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

Starting with your organic intersections you're dong a really good job of keeping your sausage forms simple, and they feel solid as a result. You're piling them up in a believable way, and they appear to be obeying gravity, nothing looks like it's about to topple off. Be aware that when you have one end of a form sticking up in the air instead of wrapping around the form below it can make the form feel stiff, think of them like well-filled water balloons.

When it comes to your cast shadows you're doing a good job of pushing them enough to actually cast onto the form below. Remember that the forms on the bottom of the pile will cast shadows onto the ground plane. It may also help you keep the direction of your shadows more consistent if you place the light source off to one side. I've demonstrated both these points on your work here.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see you put a great deal of time and effort into these, and you are showing a lot of good 3D thinking here, as you are showing that your spacial reasoning skills are developing.

There are a couple of points from your previous lesson 4 critique that you haven't really addressed, and that are undermining your efforts somewhat.

1- You're still starting the majority of your constructions with much fainter lines than your final steps. In some cases you're starting your constructions out with lines that are effectively designed to be replaced, and then going back in to apply a clean-up pass of thicker lines to replace them. While this is a valid approach in general, it is one we firmly avoid in this course, as discussed here in Lesson 2. These initial forms are not a loose under drawing, but solid forms that make up the backbone of your constructions, so draw them clearly.

2- You're still cutting into your forms and extending them in 2D. This is tied into the first point. When you make your initial marks light and loose it becomes tempting to alter your structure without respecting the solidity of your forms. One way this can happen is if you draw through your ellipse several times (remember you should aim for 2 or 3, with 2 being ideal) and choose the line you like best for the base of your construction, or hop around between different passes instead of sticking to just one of them. Where there is a gap between passes of your ellipse, you should base your construction on the outer line, to prevent any stray lines going outside of your silhouette. I've marked out one such case of this happening on this canine construction on the head. There's a note in blue where there isn't really enough information in your drawing to explain how the lower jaw attaches to the cranial ball, so it reads as a flat shape instead of a 3D form.

I also circled an area in blue where you didn't really stick to the principles of markmaking as explained in lesson 1. Take your time to plan every mark you wish to make, and use the ghosting method to full effect.

Another way you alter the silhouette of your forms is by adding large chunks of fur with no specific relationship to the underlying structure, as seen in this bison. If you take a look at this section about fur from the lesson page, you can see that each individual tuft that breaks the silhouette connects to the underlying surface.

3- You're not using the sausage method of leg construction very consistently. Remember to keep your sausage forms simple as explained here. You also need to remember to draw the intersection where two sausages join as shown here Once you have the armature of simple sausages in place, you can go and add complexity to it with additional forms as shown in this dog leg demo. I've done another markup on your bison here where it looks like you tried to capture all of the complexity of the leg in one go, and shown you how to start with simple, solid forms instead.

Alright, that’s quite a bit to go on already, let’s see what I can give you in terms of advice for lesson 5 in particular.

Firstly, don't skip steps. Follow the instructions exactly as they are written, to the best of your current understanding and ability. Your first steps for any quadrupedal construction should be building your three major masses, which you usually do, followed by connecting these masses with a torso sausage, and a simple, solid neck. This connecting stage is something you often skip, as seen on this bison who has no neck. As a result of this, his head, hump, and far foreleg are all just sort of floating in an amorphous patch of fur.

Once you have your basic structure in place, the idea with this lesson is to build complexity through the use of additional masses, ad 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 gazelle 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.

These notes on foot construction may also be useful.

On a more positive note, the horns on this construction are lovely. Each little bump is carefully designed to reinforce the 3D illusion, I think they're very well done.

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.

Make sure you don't skip drawing the eye sockets, it's a really important step for your head constructions.

Now, as you may have guessed, I will be asking you to complete some revisions. Be sure to read through this critique thoroughly, and to refer back to it (and your other critiques) 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.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions. Focus on construction only, no texture. I can see that you already know how to draw lovely fur textures, it is your understanding of form that I think you need to work on.