Hello Andersonliddle, you correctly guessed that I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing a great job drawing your forms slumping and sagging over one another with a shared sense of gravity, and your piles feel stable with the forms appearing well supported, nicely done.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the forms below, and on the second page they appear to be following a consistent light source. On the first page it is unclear where you intended your light source to be, as some of the forms are casting separate shadows in distinctly different directions simultaneously. Here is an example. Try to keep a single consistent light source in mind for the particular pile you're working on, and just like we apply gravity consistently to all the forms, we apply shadows consistently across the forms. This will help to uphold the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

Moving on to your animal constructions I'm happy to see that you've been working on your markmaking, your lines are clear and purposeful, and you're maintaining tight, specific relationships between them, which helps your constructions to feel solid.

Something I praised you for in the last lesson, which seems to have fallen by the wayside a little, is drawing through your forms. I've marked some examples in blue on this owl where the wing and the tail had been extended with partial shapes, rather than drawing these forms in their entirety. This doesn't quite provide enough information for the viewer (or you) to understand how these additions actually connect to the existing forms in 3D space. We can see similar examples in the legs of this bear. There is a fair bit of wiggle room for students to draw some of the far side legs as flat shapes (as this is the approach shown in many of the demos) but as you appear to be attempting to construct your far side legs in 3D, you should be aware that cutting off sections of your forms where they pass behind something else is going to flatten them out and undermine your efforts.

Speaking of leg construction, it is good to see you're working with complete 3D forms for your leg construction, although there is scope for improvement. During your lesson 4 critique I discussed some of the strengths of the sausage method and stipulated that it should be used throughout lesson 5. I think you probably had this method in mind for most of your pages, but it is quite specific, and there are some tweaks to use it more effectively. I've traced over and then redrawn one of the legs of this horse as an example.

1- You're doing a good job of attaching your legs well up the sides of the body, and drawing your shoulder and thigh masses nice and large. It looks like you've tried out lots of different shapes for your shoulder and thigh masses, and taking a gander at some of your references I believe this is based on your observations of the subject matter. In some cases this is working fairly well for you, however I do encourage you to stick with using ellipses to construct simple ball forms for the shoulders and thighs, as shown in the various demos. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the simpler a form is, the easier it is to assert as solid and three dimensional, I'm noticing on a number of your shoulders and thighs you've had to resort to adding additional contour curves to the surface in an effort to try to make these forms feel 3D. Secondly, there are a few places where your shoulder and thigh masses appear to be deforming in response to your additional masses. To keep a clearer understanding in your own mind of the behaviour of the various structures you are drawing I think it will help you to keep the shoulders and thighs simpler, then additional masses can be wrapped around them.

2- There are some places where you're reasonably close to using simple sausage forms for your leg armatures, though you deviate from them often enough that it doesn't look like it was a priority for you as you have already demonstrated in your insect constructions that you can draw chains of simple sausage forms. Remember we're aiming for two equally sized balls connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. We also want a healthy overlap between these sausage forms so that we can connect them together in 3D space.

3- You're a bit intermittent about remembering to include a contour curve at each joint. What we're doing with these is similar to the form intersections exercise from lesson 2. Solidifying the construction by explaining how the forms connect together in 3D space. These little curves might seem insignificant, but they are an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the 3D illusion very effectively.

4- Many of your leg constructions are pretty sparse, as I'm seeing a tendency to deform the leg sausages in an attempt to capture the entire leg in one go, rather than drawing simple sausages and then using additional forms as necessary to build bulk and complexity, arriving at a more characteristic construction of the leg in question. This construction is an example of where you are starting to build onto your basic leg constructions with additional forms, good work! I've redrawn one of the masses and added a few more, which brings me to the next point I need to talk about.

When it comes to the actual use of additional masses in your constructions, you are making good headway, but I think there's some further advice I can offer when it comes to how you design their silhouettes. 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.

While I can see that you're developing an understanding of how to wrap additional masses around underlying structures in a way that feels convincing there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

I'm seeing a slight tendency to avoid introducing sharp corners to certain masses, which does rob you of one of the tools we use to explain how the new mass relates to the underlying structures. It is by no means as extreme as what is shown in this diagram but it is something to be aware of. I've redrawn the additional mass on the belly of this horse as an example of how this could work.

On the other hand, some of the additional masses on the legs have arbitrary sharp corners- which is one thing I corrected when redrawing the additional mass on the horse's leg earlier. When wrapping around a smooth surface, such as a leg sausage, it works better to transition smoothly between curves as shown here. The idea is that complexity occurs as a result of the additional mass interacting with other forms.

This leads to the other change I made to the mass on the horse's leg, which was to break it into two individual pieces, rather than pressing an inward curve into it where it was exposed to fresh air and there was nothing present in the construction to cause any complexity.

Looking back on my work, I think I flip flopped between curving the additional shapes along the pelvis/rib cage vs along the implied sausage form wrapping those two parts. Is there a correct one?

It is a good question, and there is a correct answer. If we think about what forms are actually present in the construction, the pelvis and the rib cage already get swallowed up by the torso sausage, effectively eliminating any sort of protrusion that we'd then be able to wrap around. The surface of that sausage is smooth, and will generally be what we wrap these additional forms around. There are other forms we can use to help anchor additional masses to the construction, such as the shoulder and thigh masses, as these do protrude from the torso sausage.

As a quick bonus, I'd like to share these notes on foot construction with you. They show an approach you're already working towards on a few of your constructions, drawing boxy forms, this 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. We can then take this further by using similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. For the most part it appears that you're making headway (haha, pun) on constructing your heads in 3D, though I'd like to take some time to point you to a specific method and explain why it is useful. 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.

How do you begin to wrap your head around the perspective of animals like the two fish I drew? In the future, would iterations/thumbnailing help with that?

This fish is a challenging angle, and one you handled fairly well. I understood that we're looking up at the belly of the fish and that it is turning in space, without looking at your reference. Understanding challenging viewing angles like this certainly gets easier with practice, and by choosing to draw this construction (rather than avoiding difficult angles) this puts you on the right track for understanding them better. I'm not sure I'd recommend thumbnailing, specifically, as that implies drawing small, which can make it more difficult to think through this type of spatial reasoning problem. Once you have a lesson marked complete you're free to keep practising these constructions- either splitting one up over several warmup sessions, or periodically sitting down to spend a little longer on doing a full construction every once in a while- whichever suits your style of learning or schedule best.

All righty, I've given you a few things you could do to improve these, but I believe you understand the techniques taught in the lesson well enough to be able to apply the advice provided here independently, in your own time. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, the 250 Cylinder Challenge is up next.