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

Starting with your organic intersections the first page is the most minimal pile I have ever seen submitted for this lesson, and while what you’ve drawn is perfectly fine, I would suggest you ask yourself what motivated your decision to only draw 3 forms when there was plenty of space to add a few more. Adding a couple more forms would present you with more spatial reasoning challenges and allow you to get more out of this exercise.

The second page is a bit more adventurous, and I’m happy to see that you’re keeping your forms simple enough to feel solid and drawing through them all so you can fully understand how they sit in 3D space.

When you practice this exercise in future, imagine you’re dropping sausage forms in from above, one at a time. Think about how the form will fall, and gravity will pull it down into a position where it feels stable and supported. We want to avoid forms that feel stiff, weightless, or unsupported, such as where I’ve indicated with red arrows on your work here. If you allow gravity to operate on these forms, they might end up in these positions.

You are doing a good job of projecting your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the surfaces below. Remember to complete all of your shadows, as shown here.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are off to a nice start, your linework is clear and purposeful, and your core construction looks solid. Those basic first steps are mostly in order, just remember that the ribcage mass should occupy roughly half the length of the torso, as introduced here. I noticed you always draw the ribcage as a sphere, which results in it often being too short.

You’re also doing fairly well with your leg armatures, you’re usually successful at keeping your sausage forms simple, and in most cases you’ve remembered to apply a contour lines to each joint, to show how those sausage forms intersect. As for how you’re doing with building upon those sausage armatures, in most cases your application of additional forms is pretty sparse, when there is usually a lot more going on in the actual leg in the reference than can be described with the simple sausages alone.

Your constructions in general are often left a bit oversimplified, with minimal use of additional masses, and head constructions that appear unfinished. To take your constructions to the next level you need to observe your references carefully and frequently, to pick up on the various subtleties that inform the specifics of that particular animal. There will often be all kinds of lumps, bumps, gentle swellings and complexities if you take the time to look for them.

As you’ve helpfully shared your references, we can go over an example of where constructional opportunities are being missed. If we take this camel and rebuild your construction directly on the reference it becomes a bit clearer that those sausage armatures aren’t really describing the entirety of the leg very well. Here is a quick mock-up of some of the additional forms we could use here. Of course these will vary on a case by case basis for each reference, but hopefully it gives you some ideas. Some of the informal demos also show how to use additional forms more liberally, the running rat, donkey, and puma are good examples to refer to. As an optional bonus we could ad a little bit of fur texture where it features most prominently, as shown in green here. Notice that I’m being selective, and not covering the whole creature in dense texture. By controlling the detail density we can create focal points and avoid overwhelming the viewer (an ourselves) as discussed in the texture section of lesson 2.

In some cases it will help you to draw your constructions larger, too. There are pages like your bears, for example, where there is one small construction surrounded by oodles of blank empty space that could have been used for drawing your construction larger. Doing so will give you more space to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these constructions, and allow you to take your constructions a step further without your linework becoming overly cramped and crowded.

When you do use additional masses, they are generally quite well designed. I’ve taken your horse and made some adjustments to help them attach to the construction more securely. 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 constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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 structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future. On this cat you’re already pretty close, but you’d drawn the toes as one-off lines (in 2D) rather than as complete 3D forms.

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Okay, I think that should cover it for now. You’re off to a good start, but there is scope for you to be pushing your constructions further to get much more out of them, and you tend to skip over steps in your head constructions. I’m going to be assigning some additional pages for you to put the advice provided here into practice before moving forward. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• 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 4 pages of animal constructions.