Hello Iron_wing, as you correctly guessed, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections these are working pretty well, your forms have a sense of weight to them as you allow them to slump and sag over one another, and you’re piling your forms up an a way that feels stable and supported.

You’re projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the surfaces below and keeping keeping a consistent light source in mind, good work. I spotted a few little mistakes with the shadows on one of your pages, and you’ll find them noted here. Blue areas are missing shadows, and red areas are shadows that I don’t think we should be able to see. These little things probably come down to taking your time to think through each shadow before you draw it, and double checking that they’re all there before you call the exercise finished.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are heading in the right direction, and I can see that your spatial reasoning skills are getting stronger. You’ve tackled some pretty challenging poses and angles with a lot of depth to them and you’ve generally done a good job of fitting the various elements of your constructions together like a 3D puzzle.

One of the first points that stands out is something I talked about in your previous critique- leg construction. You’re consistently constructing your legs using “stretched spheres” which is noted on the lower left of the sausage method diagram as something to avoid, because they are too stiff. In some cases you’re also drawing around them twice, exacerbating the tendency to make them elliptical, which I specifically called out as something to avoid in these notes on your work. If something said to you in a critique is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions. Otherwise, the responsibility lies with the student to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that the feedback is applied. This might mean reviewing the feedback periodically, taking notes in your own words, a combination of the two, or something else entirely.

Something I noticed on quite a few of your leg constructions, is that sometimes you’ll draw your ellipse armatures, then draw the “actual leg” around them, without defining a clear relationship between these two stages so that the ellipses float somewhere in the middle of the leg. Your axolotl is a fairly clear example of this, especially on the hind legs. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

For example, the enveloping form marked in purple on the leg of this okapi can be given a clearer relationship to the underlying forms by breaking it into pieces, as shown in green here.

This approach can be pushed further, by 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 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 as puzzles.

Moving down to feet, I'd like you 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.

You’ve made a lot of progress with “taking actions in 3D” as discussed in your lesson 4 critique, and most of your constructions look quite solid. You do sometimes hop back into 2D by making a quick addition with a one-off line or flat partial shape, and I’ve marked out a couple of examples with blue on this okapi. Remember you want to be constructing complete additional forms wherever you want to build on your construction or alter something.

You do generally take most of your actions in 3D, and I’m happy to see that you’ve explored using additional masses as a tool to help you build on 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, if you take another look at the okapi you’ll see that I’ve replaced those partial shapes with complete additional masses, as well as making some adjustments to the large mass on top of the back. I noticed with the mass on top of the back, that you’d used an inward curve where it pressed against the back of the rib cage. The thing is, as part of the core construction, you had already taken the ribcage and pelvis masses and combined them into a “torso sausage” so there was no part of the ribcage protruding from the torso to press into the additional mass. Instead I’ve wrapped the mass around the torso sausage itself in this area. On the other hand, the shoulder and thigh masses do protrude from the torso sausage, and this makes them very useful for anchoring additional masses to the construction. I’ve used an inward curve in the additional mass where it presses against the top of the thigh mass. 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.

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. It looks like you’re familiar with some elements of the informal head demo, as you often draw pentagonal eye sockets, but pay closer attention to how the footprint of the muzzle is wedged against the eye sockets, then the form is extruded from that footprint. This will help you maintain more specific relationships between the pieces of your head constructions.

Before I wrap this up I want to mention a few things you can do that will make Uncomfortable’s job a bit easier when you submit lesson 6.

• Avoid filling in large areas with solid black, such as the neck of this okapi because it obscures the underlying construction and makes it more difficult to asses your work. In this particular case I think you’ve filled in a form shadow (where the neck turns away from the light source) rather than a cast shadow, where one form blocks the light from hitting another surface. Please review this video which explains the difference between form and cast shadows, and why we stick to using cast shadows only in this course.

• Please make sure your whole construction is in your photo. If we look at this page the bottom of the feet are missing, and as your writing is also cropped, I’m guessing the page goes further than what is included in this image. Being able to see the whole construction helps to provide accurate feedback.

• It also helps if you submit your constructions the right way up (this doesn’t matter so much for the technical exercises, like the cylinder challenge) as I got a crick in my neck turning my head sideways to look at your work.

All right, I’ve highlighted a few things you could do to get even more out of these constructions, but on the whole your spatial reasoning skills are developing nicely so I’ll leave you to apply this advice independently, and go ahead and mark this as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.