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

Starting with your organic intersections you're mostly keeping your forms quite simple, although the one on the top left of your first page is a bit complex, keeping them simple will make them easier to work with. I'm happy to see you drawing through your forms here as this helps you to improve your understanding of 3D space. You do a pretty good job of having most of your forms slump and sag around each other with a sense of gravity. For this exercise, you want to have all your forms feel stable and supported, like you could leave the pile alone and nothing would topple off. The form at the bottom right of your second page looks top-heavy and unbalanced, like it might fall over at any moment, this is something you'll want to try to avoid when practising this exercise in future.

Another point that should help you with this exercise. When drawing forms over one another try to avoid overlapping them at the peak of the lower form. This helps prevent your forms from looking like they're just drawn over one another as well as helps create the illusion that they're wrapping around each other. It sounds trickier than it actually is, here is a visual example.

Your shadows are good, you're projecting them far enough to cast onto the form below, and they have a clear, consistent direction. Some of the edges of your shadows are a bit choppy, suggesting you may have got a bit hasty when filling them in. The more you can push yourself to exercise patience and care when doing your homework, the easier it will be to reach for that patience when completing your own projects.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see you're working to stick to the instructions in the lesson material, and you're doing a good job of treating these constructions as exercises for improving your spatial reasoning. Good work. I do have some advice to that should help you to get the most out of these exercises in future.

There are a couple of signs that suggest you may be underestimating how much time these constructions might demand from you.

The first is your markmaking. I did go over this in your lesson 4 critique, but perhaps you didn't understand what I was referring to. I will try to explain again. I've marked on your crow some specific cases where you're not sticking to the principles of markmaking that were introduced in lesson 1. Your lines should be smooth, continuous and unbroken. The concepts in this course build on each other, and it is important that you follow the guidance from the early lessons as you move through he later ones. Remember that during these exercises we are not "sketching," we have to retain tight, specific relationships between each stage of our constructions, and that includes having tight relationships between your lines. Anywhere you leave gaps creates ambiguity and reminds the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat piece of paper, instead of a solid 3D construction. There is another example here on the ear of your fox. When you repeat or redraw a line, you force the viewer to decide which line is correct, and whichever one they choose, there will always be another one existing there to contradict it, which also undermines the 3D illusion that you're trying to create.

The issue is intermittent, with some pages that are better than others. In fact, as a general rule of thumb, your lines appear to be smoother and less scratchy on your larger forms and earlier stages of your constructions. This suggests that something may be changing in the manner which you draw your lines as you progress through the stages of your work. Remember that you should take your time to plan and ghost every line, no matter how small, and don't be tempted to draw smaller forms with your wrist. If you're getting tired or losing focus towards the end of your constructions you can and absolutely should take a break and come back to it later, instead of pushing through to finish in one sitting and getting sloppy.

The other aspect that suggests you could be investing more time into these is observation. From what I can see, on some of these you're not spending as much time as is really needed simply studying your reference. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. This is explained in more detail in this section of lesson 2.

Right now, because there does appear to be a greater reliance on memory rather than direct observation (not everywhere - some parts come out stronger and more directly informed than others), there are definitely elements that come out looking highly simplified. On this page it looks like you tried to extract as much information from your reference as you could, which is great. This one is simplified to the point that I'm pretty sure the legs are missing significant joints.

Once you've identified a form you wish to draw, make sure you spend as much time as you need planning and ghosting that form before you put pen to paper. There are some areas- like the feet of this fox where your proportions look slightly out of control, and I think a little more time planning and ghosting should help with that. Speakng of feet, as a quick bonus, these notes on foot construction should be useful. Something that can help with your observation and planning is to analyse the gaps between the legs. If we compare this horse to the corresponding reference, you have a substantial gap between the front legs, when they were overlapping in the reference.

Continuing on, your core construction is good. Just avoid pinching your torso sausage as you did on this dog. If we do this it is no longer sticking to the characteristics of a simple sausage form. This complexity undermines the solidity of the form, giving us something of a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of our construction. Again, be mindful of observation and proportions, and aim to have your cranial ball spherical, some of them are a bit distorted.

I'm happy to see that you're employing the sausage method of leg construction. There are a few places where you forget a contour curve for the intersection at the joints but they are usually present, well done. There are issues with proportions and accuracy, but that ties into my earlier point about taking your time. I'm honestly really happy that you're building complexity onto your sausage structures with additional masses, and that brings me to my next topic.

One thing that helps with the shape of your additional masses 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 some of the additional masses on your fox. Where you had drawn the silhouette of your additional masses running almost parallel with the silhouette of the underlying structure I have made a point of wrapping the masses around those structures instead, these larger overlaps help give the additional masses a better "grip" on the construction. Note the inward curves where these masses push up against the underlying structures of the thigh and shoulder masses. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Sometimes you try to do too much with one form. Here is an example. Remember that for constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported at any given point. We need to establish simple, solid foundations, and build things piece by piece. Here is how I might go about building that complex structure.

The last 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.

It looks like you apply parts of this method quite well, though you're a bit erratic with it. For example, with this horse you did a good job of wedging the muzzle tightly against the eye sockets with no arbitrary gap, and connected it to the cranial ball in 3D space. However on your other horse the muzzle is only connected to the silhouette of your cranial ball in 2D space. I've highlighted some issues here on your fox.

Next steps. I have given you a number of things to work on here, so I am going to assign some revisions.

For these, I really want you to invest as much time as needed to work to the best of your current ability. To help you do this I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Do not work on more than one construction in a given day. So if you happen to put the finishing touches on one, do not move onto the next until the following day. You are however welcome and encouraged to spread your constructions across multiple days or sittings if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability. That's not a matter of skill, it's a matter of giving yourself the time to execute each mark with care (which as I noted earlier is something you sometimes don't do as well as you could).

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, as well as a rough estimate of how much time was spent on it.