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

Starting with your organic intersections these are coming along fairly well. You're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and you're drawing the forms slumping and sagging over one another with a sense of gravity, nice work.

You'll generally want to avoid laying your sausages parallel to one another, as seen with the top right form on the second page as this can make the form feel precariously balanced. We want the forms to feel stable in this exercise, like we could walk away from the pile and none of the forms would topple off.

You're projecting your shadows boldly, so that they clearly cast onto the forms below, nice work. The shadows are working well on the second page, though there appears to be a little bit of confusion in the first page. I've drawn over two forms, in red and green, on your work here and added their respective shadows, according to the top-left light source you've marked on the page. This leaves the area of shadow I've drawn around in blue unexplained. Try to think through the shadow cast by each individual form, one at a time, to build your shadows piece by piece.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is honestly very well done indeed. Your lines are smooth, confident and purposeful, and I can see evidence of you planning each mark and using the ghosting method. Your constructions feel solid and three dimensional, as you show a strong understanding of how all the various pieces of your constructions exist in space and connect together with specific relationships.

There's not a lot to critique, so I'll go over the main points we cover in animal constructions, discuss what has gone well, and offer additional advice if I see something that could be improved.

Kicking things off with leg construction, it is great to see that you've continued to make effective use of the sausage method throughout the set, sticking pretty closely to simple sausage forms, and remembering to apply a contour curve for the intersection at the joints. You're off to a good start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, and I'm really pleased to see that on some of your pages, such as your bull constructions, you're 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. 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.

Speaking of additional masses, the manner in which you're designing the silhouettes of your additional masses is coming along great for the most part. I always try and push students to think about their masses first as they exist on their own, in the void, as a ball of soft meat. Here they have no complexity, being made up only of outward curves with no corners to their silhouettes. Once they press up against an existing structure however, they start developing complexity, with inward curves to wrap around those existing forms as shown here.This essentially means that we need to always make sure that we understand the nature of both the additional mass, and all the forms it's pressing up against. We can't draw the silhouette to have complexity (inward curves) without a clear source of that complexity.

So, I've made a couple of edits to this reindeer where I spotted a bit of room for improvement.

• Firstly where I've marked with an A, is an area where it looks like you'd extended the underside of the torso sausage using a single line. I've redrawn it as an additional mass instead. Remember we want to be working with complete 3D forms wherever we build on these constructions (which is something you do very well in most cases.)

• Secondly where I've marked with a B - and this is more of a tip than a correction - the more we can get our masses to fit together like pieces of a puzzle, the more grounded and solid the overall structure will feel. One way we can take advantage of this is when adding masses along your animals' backs, extend them further down along the side. Not only does this give those masses more to "grip" in the body to hold them in place (this is similar to the organic intersections where we want to achieve a sense of stability), but it also allows us to press these masses up against the hip and shoulder masses, which we can use to block in the big engine muscles that help the animal to walk and run. Since we always place complexity (inward curves and sharp corners) where forms and structures press up against one another, this gives us an opportunity to do that. You may also notice that I've changed the top edge of B's silhouette, making it a simple outward curve, as there is nothing present in the construction to press into it here. To make an inward curve we could layer multiple masses together, which I believe you already discovered for yourself during your bull constructions.

The other main point to cover 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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

You're doing a good job of drawing your feet using complete 3D forms, though as a quick bonus I'll still share these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how we can take this further, also using complete boxy forms to construct each toe.

This next point is really very nit-picky, but I'm going to mention it anyway. You're using hatching to push some of your far side legs back and flatten them out- which is completely fine- but you'll want to be consistent about what your hatching lines mean within a given drawing. Remember during this course we're not using hatching to indicate form shadows. For example the region of hatching I've indicated here is pretty confusing, as it stops right where it meets the far side leg. According to the basic assumption we've set out for these constructions (hatched areas are further back) this patch of hatching tells the viewer that the body is somehow further back than the far side leg. There's something similar happening with this dog where there are hatching lines that stop where they meet the rib cage, which pulls the rib cage forward, causing some visual confusion, as the rib cage is fully enclosed within the torso sausage and inside an additional mass in this area.

Finally (and this is another nit-pick) the tree this cheetah is stood on is falling flat. I don't usually worry too much about scenery elements in these constructional exercises, but judging by your use of ellipses I'd guess that your intent was to construct it in 3D. Remember for these constructional exercises we never add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given point. By jumping straight into a very complex wiggly line, trying to capture all the bumps and details of the tree trunk in one go, the viewer has no way of understanding how it exists as a 3D form, so it feels flat. Your best bet here would be to use the branch construction method provided in lesson 3. You could either leave it as a simple tube- which would serve the purpose of providing something solid for the animal to stand on- or you could add the knots and bumps piece by piece. Remember to also draw around your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page, as this helps to execute them smoothly. This is something you've done in most cases but appears to have slipped your mind for this tree.

Okay, I think that covers it. You've done a great job and I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. The 250 Cylinder Challenge is up next.