Hello JonathanSins, 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 lines smooth and confident, and most of your forms are simple and easy to work with. Some of your forms are slumping and sagging over each other with a sense of gravity. You seem to have missed the very first line from the exercise instructions that states "This exercise is less about getting organic forms to actually cut into one another, and more about how they can be piled on top of one another in a way that feels convincing." This does suggest that you may want to be more thorough with reading the instructions before beginning your homework assignments in future.

You've done a good job of describing how your forms cut through each other in 3D space, but that's not the point of this exercise. We're tackling a different challenge here, exploring how to pile the forms on top of each other, how they might wrap around each other with gravity, and how we can keep all the forms in the pile to feel stable and supported.

You're doing a good job of projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, well done. Some of your shadows seem to be incomplete or missing, I've made some suggested additions to your work here.

Moving on to your animal constructions

There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. If your drawings are on the recommended paper size then some of them are very, very small. For example this antelope could have been drawn twice this size to make better use of the space on the page. In artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

There are a few things that hint that you might not be investing quite as much time into these constructions as you really need to. One of them is your line work, which gets a little loose or sketchy in a few places. It's not present everywhere but there are things like leaving little gaps between lines that should connect together- for example on the feet of this antelope that undermine the solidity of your constructions by reminding the viewer that they are just looking at a collection of lines on a 2D piece of paper. Another example of rushing your lines would be the hatching on the legs of this bear which is unevenly spaced, undershooting and overshooting. I can see evidence of you planning and ghosting some of your lines, but this is something you need to do for every line.

In addition to the line work tells, another thing that suggests you could be putting more time into these is that some of them are highly simplified. This would be an example. There's not much going on beyond the absolute minimum basics required to set up a framework for your construction. I'd suggest spending longer observing your reference and attempting to transfer more structural information from that reference into your construction. This can be applied to every aspect of construction, but for example these notes on foot construction may be useful.

Moving on, in your lesson 4 critique Uncomfortable introduced the following rule. Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. He gave an explanation about how this helps you to treat your drawings as 3D constructions and shared a number of diagrams to help you to understand how to add to your constructions with complete, new forms instead.

Unfortunately you're relying quite a bit on altering your constructions with single lines and partial shapes. I've highlighted some examples on one of your pages here. I'll talk a bit more about what you can do instead of working with individual lines in a minute, but first I need to address your leg construction.

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 stated that this technique is still to be used throughout lesson 5 as well. 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.

There are some places where it looks like you made an attempt at using the sausage method, like the front limbs on your kangaroo but mostly you're working with partial shapes. On most of your constructions there was no attempt to build on your basic leg structures with additional forms as shown in the ant leg and dog leg demos that Uncomfortable shared with you previously.

There are some places where you're using additional masses. I can see you used a complete from on the back of your hybrid. 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 taken this antelope and redrawn some of your extensions as complete additional masses. Notice how I've made use of the underlying structures of the shoulder and thigh masses to wrap those additional forms around. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. These notes should help you to understand how to use additional forms.

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.

Conclusion I can see you made an effort here, but in not taking the steps you needed to apply the feedback you received in your lesson 4 critique you have undermined those efforts and fallen short of what you're really capable of. As a minimum, I need you to take actions on your constructions in 3D by adding new forms instead of single lines, use the sausage method to construct your legs, and take as much time as you need to draw each line to the best of your ability. I'd like you to complete 1 page of organic intersections and 5 pages of animal constructions, please. For these, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Do not work on more than one construction in a given day. So if you happen to put the finishing touches on one, do not move onto the next until the following day. You are however welcome and encouraged to spread your constructions across multiple days or sittings if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability. That's not a matter of skill, it's a matter of giving yourself the time to execute each mark with care (which as I noted earlier is something you sometimes don't do as well as you could).

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, as well as a rough estimate of how much time was spent on it.

Of course if anything that has been said to you here or in your previous critiques is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions. I know that you can do this and look forward to seeing your work.