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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job, you're demonstrating a good understanding of how your forms wrap around each other in 3D space, and they have a sense of weight to them, nicely done.

Your shadows are coherent, they're being cast in a consistent direction and you're pushing them far enough for them to read as cast shadows rather than line weight, good work.

Just keep an eye on your habit of arbitrarily redrawing your lines, I can see it cropping up again on some of your contour curves.

Moving on to your animal constructions these are mostly on the right track, you're doing a good job of connecting the pieces of your constructions together in a way that feels solid and 3D. On the whole your line work looks confident and purposeful, and I can see you're resisting the temptation to redraw your lines. There are a couple of things I'd like to bring to your attention to help you to get a bit more out of these exercises.

During your lesson 4 critique we introduced the following rule to help you to only take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion. "Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette." We went over how to add to your constructions with complete 3D forms instead.

By and large I can see that you're making an effort to stick to this rule when working on your animals. One area where you're prone to altering the silhouette of forms you have already drawn appears to be legs. You're doing a good job of laying down simple sausage forms for your leg armatures, and showing an understanding of how to apply a contour curve for the intersection where these sausage forms join together. When you want to build on these sausages you have a tendency to switch to working in 2D and drawing single lines, as highlighted here on your hybrid. I've used blue to indicate where these lines extend the silhouette and red for where they cut back inside the sausage forms you had already established.

So, here is how we might take some of those actions on the legs of your hybrid in 3D instead.

• In blue I started by simplifying the shoulder and thigh masses to ellipses and making them larger. This incorporates some of the extra bulk at the top of the legs, and will also serve as useful structures to help anchor additional masses to the body later.

• Also in blue I added in some missing contour curves for intersections where sausage forms connect together.

• Then I've added in the extensions as complete forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes. You can see some good examples of this in the donkey demo and the puma demo from the informal demos page.

It is good to see you're experimenting with additional masses to flesh out the bodies of your constructions, and I can see that you're putting in some thought into how these additional masses wrap around the underlying structures in 3D space, good work. 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.

You're doing a pretty good job with your additional masses already, you're wrapping them boldly around the underlying structures, breaking complicated additions into multiple simpler pieces, and you usually introduce complexity in all the right places, which is all great. I've made a few tweaks to some of the additional masses on your hybrid to show how they might be improved further. Notice with the red masses I've introduced an inward curve where they press against the blue ellipses that I drew earlier for the shoulder and thigh masses. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. I've used two pieces to build the hump in the middle, so that we can avoid using a S curve where the mass is exposed to fresh air. This actually wasn't a prominent issue on this particular construction, but if we take a look at this camel there's a more obvious inward curve at either end of the mass of the hump, where there is nothing present in the construction to press into the mass and cause this complexity.

It is good to see that you're making an effort to use complete 3D forms to describe your animals' feet, as a lot of students treat feet as a bit of an afterthought. When it comes to constructing feet, I have some advice on how you can tackle the construction of the base foot structure, and then the toes. As shown here on another student's work, we can use boxy forms - 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 structured that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

Your core construction is pretty solid, but I have a couple of quick notes for you. As introduced here the rib cage usually occupies roughly half the length of the torso. You have a bit of a tendency to make it smaller than this, drawing it as a ball. Also remember to draw around your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page, it looks like you sometimes stop at about one and a half turns.

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.

When it comes to texture and detail, there are some really nice moments happening on this chameleon. There are some areas where you've done a good job of describing the scales implicitly, by drawing the shadows they cast rather than outlining every scale. This has allowed you to transition between dense and sparse detail quite effectively, well done.

On your tigers I can see you've drawn in the color pattern of the stripes. I do know where this comes from, as Uncomfortable draws stripes on a tiger in one of the older video demos. In future I'd like you to try to stick to the guidance for texture that is introduced in lesson 2, as over time this has proven to be more effective as a learning tool for students than copying color patterns. These reminders are a good section to review for how to approach texture in this course.

This point isn't a big deal at all, but still worth mentioning. On many of your pages it looks like you've used something grey (possibly a marker on its last legs) to fill in parts of your constructions, usually the far side legs. In this course we're only working with black ink and the white of the paper. If you want to push the far side legs back you can use some parallel hatching lines to indicate this instead.

Conclusion

There's a lot of good things going on here, and your constructions are generally coming along well. I'm going to assign some (fairly minor) revisions for you to take a swing at taking actions on your leg constructions in 3D. Please complete 2 quadruped constructions. If anything said to you here, or previously is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.