Hello Ledvi21, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections these are mostly on the right track, you're wrapping your forms around each other pretty well, but there are a couple of pointers to note.

You want your pile of forms to feel stable and supported. Like you could leave it alone and nothing would topple off. On both pages you have drawn a form on the left of the page that is unstable. I've highlighted one of them in blue here.

On the same image I noted a form that is slightly too complex, you want your forms to feel like well-filled water balloons for this exercise, more complicated forms are more difficult to work with. That form is also incomplete. From your lesson 2 critique "I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when tackling this exercise again in the future. Drawing through your forms will help reinforce your understanding of 3D space." Remember to draw like you have x-ray vision, just because one form goes behind another, does not mean it ceases to exist in the 3D space you're trying to create.

When it comes to your shadows you're doing a good job of projecting them far enough to cast onto the form below. Their direction isn't always consistent, I've made some corrections on your work here, I hope that helps.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is coming along well. I'm really happy to see that you're working on taking actions in 3D, by adding to your constructions with complete forms instead of cutting inside the silhouette or extending your construction with single lines. I also see that you've made a concerted effort to use the sausage method of leg construction throughout your work, which is great. I'm also happy to see that your lines are smooth, confident and well planned. There is a lot that you're doing very well, but I do have a few pointers that should help you to continue to get the most out of these constructional exercises.

Where lesson 4 introduced the idea of building onto our construction with complete forms, here in lesson 5 we get more specific about how we design those forms to interact with our existing structures.

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 can see that you're making use of additional masses throughout the set, and they do improve as you progress. Some of your earlier constructions such as this dog have masses that stay round all the way around their silhouette without much in the way of explaining how they relate to the underlying construction. You're making better use of sharp corners and inward curves by the time you get to your hybrid. The difference is explained in this diagram.

I've made several notes on your rhino that should help you to improve your constructions further.

First, in blue, I made the shoulder and thigh masses a bit bigger. These are a simplification of some of the big muscles that help the animal to walk so don't be afraid to be more generous with them. I then used those shoulder and thigh masses to help anchor the additional masses to the construction- note the inward curves where the additional masses press against them. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I also broke the large mass over the neck and shoulders into pieces. Much like how you layered multiple masses to build the humps on one of your camels, I used multiple masses to build the desired complexity without any one mass becoming complex where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing pressed against it to cause that complexity.

There is a quick note in green, where you forgot to add a couple of the contour curves to reinforce the intersection where your leg sausages join. These little contour lines convey a lot of information about how your sausages are orientated in space and how they fit together so please try to remember them in future.

There's also a note about using a boxier structure for the top of the head, which brings us to the topic of 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.

You're generally doing pretty well at carving angular eye sockets into your cranial ball and wedging a boxy muzzle form up against those eye sockets. You often leave things highly simplified, if you look at the above rhino demo and also this camel head you can see that there is much more you can do to build on your head constructions.

You're making a good start with your leg constructions, crafting an armature of sausage forms. I noticed that while you did place additional masses in a few spots, you were a bit sparse in doing so, focusing on capturing specific bumps. But the diagrams I shared with you in Lesson 4, especially the ant leg one, show this being taken much further. As shown here on another student's work, consider the masses that exist internally within the silhouette of your structure, not just those that break the silhouette's edge. They're important because even if we were only to focus on the silhouette, considering the inside means thinking about how all of these pieces fit together in 3D space, making the whole structure feel more grounded and solid.

For the feet, using boxy forms as shown here can be very effective - just remember that as with all construction, we build up things one step at a time. The first step of building out a particular structure is not going to be the end, if we take your camel for example and compare it with this stock image it suggests that a camel's foot might have a lot more going on - not all of it necessarily visible, but it does suggest that there's a lot more going on that was not captured. I'd assume that the camel you were drawing was standing in tall grass, and that the legs/feet were obscured from vision - in such cases, don't be afraid to use multiple pieces of reference. Hell, using multiple pieces of reference can help a in a lot of ways. If we can't see the forms we have to draw, that simply means we need to look for them - not that we should just leave them out.

And with that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. As a whole you've done very well, and while you've got some points to keep in mind, you are certainly equipped to apply this yourself. Keep up the good work.