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

Starting with your organic intersections You're doing a good job of keeping your sausage forms simple and I'm happy to see that you're drawing through them, as this it helps reinforce your understanding of 3D space. you're doing quite well in terms of laying out your forms such that they slump and sag together under a consistent force of gravity. You're pushing your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, and they appear to be projected away from a consistent light source, good work.

In this area you appear to have redrawn part of your form to make corrections. Redrawing lines will draw attention to the area where you feel you made a mistake and can lead to your work becoming confusing. It's usually best to leave your line as if it were correct and move on.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is honestly coming along pretty well. You're making good use of the constructional techniques shown in the lesson material, and your markmaking is smooth and intentional. It looks like you took your time to carefully observe your references and plan your constructions, good work.

In lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building our constructions through the use of adding whole, solid forms. In lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design these additional forms. I can see that you're working on designing these masses in such a way that they reinforce the 3D illusion of your construction instead of undermining it.

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.

I can see that you're already putting a lot of thought into carefully designing your masses, but I have prepared a couple of draw overs on your work to help you improve further.

On this deer the first thing I did, in blue, was to draw the shoulder mass larger. You weren't far off on this particular construction, but sometimes you draw the shoulder mass really small. Uncomfortable uses this mass as a simplification for some of the big muscles involved in locomotion and in quadrupeds this tends to be pretty big. It also makes for a very useful puzzle piece to wrap your additional masses around. I made some edits to some of your masses, as well as pointing out where you did very well. Notice how these masses hug around the underlying structure on the shoulders and thigh masses. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. I also smoothed out a corner on a neck mass that wasn't being pressed against something that would cause that kind of complexity.

I made some similar edits on this chipmunk as well as redrawing the rib cage mass in red. You generally drew your rib cages at a more appropriate size, this seemed to be a one off case of stretching it out to include the tummy. Occasionally you went a bit too far the other way and had your rib cage completely spherical, like with this horse.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a good 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 a small side note, you seem quite fond of drawing the far side legs as 2D shapes and pushing them back with hatching. This is a valid technique, but I would probably reserve it for cases where the far legs are partially obscured. So while it was entirely appropriate for this deer I think it was a bit of a missed opportunity to practice your leg construction on this horse. It's not a big deal, but more a way you can maximise what you learn from these exercises in the future.

And as an extra added bonus I'd like to share these notes on foot construction with you, as they haven't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet but many students find them 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.

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.

I can see that you're applying parts of this method of head construction. Most of your heads feature angular eye sockets, and I can see that you're thinking about the pieces of your head constructions as 3D forms. It does look like heads are giving you the most difficulty in this lesson, so I have a couple more step by step head constructions to share with you.

The first is a simple cat head that was done from the same reference image as one of your cat constructions.

The second is a slightly more complex construction of a squirrel head which I thought was a similar enough animal to the chipmunks you drew to be relevant. The squirrel head was shared with some accompanying text:

1 - The eye socket is bigger.

2 - Define the footprint for the muzzle. It can be trickier in profile views but you can see the contour line coming down from the bottom corner of the eye socket.

3 - Extrude the muzzle from the cranial ball as a boxy form.

4- Define the bow ridge and forehead plane.

5- I drew the lower jaw as a separate boxy form, specifically attached to the cranial ball as well. Added the eyeball, which is also larger than you think it is. Defined a footprint for the nearest ear.

6- Added another form to fill in the convex profile of the squirrel's muzzle. Added a mass to flesh out the top of the neck.

7- More additional forms for the eyelids, ears, nose and lip.

Conclusion Overall I'm happy with how your constructions are coming along. I'd like you to take another swing at head construction before moving on, as this seems to be an area you're struggling with. Please complete 2 animal head constructions of your choice, they can both be on the same page.