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

Starting with your organic intersections these look good. You're keeping your forms simple and your linework is confident. You're doing a good job of having most of your forms slump around each other and having them sag with gravity. You want all the forms in your pile to feel stable and supported, so I would question how the large form on the right of this page is staying up almost vertically. Unsupported forms can feel stiff or weightless, we're aiming to have these feel like well filled water balloons for this exercise.

You're doing a great job with your cast shadows, they're clearly casting onto the form below, and are obeying a consistent light source, nicely done.

I did notice that you're going over most of the silhouette of your sausage stack with a pass of additional line weight. Remember that line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here. If you trace back over your lines slowly and carefully it can make your lines more wobbly, making little accidental alterations to your silhouettes and undermining the solidity of your construction.

When you practise this exercise the future I'd like you to draw through all of your forms. Much like when we drew through our boxes earlier 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.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is top notch. Studying all the demos and following along with them carefully, and investing as much time as you needed for every construction has paid off in spades.

I do have a few pointers to help you to continue to get the most out of these constructional exercises in future.

First, remember that throughout these constructions you want to make sure that every action you take should be done in 3D. Even though you're drawing on a flat piece of paper you want everything you do to reinforce the illusion that the drawing is 3D.

So for example- once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

For example this construction ended up with five legs, where you'd drawn one and then changed your mind about where it needed to go. You need to respect the solidity of your forms. Once it's on the page you need to treat it like it's real, you can't just ignore it. Think in your head, not on the page.

For example, I've marked on your deer in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn. On this image I marked in blue where you attempted to extend your silhouette without really providing enough information for us to understand how those new additions were meant to exist in 3D space.

Another way you make little alterations to your silhouette is when you add line weight. This often results in little extensions where you "bridge" your silhouette from one form to the next, as seen here. Redrawing your whole silhouette in this manner has the effect of taking your nice solid 3D construction and stuffing it into a fuzzy sock. Reinforcing the whole silhouette with line weight might make your constructions prettier but it is actually undermining the 3D illusion that you're trying to create. Let your construction stand on it's own, and reserve any extra line weight for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

Sometimes you alter your silhouette simply by not giving each line as much thought and time as it needs. Everything you add to your construction needs to serve a purpose, make sure you plan every line you draw, and don't redraw lines to correct them, as it makes your work messy and confusing.

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. I can see there are a lot of places where you're doing a superb job of using additional forms to add to your constructions.

One thing that helps with designing the silhouette of your additional masses 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.

Continuing on, I wanted to talk a bit about leg construction. I now it can be quite confusing, with the variety of techniques being used in some of the older demos, but the method that is currently deemed most effective is the sausage method. Uncomfortable did spend some time explaining the benefits of this method, and shared some examples of how to use it in your lesson 4 critique. I can see that you're making an effort to apply this method in most of your constructions, but you're pretty inconsistent about adding the contour curve to reinforce the intersection at the joints, as shown here. These little contour curves might seem insignificant but they do tell the viewer a lot of information about how the forms are orientated in space as well as reinforcing the structure of your legs by establishing how the forms connect together. So try to remember to include them in future.

I noticed on both your warthogs a tendency to lay down your sausage structures more like bones, keeping them relatively thin even when the animal's legs are much thicker all the way around. Remember that what we're doing here is no different from constructing insects, or plants - we're not concerned with the fact that there's actual anatomy inside, just with the forms we can see. Therefore the presence of bones - at least in what we're doing in this course - doesn't matter. Instead, we draw our sausages such that they fill in as much of the structure as they can while still maintaining the characteristics of simple sausages. Then we can build up whatever other bulk is necessary (which may have been too irregular and have thrown off the simple sausage points) using additional masses.

For the upper limbs of this warthog you've taken your sausage form and then drawn a larger form completely enclosing it. 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. This can also be applied in non-sausage situations, 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.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a great start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be pushed farther. 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, from another student's work - as you can see, 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 and puzzles.

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

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. I think it might be one of the few demos not included in your submission, perhaps because it is so simple. Despite its simplicity it is incredibly effective.

There are a few key points to this approach:

1- 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.

2- 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.

3- 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.

There are some pages like this one where you seem more focused on the opening of the eyelids than the form of the eyeball. Instead of drawing your eyelids as lines, we can get a more solid 3 dimensional result if we treat the eyelids as pieces of clay wrapping them around the eyeball as their own fully enclosed forms.

You noted having some difficulty with longer faces, so I'll also share Uncomfortable’s camel head demo which follows the same method as the informal head demo, I hope that helps.

Anyway, overall you're doing a great job, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.