

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. I want you to be able to demonstrate that you can understand and apply this feedback so that you can continue to get the most out of these exercises in the future. Be sure to read through this critique (and your previous critiques) thoroughly, and to refer back to it as often as you need to in order to understand, remember, and apply all the information that has been presented to you. Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- 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.

2- 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 5 pages of animal constructions.