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

I wish you a swift and full recovery with your wrist.

Starting with your organic intersections these are coming along pretty well. You're showing a good understanding of how your forms relate to one another within the 3D space you're creating, and you're capturing how these forms slump and sag with gravity.

A couple of your forms are getting just a touch too wobbly and complex, focus on having your sausage forms feel inflated and heavy for this exercise, as this will help them to feel solid.

You're projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, which is a good start. There are two things I'd like you to work on when practising this exercise in future. First, when designing your shadow shapes, as well as thinking about the shape of the form casting the shadow I'd like you to also consider the curvature of the surfaces that the shadow is being cast onto. Secondly, try experimenting with different light sources, it looks like both your piles have the light coming from directly above, see what happens if you use a light source in the top left or top right.

Moving on to your animal constructions for the most part these are holding together and looking fairly three dimensional, and your underlying spatial reasoning skills appear to be developing well. I do have a number of areas where I can offer some additional advice which I hope will help you build a stronger 3D illusion when practising these constructions in future.

Kicking things off with head construction, this is one of the more challenging aspects of the lesson, and you're certainly not alone in finding it difficult. It is good to see that you've grasped the importance of carving out angular eye sockets, and are putting thought into how to connect the various pieces of your head constructions together in a way that feels 3D.

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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Moving on, let's take a minute to talk about taking actions in 3D. If you recall your lesson 4 critique, we introduced a rule to help you to only take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion. It was as follows "once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette." We discussed how to build your constructions by adding new forms with their own complete silhouettes instead. While you're definitely grappling with building your constructions with complete forms, you're also quite prone to adding quick little extensions to your constructions with one-off lines. I've marked a few examples of this in blue on this springbok as well as where the hind leg had been built from flat partial shapes. All these little extensions do undermine the 3D illusion somewhat, so our goal for these constructions is to construct 3D forms wherever we want to build on our constructions, no matter how small or insignificant those extensions may seem. Building onto constructions with one-off lines only really works or forms that are already flat, as discussed here.

The next topic I aught to mention is leg construction. Looking through your pages, I can see that you're quite capable of employing the sausage method to construct your legs when you choose to. You're quite inconsistent about using it- and I know this probably comes from various different strategies being used in some of the demos for this lesson. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Be aware that when you choose to build your legs from partial flat shapes, it will yield a flatter construction than what you're really capable of.

Continuing on, the next area where I can offer advice is additional masses. I'm happy to see that you've been exploring the use of additional masses to build on your constructions throughout the set, and are using them wherever you see fit (It is not uncommon for students to only use them on the torso). Where lesson 4 introduced the idea of building onto our constructions with complete 3D forms, here in lesson 5 we start to get a bit more specific about how we design 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.

So, to demonstrate this idea in action I've redrawn several additional masses on your springbok. The red ones were drawn first, with the purple ones added wrapping around them, and the green one under the neck drawn last.

• In blue I've added ellipses for the shoulder and thigh masses. On some of your constructions you're over complicating the shoulder and thigh masses, treating them more like additional masses. While I can see the anatomical elements in your references that you're observing here, there's definitely value in starting them simpler. For constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given point, the more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer to understand how it exists in 3D space. Once the simple shoulders are in place, we can build complexity piece by piece with additional forms.

• I've used this shoulder mass to help anchor some of your additional masses more securely to the construction, notice how the mass above the neck has been pulled down from the spine and pressed against the shoulder, creating an inward curve where it interacts with this existing structure. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• Each additional mass has its own complete silhouette, I haven't added any one-off lines. The one-off lines have either been incorporated into the design of existing masses, or I've constructed new ones to build the extensions in 3D. Don't be afraid to layer multiple masses together and allow them to overlap.

• On some of your constructions some of your masses are devoid of any complexity, staying soft and rounded all the way around their silhouette, giving them a blobby appearance. There are some examples of this on the rump f your honey badger. Unfortunately this lack of complexity robs us of the tools we need to explain how the additional mass relates to the existing structure, and gives the impression that the mass might wobble off if the animal were to move. This diagram shows how we can make use of specific sharp corners and inward curves to give the additional mass a "grip" on the underlying form.

• Sometimes we see basically the opposite issue, where you've introduced complexity to the mass, but that complexity isn't explained by the structures that are actually present in the construction. For example the mass on top of the back of this dingo has two sharp corners where it wraps around the torso sausage, but the torso sausage is smooth and rounded here, so instead we'd want to transition smoothly between curves as shown in this diagram.

• You may also notice when I redrew the additional masses on the springbok I didn't need to use any additional contour curves running along the surface of these masses. Adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasise the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships. While adding lines that don't contribute much isn't the worst thing in the world using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses. So, I would actively avoid using surface contour lines on your additional masses in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

This last point is more of an encouragement than a criticism. Your markmaking is on the right track, but is a bit variable. These pages are an improvement on your initial submission for lesson 4, though there are still a few places where things get a bit loose and sketchy, such as the head of this dingo. Try your best to be patient when working through these exercises, and give yourself time to construct each form, each line, to the best of your current ability, no matter how small or how insignificant it may seem.

Conclusion

While I've given you quite a bit to think about here, you have previously demonstrated an excellent facility for absorbing and applying the advice in your critiques, so I am happy to mark this as complete and leave you to apply this feedback independently in your own time. Of course if anything said to you here is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.