Hello Boxybox09, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you're keeping your forms reasonably simple, and you've done a good job of applying gravity to the piles, so the forms slump and sag over one another believably.

There are two pieces of feedback from your lesson 2 critique which don't appear to have been applied.

• Tofu asked you to draw through all your forms when attempting this exercise.

• He also called out that your shadows were sticking to the form casting them rather than being projected onto the forms below.

To make it clearer what we are asking you to do, I have made some corrections to your work here.

Moving on to your animal constructions, at their heart, these constructional exercises are designed to help you to improve your spatial reasoning skills, and to be effective, you want to be taking actions on your constructions "in 3D space" so that you do not undermine the 3D illusion under any circumstances.

As it stands, while I certainly see you taking steps towards engaging with your constructions as though they were built from solid 3D forms, there is still a tendency to switch back to 2D thinking and drawing lines on the 2D surface of your paper, without really thinking about how these lines represent 3D forms.

During your lesson 4 critique we introduced the following rule, to help you to take actions in 3D:

Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its 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. I'd like you to take a look at this diagram showing the various actions we can take on a sphere. When working on organic constructions in this course, we're aiming to only work by addition in 3D.

On this dog I've marked some examples of taking actions in 2D, extending the silhouette of forms you had already drawn with one off lines.

On this rhino the 2D additions were very extensive, so I've done the opposite, and highlighted your complete 3D forms with green.

Please review your lesson 4 critique where I discussed how to add complete 3D forms to your constructions and shared several diagrams and demos to help you apply this to your work.

Another way you can flatten your construction is by cutting your forms off where they pass behind something else. In your lesson 4 critique I went over the importance of "drawing through" and completing your forms. Draw each form in its entirety, even if it isn't fully visible in the reference. This will help to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

Moving on to the nitty gritty of animal constructions, I think it is probably best to go over each element step be step, and call out some of the various issues.

Starting with your core construction, you've done a good job of laying out your major masses of the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis. As discussed here on the lesson intro page, the torso sausage should incorporate a slight sag. It should also stay simple, sticking reasonably closely to the characteristics of simple sausage forms. By drawing the torso sausage with a wobbly line like this you add complexity to the torso sausage, which undermines its solidity and gives you a weaker foundation to build the rest of your construction upon. I understand sometimes animals don't look very sausagey, however it is still possible to build such creatures by starting with a simple sausage form, I have a couple of examples you may find helpful, this dog and this partial kangaroo construction.

Remember to explain how the cranial ball connects to the body in 3D by constructing a simple solid neck. There are a couple of constructions, such as this rhino where the neck was drawn with flat partial shapes, I've constructed it in 3D for you on that image.

The next point to discuss is leg construction. It is good to see that you have remembered to use the sausage method of leg construction, as requested in your lesson 4 critique. There is plenty of scope for improvement in your application of this method.

• Remember to stick to simple sausage forms for the base armatures. There are several places where it looks like you've deliberately deformed these sausages to look more like the animal. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is to assert as being solid and three dimensional, so for constructional drawing we start simple, and build complexity gradually, piece by piece.

• You're frequently leaving out the contour curves at the joints which is something I specifically asked you to work on in your lesson 4 feedback.

• Sometimes you're oversimplifying the whole leg into one sausage, such as the front legs of this dog. Take another look at the basic layout of the joints from the lesson intro page. Just because a leg is straight, doesn't mean the joints stop existing. Carefully observing your reference and analysing where they are will help you to produce more natural looking constructions.

• You're either leaving your basic leg structures completely bare, or altering them with one off lines, instead of building complexity with additional forms as discussed in your lesson 4 critique.

• This is more of a nitpick, but I noticed that you fully constructed the far side legs in your first 4 quadruped constructions, then reverted to working in 2D by drawing them as partial shapes. I understand this may be due to seeing Uncomfortable draw far side legs as partial shapes in some demos, so it is not a huge concern, however assuming these pages are in chronological order, this means you've gone from working more 3D to less 3D over the course of the lesson, which is a little troubling.

The next area I can offer advice on is additional masses. I can see you've made a start with exploring the use of additional masses to build on your basic constructions, although this can be taken much further.

I think it will help you if I take a moment to explain how to think about the behaviour of these additional masses, and how we can use this behaviour to design the masses to that they wrap around the underlying structures in 3D space.

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 edits to your dog. Mostly redrawing the 2D extensions as complete forms, but also simplifying the two complete additional masses you had drawn, eliminating random wobbles that are not explained by the underlying structures.

On this rhino I've made some more extensive edits to rebuild the enormous flat extension on top of the back using complete 3D forms. Due to the size and complexity of the extension this required piling several masses on top of one another, purple, then blue, then brown. Each one has its own complete silhouette. That silhouette is designed to show how the additional mass wraps around the underlying structures in 3D space. Notice with the blue mass, I've made use of the large red ellipse of the shoulder mass to push against the blue mass, causing specific corners and an inward curve in the blue mass as it wraps around the shoulder. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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.

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.

Conclusion

This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and I'd like you to take as much time as you need to read it thoroughly, as well as reviewing the relevant sections of lesson material and your lesson 4 critique. You may also want to take some notes in your own words to remind yourself of what to work on. Once you've done that I'd like you to complete some extra pages to address the points I've raised here. For these I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• 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.

• 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 one page of organic intersections and five pages of animal constructions. If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.