Hello JuanSebastianPulidoVelasco, 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 forms simple, which helps them to feel solid. In future I want you to think of these forms as being soft and heavy, like well-filled water balloons. Some of your forms, such as this one appear stiff, like pieces of wood. We want to capture how these forms slump and sag around one another with a shared sense of gravity. Here is what I mean, see how I've redrawn that same form, allowing it to sag in the middle, and come to rest in a position where it is supported by the forms below.

Some of your shadows are a bit minimised, so they appear to cling to the forms like heavy line weight rather than being projected boldly enough to cast onto the forms below. Here is an example of how the shadows might look on one of your pages if we project them onto the forms below.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see you've made a real effort to apply both the lesson instructions, and the advice in past feedback. It is good to see you starting with simple ball forms for the major masses of the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis, and connecting them together with a torso sausage. I'm really happy to see that you've continued to use the sausage method to construct most of your legs, and that you've explored building onto your constructions with additional masses.

If we think of drawing these constructions using the analogy of baking a cake, then we can consider the instructions in Drawabox to be a partial recipe. The instructions will tell you to use ball forms, sausages, additional masses etc, like a recipe might telly you that you need eggs, butter, sugar, flour. What the instructions don't say is how much flour or sugar you'll need- or how big the forms should be in relation to one another for a particular construction. We can tell you what order to draw the forms in (what order to put ingredients in the bowl) but not what angle to draw them at, or exactly where to place them (how to mix the ingredients).

The missing information that you need can be found in your reference, and from what I can tell you're just not observing your reference carefully or frequently enough to extract that information and transfer it to your constructions. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. You'll find a more in-depth discussion on drawing from observation vs memory in this video from lesson 2.

Right now, because there does appear to be a greater reliance on memory rather than direct observation (not everywhere - some parts come out stronger and more directly informed than others), there are definitely elements that come out looking highly simplified, or with proportions so off that it is difficult to tell what type of animal you were drawing.

When starting out a drawing, it's definitely a challenging point - you're putting down those initial masses, and they make a lot of major decisions that will determine how a number of important things turn out. For example, your proportions in this raccoon you ended up starting out with the proportions off in terms of how the head and body were drawn in relation to one another, and as a result, the head ended up coming out tiny. Now, it's true - spending more time observing your reference would have helped, and I can see a number of things across your homework that suggest that you probably could be looking back at it more frequently. You do get points for not attempting to "fix" this mistake by cutting back inside forms you have already drawn or redrawing them, this is very important for constructional drawing and you generally do a good job of respecting the solidity of your forms once they are on the page.

Another area where you seem to have trouble controlling proportions is legs, on the same raccoon they appear enormous (and all different lengths), and on both your Okapi constructions the far side legs are longer than the near side ones. Here's a breakdown of some of the issues on one of them. In addition to observing your reference, be sure to use the planning stage of the ghosting method for every form you draw, to give yourself the best chance of putting the form down where you intend to draw it, rather than haphazardly. You can place a dot on the page for where you want each joint to go if you find it helps to have something on the page to aim for when ghosting.

I found this image of an okapi in a similar pose and this image where the feet are visible and used them to make a quick reconstruction of how we might build this animal. In particular take a good look at the third step where the leg sausages have been added. The sausage forms are generally skinnier, and the lowest section is much smaller than what was present in your construction. The front legs are almost straight, and there's a distinct bend at the ankle joint in the hind legs.

Now, while rushing the observation and planning process does seem to be the biggest stumbling block you're running into, there are a couple of aspects of your construction where I have some advice for you.

The first of these is additional masses. You're usually drawing complete 3D forms when you want to build on your constructions, though sometimes you'll extend off existing forms with one-off lines as we see on the right side of this leg joint. Instead, you'll want to draw a complete additional mass with its own fully enclosed silhouette, so we can unserstand how it connects to the existing structure in 3D space, as you did on the left side of the leg.

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 traced over two masses one this warthog (which was one of your more well observed constructions) to highlight two issues that occur intermittently throughout the set. The mass above the neck is a partial shape, it just stops existing where it reaches the head. This makes is unclear where the edge of the mass is meant to be, or how it connects to the head in 3D space. With the mass on top of the rump you've avoided using any complexity, leaving the mass as soft rounded outward curves all the way around its silhouette. Unfortunately this lack of complexity robs us of the tools we need to explain how the mass wraps around and grips the underlying structure. It sort of looks like a blob dropped on top of the animal that would wobble off if the animal were to move. So, in this image I've redrawn the mass on top of the rump, pulling it down from the spine around the side of the body, and making use of the thigh mass, pressing additional mass against this structure and wrapping it around. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. The adjustments to the neck were slightly more complicated, I started by enlarging the neck (in green) and the shoulder (in blue) so we can use these bulky structures to help anchor the additional masses to the construction. The red mass above the shoulder was drawn using the same logic as the mass over the rump, then the purple mass was drawn wrapping around that, filling in gap behind the head, this time I've tucked it around the back of the ear when pressing it into the existing structures f your construction.

As a quick bonus, I think you may find it helpful to look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that 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. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

The next 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.

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 rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

I can see you tried out a few different head construction methods, but something that is consistent across most of the set is a tendency to make your eye sockets smaller than they should be, so try making them larger than you naturally feel like they should be to compensate for this.

Before I wrap this up I wanted to take a moment to clarify that if you choose to add texture and detail to your constructions you'll get more out of the exercise if you try to follow the guidance for texture as introduced in the texture section of lesson 2. I understand that you're probably copying color patterns because Uncomfortable draws stripes on a tiger in the intro video for this lesson. Unfortunately that video is a little outdated in that regard (although there is still plenty of valuable information in the video) and this will be corrected once the overhaul of lesson content reaches lesson 5. For now though, you can review your lesson 4 feedback where I discussed the difference between decorating drawings, and approaching texture in a way that tells the viewer how the surface might feel to run your hand along it, using cast shadow shapes to imply small forms on the object's surface. If something said to you here or previously is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.

Now, while there are some aspects of your constructions that are coming along nicely, I feel you can do much better if you slow down and observe your reference more carefully, taking time to plan each form before you draw it, and so I will be assigning some revisions for you to address this.

For these I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

• When you upload your work please also upload the reference images you used.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.