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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a great job of keeping your forms simple, and I'm happy to see that you're drawing through them all as this helps reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

Remember to hook your contour curves around the form for this exercise.

Your forms feel stable and supported, which is great. The top form on this page feels a little stiff, with that open gap beneath its right end. Aim to have your forms sag and slump around each other under shared gravity.

Your cast shadows are good, I do think they are a little tentative and could be pushed further. I've made some edits here to show that you could be a bit bolder with them.

Moving on to your animal constructions for the most part you've done a bang up job. There are a few things I'll want to call out to keep you on the right track, but I can see that you're making a great deal of effort to apply the principles from the lesson as closely as you can, with a particular focus on building things up with individual, solid, 3D forms - rather than viewing the additions as flat shapes or individual marks on the flat page.

I'm happy to see that you're making great use of additional masses to build up on top of your basic structures throughout the set. You're already doing a good job with designing your masses, but I'm going to make use of a piece of pre-written text that explains how we think about designing these masses, and then see if there are any spots I can give you more specific advice for.

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 did find a couple of things that could be improved, and marked them on your hybrid. In red I highlighted an area where you either redrew a form, or cut inside a form you had already drawn, and the stray line left hanging outside your construction is undermining the 3D illusion of your drawing. Altering silhouettes was one of the things Uncomfortable talked about in your lesson 4 critique. Admittedly it's not something you do often, but it is something to keep in mind.

In purple I noted something you already do very well- wrapping masses around your underlying structures, and just altered is ever so slightly to be more specific. The more we can interlock these additional masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

In darker red I noted an arbitrary corner on one of your masses and redrew that section with a smoother curve. Here is another example shown in this diagram that Uncomfortable made for another student, which should hopefully explain this concept. All complexity in these silhouette designs must occur only in response to existing structures.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a great start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but I see a bit of a tendency to run them parallel to the length of the leg and juuust slightly overlapping them with the underlying sausage structure. 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.

As an extra added bonus you might find these notes on foot construction useful.

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.

While you weren't strictly sticking to this method through some of your work, your head constructions mostly feel pretty solid and 3D.

While your spatial reasoning and construction skills are coming along great, I do need to give you a reminder not to neglect the principles of markmaking that were introduced in lesson 1. Your lines should be smooth, continuous and unbroken. There are a lot of scratchy marks and unnecessarily repeated lines throughout your submission. Remember that throughout this course you should be using the ghosting method in full for every line you draw, and drawing from the shoulder to help execute a smooth confident stroke. Your additional lineweight also gets a bit heavy handed at times. Line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps as explained here. and it should be kept subtle. This doesn't require the addition of much extra thickness, just enough to set it apart. Our subconscious will pick up on this difference even if our eyes don't immediately, and will understand the kind of hierarchy this is creating.

All right, that's about covers it. You're doing a great job so I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.