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

Starting with your organic intersections your work is hitting the right notes, you're keeping your forms simple and are drawing them wrapping around one another with a sense of gravity.

I have a little tip that should help you with this exercise. When drawing forms over one another try to avoid overlapping them at the peak of the lower form. This helps prevent your forms from looking like they're just drawn over one another as well as helps create the illusion that they're wrapping around each other. It sounds trickier than it actually is, here is a visual example.

Your shadows are following a consistent light source and you're projecting them far enough to cast onto the form below, well done.

In future I'd recommend adding more forms to your piles, to really fill up the page and push yourself into solving more complex problems. Your work here is good, but there is the potential to learn even more by breaking out your comfort zone a bit.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is solid. I can see you're thinking about everything you draw as a 3D form, and considering how all these pieces connect together with specific relationships. You're upholding the principles of construction, starting things with simple solid forms, and building up complexity piece by piece without undermining the three dimensional illusion. You've done a good job of following the lesson material as it is presented, but I have some additional advice that should help you to get even more from these constructional exercises in future.

There are a couple of places on your constructions where you're accidentally undermining the 3D illusion of your constructions by choosing the inner line of your (two dimensional) ellipse to use as the silhouette of one of your (three dimensional) major masses. This leaves a stray line floating outside the silhouette of your construction to contradict the 3D illusion. We can see this happening with the pelvis of this wolf where I've highlighted the cut off sections in red. There is a way we can work with a loose ellipse and still build a solid construction. What you need to do if there is a gap between passes of your ellipse is to use the outer line as the foundation for your construction. Treat the outermost perimeter as though it is the silhouette's edge - doesn't matter if that particular line tucks back in and another one goes on to define that outermost perimeter - as long as we treat that outer perimeter as the silhouette's edge, all of the loose additional lines remain contained within the silhouette rather than existing as stray lines to undermine the 3D illusion. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image of your wolf I've completed the form of the tail for you in green. When we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes.

The third note on your wolf, in blue relates to line weight. I'm going to lift some feedback I provided on Discord:

It is quite subtle, but it looks like you're tracing over quite large sections of your silhouette to reinforce it with extra line weight. Doing this can cause your initially smooth and confident lines to get a little wobblier (I can see this ever so slightly on the legs) and can tempt you to think more about how the lines run across the paper than how the forms exist in 3D space, and make small modifications to your forms' silhouettes to refine them- as seen on the muzzle.

I find that the most effective use of line weight - at least given the bounds and limitations of this course - is to use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here.

Assuming that your pages are posted in order, it does look like you continued to trace around your constructions silhouette with extra line weight after I had offered this advice. Feedback on Discord is more informal than an official critique, but if it comes from a TA it is probably worth listening to.

Here is anther example, on your frog. Here we can see the thicker line of your extra line weight "bridging" from one form to another, making a small extension to your silhouette in the process. What this does is a bit like taking your solid, specific construction and stuffing it into a fuzzy sock, smoothing out all the bumps, and flattening things out.

It is good to see you working with the sausage method of leg construction throughout your pages. Sometimes your sausage forms get a little too complex, instead of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms. We can see an example of this here on your frog.

Looking through your work, I get the impression that you're trying to use your sausage forms to draw the entire leg. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms shown in this dog leg demo that I shared with you previously. You were starting to work with additional forms on your leg constructions here but opted to keep all your legs completely bare in this lesson. You can see some further examples of additional forms being used on leg constructions in the donkey demo and puma construction from the informal demos page.

Fortunately there are plenty of other places on your constructions where you are making good use of additional masses. 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 a few edits to this deer.

• In red I've redrawn the torso sausage to incorporate a slight sag, as discussed on the lesson intro page. This not only helps to keep the construction from feeling stiff, but may also eliminate the need to paste additional masses to the underside of the belly, which is conceptually a more difficult task than pilling additional masses onto the top of the back, where we have gravity working with us to help attach the forms.

• In green I've redrawn some of the additional masses on top of the back. I've given them a much more generous overlap with the torso, to give them a better grip so they don't feel like they might wobble off, and designed their silhouettes to wrap around the underlying structures. Notice how I'm using the shoulder and thigh masses to help anchor the additional masses to the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• In purple I've designed some additional masses on the legs. There's often much more structural complexity in the reference than can be captured with simple sausage forms. To take your work to the next level, try to extract as much information from your reference as you can, rather than leaving the legs completely bare. I also added some more structure to the hooves. For more general information on constructing feet, these notes on foot construction may be useful.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. It is clear that you're thinking about how the various pieces of your head constructions exist in 3D space and connect together. 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.

Alright, I think that covers it. You're showing a good understanding of the main concepts of this lesson, and I'll leave you to apply this feedback independently. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6. Best of luck, and keep up the good work.