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

Starting with your organic intersections these are hitting the right notes, you’ve got a good sense of weight to your forms as they slump and sag over one another, coming to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported.

In future, it will help you to get more out of this exercise if you draw through and complete your forms where possible, instead of cutting some of them off where they pass behind one another. This isn’t always easy where a form points towards the viewer, but there are a few places, such as the form at the far left of this pile which would have been fairly straightforward to draw through. This will encourage you to think more about how the form exists in 3D space.

The shadows are working pretty well, you’re generally projecting them boldly enough to cast onto the surfaces below, and appear to be attempting to follow a consistent light source.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your work is similarly well done, I’m seeing that you’re making an effort to stick to the principles of markmaking, and putting a great deal of thought into how to build up your constructions like pieces of a 3D puzzle.

You’re making good progress with building your constructions “in 3D” and I’m happy to see that you’re respecting the solidity of your forms by resisting the temptation to cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn. Just remember to construct a complete new form with its own fully enclosed silhouette whenever you want to add to the construction or change something. I notice that sometimes you hop back into talking actions “in 2D” by extending the construction with a one-off line, basically the incorrect example from the bottom of this diagram I shared with you in your previous critique. If we look at this ibex as an example, on the front of the forelegs your approach was correct, you did a good job of building the bumps on the knees with complete additional forms, establishing how they connect to the existing leg sausages in 3D space. On the other hand, it looks like you’d extended the front of the hind legs with one-off lines, which undermines the 3D illusion, both for the viewer, and more importantly, for you.

It looks like you’re working with the sausage method of leg construction in mind, although there is some variability in how closely you adhere to all of the specifics of this method.

• Remember to keep the sausage forms simple when putting down your leg armatures. We’re aiming for two rounded ends of roughly equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. As noted on this section of your fox some of your leg sausages are spot-on, but some of them deviate so far from simple sausages the it looks like you may not have had these characteristics in mind at the time.

• It also helps to keep the shoulder and thigh masses simple, using an ellipse as discussed in this step of the wolf demo. In all fairness, you’re doing this well on a lot of pages, I just noticed your shoulder and thigh masses getting more complex on a few pages. The more complicated a form is, the more difficult it is to understand how it is to supposed exist in 3D space, and the more likely it is to fall flat.

• You’re a bit inconsistent in applying a contour line at each joint. These little lines might seem insignificant, but defining the intersections where the forms connect together in 3D space is a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction, so try to remember to include them in future.

• Once the sausage armatures are in place we can add any lumps, bumps and complexity that couldn’t be captured with the sausages by using additional forms. Here is how we could apply all these points to the hind leg of your fox. I do see that you’re starting to explore building onto some of your legs with additional forms, but this can be pushed further. 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, 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.

When you do use additional forms to flesh out your constructions, such as the larger masses you’ve used along many of the torsos, you’re doing a pretty good job of designing them in a way that feels convincing, by considering how the mass would attach to the structures that are already present.

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, using your fox again, I traced over in green an example of an additional mass which you’d designed very well. On the same image I’ve completed two additions which (as far as I could tell) were just flat partial shapes. Notice how I’ve taken advantage of those simple shoulder and thigh masses (the blue ellipses) that I mentioned earlier. These shoulder and thigh masses protrude from the sides of the torso sausage, providing something to help anchor additional masses to the construction. 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.

I can see you using some of those ideas on some of your head constructions, for example this fox looks like you were fitting everything together snugly, and developing the round cranial ball into a series of planes. Try bringing it all together in the way the demo shows, and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise. Sometimes it seems like this method is 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, I think that should cover it. Your spatial reasoning skills are developing well and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.