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

Starting with your organic intersections you've done a good job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and it is good to see that you've drawn through them, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're creating.

One thing I noticed on your first page was that the form highlighted in red here is effectively floating there in space (aside from where it's slightly supported on the left). There's essentially nothing but empty space underneath its right side, which tells the viewer that the pile itself is not stable, and thus not really abiding by a consistent gravity. When doing this exercise in the future, it's important that you always think about how you're building up a stable pile, working from bottom up. With each sausage, ask yourself whether it's being supported in space, or if it's floating. Here I've redrawn the form, allowing it to slump over the form below under the effects of gravity, I've also allowed another form to the right of the pile to flop down around the form below it, rather than standing erect and stiff.

You're doing a good job of projecting your shadows boldly so that they clearly cast onto the forms below, and I can see that you're being mindful of the curvature of those surfaces when designing your shadow shapes, good work.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is honestly very well done. Your markmaking appears confident and purposeful, and I can see that you've been putting plenty of attention into how to fit the various pieces of your constructions together like 3D puzzle.

In future, it will help to build a more solid construction if you make sure to establish how the head connects to the torso by constructing a simple neck, even in foreshortened poses such as this goat. You can see an example of how to do this in the puma construction on the informal demos page. Here I've estimated where the base of the neck might be, based on the position of the front legs, and connected it to the cranial ball. This may seem trivial, but we don't want to leave the cranial ball floating arbitrarily in front of the chest.

I'm happy to see that you've continued to work with the sausage method for constructing your legs, and are applying it well. I wanted to mention that you're off to a good start with using additional forms to build onto your leg sausage armatures to 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.

Speaking of additional masses, I think overall you've done a pretty good job of specifically designing the silhouette of those masses to have them actually wrap around the existing structure. 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.

I did notice in one case that you were wrapping the additional mass along the backside of this goat around the back of the rib cage mass. This is technically incorrect, since the rib cage is not a protruding structure - it goes smoothly into being part of the torso sausage pretty early on, leaving us without anything to wrap our masses around. Instead, as shown here, we use the masses we can block in at the thigh and shoulder (I've used a blue ellipse to make the shoulder larger, where quadrupeds usually have large muscle groups to help them walk and run), wrapping our additional mass around those.

You're doing well with constructing your feet from complete 3D forms. As a quick bonus, I'd like you to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable demonstrates how to take the boxy forms you're using for feet and push the approach even further by constructing more boxy forms for the toes.

This next point isn't a criticism, I just wanted to take a moment to commend your use of texture on this lizard where you've done a great job of designing cast shadows to imply the presence of the scales, it is very effective.

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:

• 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.

Overall you're honestly not that far off, and I can see you working through similar principles when you approach head construction, and there are definitely areas where you're following the process shown in that informal demo at least in part - but bring it all together in the way the demo shows, and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise.

Oh, also worth mentioning - when drawing eyelids, it helps a lot to actually draw each eyelid as its own separate additional mass, wrapping them around the eyeball as shown here.

And that about covers it! Great work, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.