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

Starting with your organic intersections, you've done a good job of drawing your forms slumping and sagging over each other with a sense of gravity. All your forms feel stable and supported, which is what we're aiming for with this exercise.

In future I recommend that you draw your forms roughly equal in size, rather than dropping little ones on top of big ones. This will present you with more challenges in terms of how to keep the pile feeling stable.

Moving on to your animal constructions you've honestly done a very good job. I can see you've really made an effort to take actions on your constructions "in 3D space" as discussed in your lesson 4 feedback, and I have to applaud you for fully constructing the far side legs and drawing through them, as this isn't shown in many of the demos. Nice one. You certainly haven't gone easy on yourself here, choosing some difficult poses and angles, and have risen to these challenges quite well. That being said I do have a few pieces of advice for you to keep in mind when practising these construction exercises in future.

While you're definitely taking much more actions in 3D than in your lesson 4 constructions, I did spot a few places where you'd made an extension to the silhouette of your existing forms by adding a flat partial shape. Here is an example, highlighted in blue on your bird, and here is how we might draw this addition as a 3D form with its own fully enclosed silhouette instead.

You're generally doing a decent job with the basic pieces of your head constructions, carving out angular eye sockets and extruding a boxy muzzle form from your cranial ball. You're a bit prone to editing these initially solid forms by drawing single lines and partial shapes, as highlighted here on one of your camels. I've used blue where the box was extended and red where you cut back inside it.

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.

For an example of how to construct an animal with its mouth open, you can take a look at this squirrel, and if perhaps it was the species you found particularly challenging in this case you may find it helpful to study this camel head demo.

The next point I wanted to talk about is additional masses. It is good to see you making liberal use of additional masses throughout your constructions, and you're generally designing them in a way that explains how they wrap around the existing structures quite convincingly.

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, while you're doing pretty well already, I've made some edits to this camel for some suggested improvements.

Starting with the mass above the shoulder, I've pulled this down from the spine around the sides of the body to give it a firmer grip. Having additional masses that overlap the existing structures just slightly, with the two forms' silhouettes almost parallel can make the additional mass feel precariously balanced, like it might wobble off if the animal were to move. I've also made use of the elliptical shoulder mass, pressing the additional mass up against it and creating an inward curve where it wraps around. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Further back, with the hump, this additional mass had inward curves in the outer silhouette where it was exposed to fresh air and there was nothing present in the construction to press against it. So, instead I've built this addition using two masses piled on top of one another, allowing each mass to stay simpler.

I also noticed that you seemed to be using the rib cage mass to press into this additional mass and create complexity. This is good 3D thinking, but if we really consider all the forms present, the rib cage is already fully engulfed within the torso sausage and so cannot protrude to cause such complexity. Instead we'd use the shoulder or thigh masses for this purpose, as they do protrude from the torso sausage.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a great start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be taken further. A lot of these forms 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 and puzzles.

it is good to see that you've constructed most of your feet with complete 3D forms, it is not uncommon for students to treat them as a bit of an afterthought and revert to working with one off lines and flat partial shapes. As a bonus, I think you may still benefit from taking a look at 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.

There are a couple of places where it looks like you've filled in form shadows with solid black, such as the belly on this page Remember solid black should be reserved for cast shadows ,where one form casts a shadow onto another, rather than form shadows, where the surface of a form faces away from the light. If you are unsure of the difference between them, this section from lesson 2 should clear things up for you.

On a fairly minor note, sometimes your use of additional line weight appears a bit arbitrary. The most effective use of additional line weight, at least within the bounds and limitations of this course, is to reserve if for clarifying overlaps, and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. What this does is it prevents us from adding line weight in random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hid mistakes behind line weight.

Okay, I think that covers it. You've done really well and I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.