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

Starting with your organic intersections you’ve done a good job of keeping your sausage forms simple, and they’re wrapping around each other with a sense of weight and solidity, well done. 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.

You've done a good job with your shadows, they're clearly being cast from one form onto another and you appear to be sticking with a consistent light source, good work.

Moving on to your animal constructions there's a lot you're doing really well. I can see you've been really conscientious about trying to make actions in 3D whenever you want to add to, or alter your constructions. Great job! I do have a few pointers for you, that should help you get more out of these exercises in the future.

Your lines are smooth, clear and intentional, which is wonderful to see. Just watch out for the occasional case where you leave gaps in your silhouettes that threaten to undermine the illusion of their solidity. As a manner of drawing it's totally fine - but just not in this course. It is mostly only really present on this vulture's wing.

I can see that you've done a pretty good job of using the sausage method for constructing your legs. Do try to remember to place a contour curve to define the intersection at the joints. You're adding it some of the time, but not always. This little curve gives a lot of information about how the leg is bending, and how it is oriented in space.

You're a little hit-and-miss with how you construct your torso sausage. Sometimes constructing it correctly, by building a rib cage and pelvis and joining them together, sometimes skipping straight into the sausage form. While this oversimplification isn't the end of the world, it does make it harder to attach the shoulder and thigh masses, and with a less defined basic structure it is also more difficult to wrap your additional masses around it in a solid and believable manner.

Once you have your basic structure in place, the idea with this lesson is to build complexity through the 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've marked on your cow some suggested alterations for some of your additional masses. Notice how these masses hug around the underlying structure on the shoulders and thigh masses. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

You appear to be primarily focusing your additional masses on specific bumps that break the silhouette. It may help you with wrapping them around each other and interlocking them if you also consider the "in-between" pieces, as shown in this draw over from Uncomfortable on another student's work.

I've also made some corrections on one of your dogs here as follows:

1- The rib cage is usually about half the total length of the torso sausage.

2- The missing intersections between leg sausages.

3- Some bolder wrapping of your additional masses around the underlying structure, including wrapping the chest mass around the inside of the front leg.

4- Feet? Somebody stole them? I've added them for you.

Speaking of feet, these notes on foot construction should help you.

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.

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 show in in this banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All right, while I've had plenty of tips and pointers for you, I think you are capable of applying this feedback on your own. Of course if anything I've said here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.