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

Starting with your organic intersections your forms are working pretty well. You’re keeping them simple enough to feel solid, and you’re doing a good job of capturing how these forms slump and sag over one another, coming to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported.

Right now some of your contour lines are hurting the 3D illusion of your forms and flattening them out. This is because you’re not hooking them around the forms as discussed here under the common mistakes section for the organic forms exercise. I called this out in your lesson 4 feedback too. If something said to you in a critique is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask for clarification. If the instruction makes sense please take the steps necessary in order to remember to apply it as you move forward.

Moving on to your animal constructions, you’re using these exercises as intended, as puzzles to help you develop your spatial reasoning skills, and I’m seeing some encouraging growth across the set. Your linework does look more hesitant on the first hybrid. If you feel rusty after taking a break it can help to spend a little longer on your warmups than the usual 10-15 minutes to get back into the swing of things.

Something that caught my attention is that you’re not making complete or consistent use of the sausage method of leg construction. For example, you were clearly working with the sausage method in mind for your horses, but then this rhino doesn’t appear to have been constructed with the intent to use the sausage method. I understand that it can be a bit confusing because Uncomfortable uses a variety of techniques for constructing legs in the demos, but the instruction I gave in your lesson 4 critique to use the sausage method throughout lesson 5 was designed to help you get as much as possible out of these exercises, so it is unfortunate that it was forgotten.

So, here I’ve traced over a section of your rhino’s leg, and dragged it off to one side to make it clearer what the issue is. When we pull it off to one side it becomes very obvious that this section does not have its own fully enclosed silhouette, it is just a partial shape. This matters, because by not completing the form, we miss out on any clearly defining elements that show how this section is supposed to attach to the upper leg in 3D space, so it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it.

This capybara is a bit better because you’re using complete forms, however you don’t appear to be aiming to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is to understand how it is supposed to sit in 3D space, so the more likely it is to fall flat. I’ve seen that you can stick to sausage forms when you choose to, so make sure you aim for those simple properties in future.

This horse has some of the best legs in your submission, they’re sticking to sausage forms pretty well. Just remember to apply a contour curve at each joint, to show how the forms fit together in space, much like the form intersections exercise in lesson 2.

Also, keep in mind that even if the leg appears fairly straight in the reference, it will still have joints, because they are necessary for the animal to be able to bend its legs and walk. I noticed a couple of constructions, such as this capybara where the forelegs seem to be missing some joints. This section of the lesson intro page shows the major joints to look out for. Their exact placement will vary between species, so observe your reference carefully to help you position the joints believably.

I’m happy to see that you’ve explored building onto many of your leg constructions using additional forms, as well as along the torsos. I can see you’ve experimented with the design of these masses quite a bit, as it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette in a way that feels convincing.

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 used this mass on your horse’s leg as an example to call out a couple of ways you sometimes introduce unexplained complexity to your masses. That is, by pressing an inward curve into a mass where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present to press against it, and by introducing sharp corners where a mass is connecting to a smooth round surface so there is nothing to cause such a sharp change in trajectory.

Here I’ve addressed this by using two masses instead of one, allowing each mass to stay simpler where it is exposed to fresh air. I’ve also moved the sharp corner over, so that it occurs in a specific spot, where the mass meets the outer edge of the underlying sausage form.

I can see that you’ve experimented with layering masses in this manner elsewhere on your constructions, which is good. In situations where you've got two masses overlapping one another, remember that these are 3D forms - that means that when you drop a new form on top of another one, it's not just going to occupy the same space. You need to think about how the new one wraps around the existing one, to define the relationship between them more effectively. Here is an example on your komodo dragon, where the red and the green mass seem to occupy the same space. In this image I’ve redrawn the masses so the green one wraps around the red one instead.

On the same two images I also traced in blue some examples where you’d left some forms incomplete, and then gave them fully enclosed silhouettes in the corrected image, so we can see more clearly how they are supposed to sit in 3D space.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

The next 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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

When it comes to drawing fur, I think there are constructions like this capybara where you’ve simply underestimated how much time this really needs. I can see from your markmaking (which is zigzagging in places) that you’re not always intentionally designing each tuft. It’s not bad, but to improve you’ll need to be more patient with your observations and intentional with your markmaking.

What I think is working quite well, is the implicit markmaking you’d used to describe some of the scales on the komodo dragon leveraging the techniques discussed in the texture section of lesson 2. Generally I’d advise against filling in large areas with solid black on your constructions (even if they are shadows) as they don’t help describe the surface texture, but can obscure the underlying construction, making it more difficult to provide accurate feedback.

Okay, I think that should cover it. I can see your spatial reasoning skills developing as you go through the lessons so far. While I think you’ll continue to improve by applying the points discussed in this critique, I think you have the information you need to be able to continue practising these constructions independently, in your own time, so I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.