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

Starting with your organic intersections your forms have a good sense of weight to them, and you’re building up your piles so that each form feels stable and supported, like we could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off, well done. You’re projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the surfaces below, and they appear to be following a consistent light source.

When you practice this exercise in future you’ll get more out of it if your draw through and complete your forms wherever possible, instead of cutting some of them off where they pass behind one another. This will push you to think through how the whole form sits in 3D space.

Moving on to your animal constructions, I’m seeing plenty of ability here, and good observational skills, although there are a few points I noticed that stood out, as they were addressed in my critique of your Lesson 4 work. It is often necessary for students to take their own steps in ensuring that they do what they need to in order to make sure they're addressing the issues that have been called out. It's very easy to simply come back from a break and continue forwards with the next lesson without consideration for what issues may have been called out (or perhaps having them more loosely in mind, but without specifics), and each student needs to decide what it is they need to apply the information they're given as effectively as they can. For some that means reviewing the past feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely.

I’ve marked on your rhino examples of the following points which were discussed in your lesson 4 feedback.

• Cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn, undermining their solidity.

• Building parts of some of the constructions with one-off lines or flat partial shapes, instead of constructing complete new forms and attaching them to the existing structure in 3D.

• Adding line weight to the entire silhouette of the construction, moreso in the later pages, using it in an effort to improve the aesthetics of the drawings, rather than as a tool to help clarify overlaps between forms.

• This point I talked about in your lesson 4 work, mentioning that you were on the right track with using the sausage method of leg construction. You do use it some of the time, but much less consistently than what you have previously demonstrated you are capable of.

For the first two points, remember that when interacting with organic constructions in this course, we want students to strive to only take actions by adding in 3D. Creating believable, solid, three dimensional constructions despite drawing on a flat page requires us to first and foremost convince ourselves of this illusion, this lie we're telling, as discussed here back in Lesson 2. The more our approach reinforces the illusion, the more we make new marks that reinforce it even further. The more our marks break the illusion, the more marks we make that then further break the illusion, for us and for everyone else.

While in this course we're doing everything very explicitly, it's to create such a solid belief and understanding of how the things we draw exist in 3D space, that when we draw them more loosely with sketching and other less explicit approaches, we can still produce marks that fall in line with the idea that this thing we're drawing exists in 3D.

For the third point, remember that everything we do in these exercises serves a specific purpose, and additional line weight is no exception. As introduced in this video from lesson 1, in this course we use line weight to help clarify overlaps between forms, and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. There is absolutely no need to add line weight to the whole silhouette of your constructions, and doing so can actually undermine the 3D illusion we seek to create by causing alterations to your forms’ silhouettes. There’s also a general tendency for you to redraw some of your lines arbitrarily. In ending up with all of these different lines representing the edges of the same form, the viewer is given a number of different possible interpretations. Regardless of which interpretation they choose to follow, there will always be another present there to contradict it, which ultimately undermines their suspension of disbelief and reminds them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing.

Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasizes the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to execute each mark. Make sure you’re making every effort to stick to the principles of markmaking throughout the entire construction process on every page, there are some pages, such as this lizard where your markmaking is sketchier than what I know you’re really capable of.

To the fourth point, make sure you stick to all of the specifics the sausage method of leg construction, laying down a chain of simple sausage forms and applying a contour curve to define the intersection at each joint. Refer to your lesson 4 feedback for diagrams showing examples of how to construct additional forms on those sausage armatures to transform the sausage chain into a more characteristic representation of the leg in question. On some pages such as this fox it looks like you were aiming to use the sausage method, but remember that sausage forms are NOT ellipses. Constructing legs from ellipses tends to make them way too stiff. Try to stick to two round ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width for each limb section.

Continuing on to new information, in lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions “in 3D”- additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses on the majority of your constructions, although it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette in a way that feels convincing.

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.

With that in mind I’ve made a few adjustments to the masses on this rhino. You’re actually doing pretty well with the design of the masses, the most frequent correction here is simply to complete the masses instead of cutting them off where they overlap. Another thing to note in regards to these additional masses is that adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasize the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships, and they also suffer from diminishing returns where a bunch may not be any more impactful than just one. While adding contour lines that don’t contribute much isn’t the worst thing in the world, they can sometimes lead students into thinking that they can “fix” a poorly designed mass after the fact, feeding into a tendency to craft the masses themselves less intentionally.

The last thing I wanted to note with these additional masses concerns the purple one above the shoulder. Notice how I’ve pulled it down around the side of the torso and pressed it against the top of the protruding shoulder mass, helping to anchor the additional mass to the construction. The bulky shoulder and thigh masses we find on most quadrupeds are a goldmine for this sort of thing,the more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet. I want you to demonstrate that you can understand and apply this feedback so that you can continue to get the most out of these exercises in the future. Be sure to read through this critique thoroughly, and to refer back to it as often as you need to in order to understand, remember, and apply all the information that has been presented to you. Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

2- Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.