Hello Drego47, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections

You've mostly done a good job of keeping your forms simple, with the exception of this one which got a bit wobbly along the top.

What also concerns me with that particular form is that it appears to be floating, instead of obeying gravity. I've highlighted the empty space underneath it here. think of these forms like well-filled water balloons, solid and weighty, but also flexible.

You want all the forms in your stack to feel stable and supported. In addition to making sure you don't leave gaps between your forms, you also want to have them sag and wrap around one another. I've made a small edit to one form that looked like it was precariously perched and about to topple off here to make it feel more stable and grounded.

It looks like you used a thick marker or brush pen for your line weight in this exercise. Don't do that. It's so chunky and heavy-handed that I thought you'd added some really odd cast shadows for a moment. Line weight should be kept subtle as explained here.

Speaking of cast shadows, this is something you're doing well. You're pushing them far enough so that they clearly cast onto the form below, nicely done.

I've highlighted one small missing cast shadow here, but more importantly than that, I've also drawn in the rest of a from that you majorly cut off. In the future I'd like you to draw through all of your forms. Much like when we drew through our boxes earlier drawing through these organic forms will help us develop a better understanding of the 3D space we're attempting to create. It really will help you get more out of this exercise by drawing every form in it’s entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they go behind another form.

Moving on to your animal constructions I will be pasting in some of the feedback I've already given you on Discord as quotes. Partly so you have all your feedback in one place and don't have to search through Discord for it, and partly so I don't repeat myself so much.

Prior feedback

Feedback already given on this dog

When you join your rib cage and pelvis together into a torso sausage, remember that it should sag. If you pinch the underside upwards, it is no longer sticking to the characteristics of a simple sausage form. This complexity undermines the solidity of the form, giving us something of a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of our construction.

When you use additional masses I am noticing that there are a some places where you tend to avoid certain kinds of complexity - like sharp corners and inward curves - resulting in a lot of softer, rounded corners instead. Unfortunately this absence of complexity robs us of the very tools we need to use to establish contact between these 3D structures, instead making the masses appear flatter and more blobby.

I'm also seeing a bit of overuse of contour lines, potentially the result of you realising that your additional masses feel flat, and trying to make them feel more three dimensional. Unfortunately those contour lines help a form feel more three dimensional on its own, in isolation - but does not solve the problem at hand, which is the lack of relationship being defined between the mass and the structure to which it is attaching. Furthermore, using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses, exacerbating the issue.

You were provided with notes on foot construction after expressing difficulty with them.

You were also presented with this demo which was created specifically to help you with the torso sausage, but also demonstrates use of additional masses and head construction.

In response to this capybara Which isn't in your homework submission. This in itself is a red flag that you're doing "practice pages" and grinding, which is something Tofu already highlighted to you as a bad idea in your lesson 2 critique. The reasons for this are explained in more detail in this video from lesson 0 that Uncomfortable sent to you in your lesson 3 critique. Doing more pages than is asked will make it more likely that you will put less time and energy into each individual page, spreading yourself thin, and can lead to burning out.

I'm just guessing, with the edges of the page being cropped off in the photo and all, but I have a hunch that maybe you're not giving this construction all the space and time it really needs for you to work to the best of your current ability.

(your response) "I tried for sure, sometimes they come out smaller than expected"

Hmmm. Well, you're in control of the marks you make.

You want to carefully observe your reference and plan your construction.

So for that capybara, I'd start by planning the rib cage, because that's the biggest major mass. I can see it's about half the total height of the animal, and maybe a quarter of its total length. This gives me a ball park estimate of how big I can draw it. Then I need to consider where on the page I put it. There needs to be some space above and to the left of it, for the head and neck, space to the right for the pelvis, and space below for the legs. Only once I've considered all of this will I actually draw the form, as big as I can make it while still leaving room for everything else I'm going to draw.

This process is slow and laborious, but gets faster and easier with practice. By making your drawings small to avoid having to negotiate this process you're doing yourself a disservice.

Feedback in response to your second dog

If you're doing more than one construction per day I suggest you slooooow down and just do 1 a day. You can and should spread a construction over multiple sittings if that's what it takes for you to stay fully focused. Really push yourself to take as much time as you need to plan every mark you make, and don't think about rushing off to the next one before you've done your very best with the one in front of you.

A couple of things you can think about that might help you with your observation skills.

Firstly, think about what angle we're viewing the dog at. How much of the front do we see, compared to the side? I've put this down visually for you, with colour coded lines here. This is a three quarter view. We see slightly more front than side, and the length of the dog (and therefore the torso sausage you need to draw) is foreshortened.

Something else that you can look for, to help place things correctly, is the negative shapes (the gaps between and around your subject) taking a careful look at the gaps between legs may help you.

feedback for your submission today

Your lines are smooth, clear and intentional, which is wonderful to see. You do a good job with your mark making, never resorting to scratchy marks or redrawing them to correct mistakes.

There are some pretty significant signs suggesting that you may have underestimated just how much time these drawings might demand of you.

So, I looked at your submission history, and did notice that you've basically submitted your last 4 homeworks every 14 days (accounting for revisions). This particular submission was posted 7 minutes after the 14 days had passed. I really cannot stress this enough - that 14 day cooldown is not a deadline. It is there to help discourage people from rushing, and to keep our staff from getting overwhelmed. As discussed back in Lesson 0, you should be taking as much time as you need to execute each drawing, and each component of each drawing, to the best of your current ability.

I know that you do have a lot of time available, and I don't think you're consciously rushing your work (I hope) but I also get the feeling that knowing that it's going to be hard is causing you to, subconsciously, invest less time than you require. While you may have the time to draw 8 hours a day, I highly doubt that you can actively focus on learning for 8 hours a day. If you can't focus, you can't work to the best of your current ability.

The main issue that stands out most comes down to observation. From what I can see, you're not spending as much time as is really needed simply studying your reference. 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. This is explained in more detail in this section of 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. I did already talk you through some observational strategies on your capybara and your second dog, but here's some further analysis on your goat. Speaking of simplification, goats have cloven hooves, which are quite apparent on the front legs in your reference, and you've drawn them as simple blobs without really paying due care and attention to the information that is in front of you.

Something that makes me believe that you're not necessarily working to the best of your current ability is that you don't always apply the techniques that you do already know. I've done a bit of a breakdown on this bat, which was one of your later constructions. By this point you had already shown that you know how to connect the cranial ball to the torso with a simple, solid neck, and you had previously been working with the sausage method for leg construction, but for some reason you didn't do that here. It looks like you started constructing the wings properly, and then ran out of steam. You know how to do this, it's the same construction method that you used for insect legs in the last lesson. If you can construct 8 spider legs I know you can construct 2 bat wings.

Moving on, in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building our constructions by adding whole forms to an existing structure, in lesson 5 we get more specific with use of additional masses, and designing these masses in such a way that they reinforce the 3D illusion of your construction instead of undermining it.

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.

I did already discuss your use of additional masses as feedback for one of your dog constructions, but here is a direct draw over on your goat demonstrating how to wrap them around the underlying structure more, instead of using rounded blobs.

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:

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.

I want you do do your best to employ this method for constructing animal heads in the future.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. I want you to be able to demonstrate that you can understand and apply this feedback so that you can continue to get the most out of these exercises in the future. Be sure to read through this critique thoroughly, and to refer back to it as often as you need to in order to understand, remember, and apply all the information that has been presented to you. Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- 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.

2- 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.

Please complete 1 page of organic intersections and 6 pages of animal constructions.