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

Starting with your organic intersections, your work is a little bit mixed. I'm getting the impression that you are thinking of how these forms sit in 3D space and not just as 2D shapes on a piece of paper, but there are couple of things for you to keep in mind when practising this exercise in future.

There are places where you're drawing your forms in front of one another, for example this red form sits entirely in front of the larger form at the bottom of the pile, so it looks like it would fall off. Instead, with each new form you add, imagine you're dropping it in from above, and letting it fall and come to rest in a position where it is stable and supported. Think of these forms as being soft and heavy, like well filled water balloons, so as they come to rest they will slump and sag, wrapping around the forms below, these notes might help.

Try to "draw through" and complete your forms where possible, as I've done with this form at the top of your pile. By drawing the forms in their entirety instead of cutting them off where they pass behind one another, we can develop a stronger understanding of how the whole form sits in 3D space.

Good work projecting most of your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the surfaces below. You appear to be keeping a consistent light source in mind too, well done.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall you're on the right track, and I'm seeing an impressive amount of growth across the set. Your spatial reasoning skills are developing nicely, with your constructions getting progressively more solid and 3D, good work!

Admittedly you were off to a bit of a rocky start with your bird constructions, I've marked several examples in blue on your blue jay where you'd added to your construction "in 2D" by extending the silhouettes of existing forms with one-off lines or flat partial shapes. I can see that you're striving to take actions on your constructions "in 3D" as by the time we get to this moose (which I've given a similar treatment with blue) your construction is more developed and you're mostly building up your construction with complete 3D forms, establishing clear relationships between each new form you add and the existing structures.

There are a few areas where the solidity of your constructions gets undermined a little by your linework getting "loose" and sketchy. Here is an example of what I mean, where I've circled lots of little gaps between your lines. These gaps make it a bit vague where the edge of your forms are supposed to be, forcing the viewer to guess, and undermining their suspension of disbelief, reminding them that they're just looking at lines on a flat piece of paper. Furthermore, drawing with dashed or broken lines breaks the first principle of markmaking that was introduced back in lesson 1.

In some areas the gaps in the silhouette of your construction appear rather more deliberate, such as this wolf where 3 of the legs have been left open and incomplete. I suspect what happened here is that the feet were obscured in the reference. Do your best to complete your forms, even if they pass behind something in your reference image. If you find yourself in a similar situation in future I encourage you to find another reference image of the same species where the feet are clearly visible, and use that to help you fill in the missing pieces of your construction.

I also have some advice that I hope will help you in your future attempts to construct paws. I'd like you to study these notes which show 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.

I'm happy to see that you've stuck to the sausage method of leg construction for the majority of your pages, and you're usually doing a decent job of constructing chains of sausage forms and applying a contour line at each joint to show how the forms intersect. You've made a start with building onto your sausage armatures but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these focus primarily on forms 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, on another student's work. 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 and puzzles.

It is great that you've made quite liberal use of additional masses along the torsos of your animals, and on the whole you're showing a good grasp of how to design your masses so they feel convincingly 3D.

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.

It looks like you got more confident with additional masses as you progressed through the set, though I've gone ahead and made some edits to your moose that I hope will be useful.

Mass A was already quite well designed. I adjusted the top edge of the form to be a simple outward curve where it is exposed to fresh air, removing the inward curve at the front where there was nothing present to press into the mass and cause it. I also pulled the mass further around the side of the body and pressed it against the top of the shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Masses B, C, and D were all incomplete (D was just a one-off line) and I've "drawn through" B and C instead of cutting them off there they passed behind the leg/head.

E has a small but significant edit. Instead of cutting it off where it reaches mass A I've allowed it to overlap and wrap around that existing form in 3D space. F has been pulled around the front of the thigh more boldly to give it a firmer grip. G has been adjusted to take into account the presence of form B between the front legs. H and I replace a partial shape with complete forms.

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.

It looks like you're at least somewhat familiar with the informal head demo, as there are some constructions like your hybrid where you're carving out pentagonal eye sockets and wedging a boxy muzzle form snugly against them. You do stop short of following the demo in its entirety in this construction, there's no brow/forehead plane wedged against the top of the eye sockets, and the cheek is just a one-off line. Try your best to employ the informal head demo 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, such as the caiman you were asking about, but as shown in in this rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Okay, I think that should cover it. I think you'll continue to improve with practice, but I'm confident your constructions are heading in the right direction so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, and feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.