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

Starting with your organic intersections, you're piling your forms up and wrapping them around one another in a way that feels convincing, and you're projecting your shadows so that they clearly cast onto the forms below, nice work. If you want to challenge yourself a bit more with this exercise you could try moving your light source to more extreme or interesting angles and experiment with how that will affect your shadows.

Moving on to your animal constructions these are coming together well, you certainly appear to have clicked with the idea of treating these constructions as three dimensional puzzles, paying attention to how to fit all the pieces together in a way that reinforces the 3D illusion rather than undermining it. For the most part these are feeling quite solid, but I do have a couple of pieces of advice that should help you when practising these constructional exercises in future.

Starting with your core construction, you're doing a good job with most of your constructions. Be sure to always draw around your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This will help to execute them smoothly, as explained in this section. You're doing this correctly in most cases, but the rib cage and pelvis of this komodo dragon don't appear to be drawn through, and look a little stiff.

With regards to this page of servals remember the rib cage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso, as explained in this section. The construction on the left is an example of drawing the rib cage a bit small, which I can see occurring a few times across the set of constructions. For the construction on the right, the torso sausage is getting a bit wobbly and complex, which gives you something of a weaker foundation on which to build the rest of the construction. This was something of a one-off issue, as I can see you're keeping your torso sausage simple in your other constructions. I do see where you're coming from, looking at your reference image. Sometimes a reference doesn't look like it is well suited to using a simple sausage for the torso, but as shown in this partial kangaroo construction we can use additional masses on top of the torso sausage to build a plethora of different animals.

Speaking of additional masses, it is great to see you've been making use of this tool to build bulk and complexity onto your constructions, and I do see some improvement across the set. 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, I've made use of this rhino as an example to show some ways we could improve your application of additional masses. I've highlighted on your work in red an example of a mass that had a lot of complexity that couldn't be explained by interacting with the other structures in the construction. The more complicated a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer (and you) to understand how it exists in 3D space, so this form falls a little flat. For constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the underlying structures at any given point. Instead, we'd have to break this addition into more steps, adding simpler forms piece by piece. On the same image, I've drawn over with blue a few places where it looks like you'd extended off existing forms with single lines and partial shapes, which as we discussed in your lesson 4 feedback, doesn't quite provide enough information for us to understand how those additions connect to the existing structures in 3D space.

I'd like you to take a look at this image where I've redrawn the partial shapes, giving them their own, fully-enclosed silhouettes. I've broken the large mass on top of the back into several pieces, making sure each one stays simple where it is exposed to fresh air. They were drawn in this order- red, green, purple, blue. Once again, each mass has a complete silhouette, and where they overlap I've allowed them to do so in 3D space, wrapping the new mass around the pieces that are already in place. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Something worth noting that you're doing really well on some of your constructions, is making use of the shoulder and thigh masses to wrap your additional masses around and help anchor them to the construction, great work.

Another point to commend you for is continuing to use the sausage method for constructing your legs, nicely done. Do be sure to remember to include the contour curve at each joint, to explain how the sausage forms intersect. These are present on most of your constructions, but appear to be absent on this horse. It's still worth mentioning that using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool, and one you use fairly well. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively.

You're off to a decent start with using additional forms to build onto your sausage armatures and arrive at a more characteristic construction of the particular leg you're trying to draw. I noticed a lot of these additions focus primarily on masses 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 as puzzles.

As a quick bonus, I'd like to share these notes on foot construction with you. They show an approach you're already working with on a few of your constructions, drawing boxy forms, this 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. We can then take this further by using similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Most of your pages show a very clear intent to draw your heads in 3D and fit all the various elements together like a puzzle, and most of them are working well. I'd still like to take some time to point you to a specific construction method and explain why it is so useful. 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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All right, I think that covers it. Good work, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.