Hello hoango24, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections You're doing a good job of keeping your sausage forms simple and I'm happy to see that you're drawing through them, as this it helps reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

You're drawing your forms slumping and sagging around each other with gravity, I think the first page came out stronger than the second. It looks like you added a few more forms than you could keep track of on the second page and some of the ones near the top of the stack feel a bit precarious or unsupported. You want to be able to leave the stack and know that nothing will fall off.

I think you need to push your cast shadows more, most of them are hugging the form that is casting them instead of being projected onto the form below. I think it will help you if you put your light source over to one side more, it will help you cast the shadows in a consistent direction. I've marked on your work how much further I'd like you to push the shadows in this exercise.

Moving on you your animal constructions

There are a couple of things to call out that Uncomfortable discussed in your lesson 4 critique:

1- Altering the silhouettes of your forms. I've marked on your horse in red where you cut back inside the silhouette of your forms, and in blue several places where you extended the silhouette with one-off lines and partial shapes. We'd like you to add whole forms to your construction whenever you want to alter it. Uncomfortable went over the reasoning for this and shared many diagrams and examples with you in your previous critique so please refer back to that for a fuller explanation. I redrew one of the legs to show you how to build complexity in your constructions by adding forms.

2- You're starting your constructions with much fainter lines, and going back with heaver marks at later stages to darken the lines you want to keep visible.

This approach is something Uncomfortable refers to as a "rough underdrawing with a clean-up pass", and while it is an entirely valid approach in general, it is not one you should be employing in this course as explained here. At its heart, it's because it results in students tracing back over their linework, which itself causes them to focus on how those marks run along the flat page, rather than how they represent the edges of forms in 3D space. In this focusing shifting towards the 2D, we end up breaking principles of the lesson. going back over your lines in this manner causes small sections of silhouettes to be cut out, and small sections to be extended. These extensions are all the more likely to occur when we allow that line weight to "bridge" from the silhouette of one form to another.

Instead, line weight should always follow the silhouette of one form at a time, and should be reserved to the specific localised areas where overlaps occur between forms, in order to help clarify those overlaps. Line weight should be kept subtle and should be applied with a single, confident, ghosted, superimposed stroke as shown here.

A small side note, you should be drawing through your ellipses 2-3 times only as discussed in this video from lesson 1.

Continuing on, once you have your basic structure in place, the idea with this lesson is to build complexity through the use of additional masses, and 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.

So, for example, I've redrawn 3 of your masses on this horse to show you how you can wrap them around the underlying structure more. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. I also made the shoulder mass much bigger. Remember this mass is a simplification for the bulky area where a lot of the muscles used for locomotion are housed, and that legs will usually sprout from the sides of a quadruped’s body, not the underside.

Oh and these extra notes on foot construction may be useful.

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. I can see that you're applying some of this method some of the time. For example your horse shows a concerted effort at carving out eye sockets and extruding a boxy muzzle from the cranial ball. On the other hand with this deer the head isn't really constructed at all. It looks like you drew the outline of the face from observation without thinking about how the forms exist in 3D space. I've redrawn your deer step by step here to show you how to construct a head in profile, as well as using additional masses (which you didn't attempt on this particular construction) and selective subtle additional lineweight.

All right, I think that about covers it. I'll be asking for some revisions to check that you understand and apply this feedback. Of course if anything I've said here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.