Hello Lo999, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, and most of them are slumping and sagging around each other with a sense of gravity. I'm noticing a tendency to pile forms in front of, or next to each other, instead of piling them up on top of one another. You can see the difference shown in this diagram, I'm happy to see you're drawing through your forms here, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

In future keep in mind that this exercise will give a greater variety of spatial reasoning problems for you to solve if you keep your forms fairly equal in size, instead of having a big mother form and little babies.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, good work. The direction of your shadows isn't very consistent though. Pick a direction for your light source, and keep it in mind for every shadow you draw on that page. Here is an example of what one of your pages might look like with the light source above and to the left of your pile of forms.

Moving on to your animal constructions

I can see you've made a real effort with your markmaking in this lesson. I can see evidence of you planning your lines and using the ghosting method. Most of your lines are coming out smooth and you've mostly avoided arbitrarily redrawing your lines, good work.

Your draw along for the wolf demo came out pretty well. I did notice your copy is missing the contour curves for the intersections where leg sausages join together. I'll talk more on legs later. For reference, they're included in step 3 of the demo.

In the feedback I wrote for your lesson 4 revisions I went over the importance of drawing though your forms- instead of cutting them off where they pass behind something else. By cutting off pieces of your forms instead of completing them, they become partial shapes and this breaks he 3D illusion that we're trying to create. Here on your hybrid I've highlighted in green where you've drawn complete forms. Everything else in that construction is a series of lines and partial shapes. Here I've drawn through some of your forms for you to complete them. Here I've altered some places where the construction had been extended with single lines, to make those lines into complete forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes. This might look a little messy at first, but all these lines are important for the viewer (and you) to understand how your construction exists in 3D space.

An example of not really applying the principles of construction would be the head and neck of this lizard where you did a good job of establishing the cranial ball and cylindrical neck, then went straight to drawing the outline of the face by copying the reference instead of establishing any secondary 3D forms. I recommend that you review this section on construction from lesson2. For constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given point, we have to build things gradually, adding complexity step by step. Skipping steps will make your drawing fall flat.

When it comes to 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.

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.

I can see you were applying more construction to some of your other heads, as noted here on one of your camels, you want to make your muzzle a complete form that attaches to your cranial ball in 3D space, wrapping around that ball and wedging against the eye sockets, instead of extending it from the outer edge of the ball in 2D. Start with a simple form for the muzzle. Only once you have that established and feeling solid can you think about adding the details of the lips. I also highlighted in red some cases of drawing lines instead of complete forms.

Moving on, I can see that you're aware of building the body by constructing a cranial ball, rib cage, and pelvis mass and connecting them together with a torso sausage and simple neck. This was done correctly on this cat. From this camel onwards the torso is being simplified into a single ellipse. This is applicable to birds, but quadruped constructions benefit from using a torso sausage. Here is how we might construct it for one of those camels.

The next point I need to talk about is leg construction, there are some different methods of leg construction being shown in the various demos in this lesson. The method that is most useful as a learning tool for students is the sausage method. In your lesson 4 feedback I went over the virtues of the sausage method and provided diagrams and examples to help you use it, and I'm not really seeing correct application of the method in your work.

I'm seeing the following issues:

Sometimes sections of legs are drawn with partial shapes instead of complete forms.

Sometimes the forms are complete, but don't stick to the characteristics of simple sausages as introduced here.

Sometimes you've drawn sausage forms, but haven't included the contour curve for the intersections at the joints, which was something I specifically asked you to do in the feedback for your lesson 4 revisions.

I appreciate that the method is quite specific, so I've done a draw over of one of your legs, with each step colour coded for you here.

The idea with these sausage forms is not to try to capture the entire leg in one step. 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, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, here, and here on this dog leg demo. Another good example of leg construction is the donkey demo from the informal demos page. You can also see the sausage method being used in this dog demo that I put together for another student.

When it comes to constructing feet, it can be useful to consider them as boxy forms, then construct more smaller forms for the toes, you can see this demonstrated in these notes on foot construction.

The last major point I need to cover is using 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.

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 -like the large mass on the back of this construction, 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. This diagram shows how to design a mass to wrap around an underlying form.

Sometimes there are cases where you're using extra contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid. Unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

Another issue I'm seeing is sometimes trying to do too much with a single form, such as the humps on the back of this camel. When we need to build a big, complicated extension onto our construction it is better to break it into multiple forms, and layer them on top of each other. Making sure each one stays simple where it is exposed to fresh air, with no inward curves where there is nothing present in the construction to press against the additional form. You can see an example of this in this draw over on your camel. I also made a point of using the existing structure of the shoulder and thigh masses to wrap these additional forms around and anchor them securely to the construction.The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

All right. You've made a decent start, but in not applying past feedback, or the principles of construction, as closely as possible I feel you've fallen a little short of what you're really capable of in this lesson. I'll be asking for some revisions so that you have opportunity to apply this feedback before moving on to the next lesson.

Please complete 5 pages of animal constructions.

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.

Of course if anything I've said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.