Hello LauAvinyo, 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. Occasionally a form is perched precariously on your pile, like it might topple off at any moment. I've highlighted them on this page. You want all your forms to feel stable and supported in this exercise, like you could leave the pile alone and nothing would fall off. I'm happy to see you're drawing through your forms, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

You're doing pretty well with your shadows, you're projecting them far enough to cast onto the form below and their direction is fairly consistent. I've made some suggested alterations to your shadows here, applying shadows under two forms that weren't casting any, and expanding the shadows on the ground plane- on the left to match the light direction of some of your other shadows- and on the right to give a form more clear contact with the ground plane so it doesn't look like the far end is floating in the air.

I also put a quick reminder to draw around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, which as explained here is something we ask students to do for every ellipse you freehand in this course.

Moving on to your animal constructions one of the aims for this lesson is to develop an understanding of how the forms you’re drawing exist in 3D space and connecting them together with specific relationships. We want you to be able to fool the viewer into thinking it's 3D.

In your lesson 4 critique Uncomfortable introduced the following rule to help you to think in 3D:

Once you've put a form down on the page, it's best to refrain from altering that form's silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

So for example, I've highlighted on your tiger where you'd established some forms for your legs, then modified the silhouettes of those forms, chopping off the pieces in red and accidentally flattening your construction in the process.

Sometimes this happens on a smaller scale, when you add extra line weight and refine your silhouette as you do so. I've marked some examples here on the legs of one of your zebra, with little cuts in red and extensions in blue. In future please avoid tracing back over your silhouette to add extra line weight, instead it should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo.

Moving on, it looks like you're attempting to apply the sausage method for constructing your legs, but the method is very specific and you're not quite following it correctly. So, there are some places where you're drawing incomplete forms, instead of overlapping complete sausage forms as shown in the diagram. Sometimes you draw complete forms but they're not quite sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as introduced here. You don't seem to be using a contour curve for the intersections at the joints, here is a copy of the sausage method diagram with the intersections highlighted in red.

I do understand where the confusion with leg construction comes from, as there are some different methods being shown in the various demos. Please take another look at the ant leg demo and dog leg demo that Uncomfortable shared with you in your lesson 4 critique to help you with this lesson. You can also see a good example of applying the sausage method of leg construction in the donkey demo from the informal demos page.

To get you started, I've done a colour coded step by step leg construction over your zebra.

As an extra bonus, these notes on foot construction should be useful.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is additional masses. Where lesson 4 introduced building on our constructions with complete 3D forms, here in lesson 5 we get more specific about how we design the silhouette of these additional forms.

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 here I've made some suggested alterations to the additional mass on the back of your zebra. You may have noticed earlier that I had made the shoulder mass bigger when I redrew your leg. I'm using this mass as a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, so I’ve made it bigger, while still keeping it really simple. If we try to add too much complexity with a single form it is likely to feel flat, we can always build more complexity slowly bit by bit, by adding more forms, while keeping things 3D. This larger shoulder mass also acts as a really useful structure to anchor the additional massed to, notice how I've wrapped the additional masses around the shoulder and thigh. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. I also broke that one big mass into multiple pieces. This allows each mass to stay simple where it is exposed to fresh air, instead of having an inward curve in an additional mass where it is exposed to the void and there is nothing present to press against it.

Continuing on, 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:

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.

Looking through your head constructions, you tend to draw the eye sockets quite small, and sometimes with broken marks that don't fully connect together. Sometimes you connect the muzzle box to the cranial ball in 3D space, but sometimes it extends from the silhouette of the cranial ball as a flat shape, as seen in this rhino. I'm seeing a tendency to draw lines to represent the opening of the eyelids, instead of an ellipse for the complete form of the eyeball.

Here I've put together a walk through on top of your zebra to help you to address these issues.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. In effect, you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

Now, I have given you a number of things to work on here, so I will be assigning some revisions.

Please complete 5 pages of animal constructions.