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

Starting with your organic intersections these are coming along fairly well. You're doing a good job of establishing how the forms pile upon one another, slumping and sagging under the forces of gravity. Your application of cast shadows is coming along nicely - you're doing a good job of pushing forward boldly, and keeping that consistent light source in mind. It just looks like you forgot to fill in this section of cast shadow.

Moving on to your animal constructions I feel that overall you've done a great job of focusing on these drawings specifically as an exercise in spatial reasoning. You've clearly paid a lot of attention to how it's all about thinking through the way in which these forms fit together in three dimensions, and the frequent use of additional masses, wrapping them around the existing structures and designing their silhouettes to convey those spatial relationships demonstrates this well.

Just a quick reminder, that when using texture in this course you should be using the shapes of cast shadows to implicitly describe the smaller forms on an object's surface. You're telling the viewer how that surface feels. This has nothing to do with what color the surface happens to be. So for example looking at the fish on this page there would be no reason to fill in the stripes that are a darker color to describe the fish's markings. It's only prominent on one page, so I won't belabour the issue. I suggest rereading your lesson 4 critique where Uncomfortable wrote a thorough explanation on texture for you.

When you add line weight, be mindful of what you're trying to tell the viewer. On this rhino the extra line weight on the belly where it overlaps the near-side front leg gives the impression that the belly is in front, and both front legs are behind it, so keep that in mind in future.

I didn't see you making this mistake that much, but I'd better call it out. Don't cut into the silhouette of your forms, as I've marked in red on your camel When our ellipses get rather loose, always pick the outermost perimeter as defining the silhouette of that form, just so all of its linework exists inside that space, rather than floating outside of it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

On the same image I marked in blue where you appear to have extended your silhouette with partial shapes instead of complete forms. I can see you're working to make sure you take actions in 3D when building your constructions, and it looks like these 2D extensions appear less frequently as you progressed through the set.

Where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building on our constructions with 3D forms, here in lesson 5 we get more specific about how we design the silhouette of these additional forms. 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.

When it comes to additional masses, I can see that you are being attentive to those shapes, considering how they wrap around one another, but as shown on your camel you do have a tendency to include corners in their silhouettes without any external reason for those corners to exist. Remember that all complexity (corners, inward curves, etc.) occurs in response to another structure pressing against a given mass. If there's nothing to create a corner, we have to find another way to transition from one curve to another along the mass's silhouette - in this case, transitioning more smoothly rather than at a singular sharp corner.

I also wanted to talk about one of the additional masses on this rat As we can see there, the additional mass you constructed along its back appears to form a corner where it meets the rib cage- but if you really think about the structure that is present as you're adding that additional mass, the rib cage is already completely engulfed by the torso sausage, leaving no protruding forms or structures for the mass to interact with. So instead, as shown in the notes on your work, that mass should not actually be worrying about the rib cage, but rather wrapping around the whole torso sausage.

While we may not be using the rib cage and pelvis to introduce complexity to our additional masses, there are other structures attached to the torso that we can use for this purpose, namely the shoulder and thigh masses. I've noted on your work here where you'd made really good use of your thigh to wrap an additional mass around, but sort of glossed over the shoulder. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a good start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these focus primarily on forms that actually impact the silhouette of the overall leg, but there's value in exploring the forms that exist "internally" within that silhouette - like the missing puzzle piece that helps to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. Here is an example of what I mean, from another student's work - as you can see, Uncomfortable has blocked out masses along the leg there, and included the one fitting in between them all, even though it doesn't influence the silhouette. This way of thinking - about the inside of your structures, and fleshing out information that isn't just noticeable from one angle, but really exploring the construction in its entirety, will help you yet further push the value of these constructional exercises and puzzles.

As an extra added bonus, notes on foot construction may also help you.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. You're clearly treating your heads as 3D puzzles, and carefully thinking about how all your pieces fit together, and that's great. It looks like for the majority of your pages you're working on using the approach shown 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 continue 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. One thing that can also help, specifically when dealing with eyes, is to draw the eyelids themselves as their own separate additional masses (one for the upper lid and another for the lower lid). This can help us better focus on how they're actually wrapping around the eyeball itself, as shown here, much moreso than trying to draw a single "eye" shape and having that conform to the eyeball's curvature.

Anyway! All in all, good work, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.