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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are well done. You're keeping your forms simple which helps them to feel solid, and you're doing a good job of applying gravity to them so they slump and sag over one another.

You're projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, and it is clear that you're paying attention to the curvature of the surfaces that the shadows are being cast onto when designing your shadows.

My main suggestion for you to work on here is your contour curves, which appear a little stiff and hesitant in places. Remember to prioritise a smooth confident stroke over accuracy. Something you might find helpful, if you haven't already tried it, is to ghost the motion of the entire ellipse, and only put the pen down for the visible section you wish to draw. It can take some practice to get the timing right, but I've found it helps with the smoothness, and also keeps the curves elliptical, even when they get very narrow.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your work shows a strong understanding of how to fit the various pieces of your constructions together with specific relationships, like a 3D puzzle. There are some places where you've added to your constructions with partial shapes, which doesn't quite provide enough information for the viewer (or you) to understand how they connect to the existing structure in 3D space, but there are also a lot of places where you've done a jolly good job of interacting with your constructions in 3D space, so I'm convinced you're heading in the right direction with these.

I'll go over the main elements of animal construction, and discuss some things that are going well, as well as a few pointers that should help you to get a little bit more out of these constructions in future.

Starting with core construction, your major masses are well proportioned, just remember to draw around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse free handed in this course, as it helps to execute them smoothly. You're doing this correctly in some cases, but not always.

When you combine your rib cage and pelvis masses together into the torso sausage remember to include a slight sag through the middle. Drawing it completely straight across can make it feel a little rigid. We can always fill out any additional bulk on top with additional masses later.

Remember to construct a simple solid neck to establish how the cranial ball connects to the torso in 3D space, even if the forms overlap on the page. You can find an example of how to do this in the puma construction on the informal demos page.

Moving on to leg construction, there was a bit of a rocky start with the partial shapes being used for the legs of these birds but I'm happy to see that you've stuck to the sausage method of leg construction for most of your pages.

On most of your pages you're doing a good job of constructing chains of sausage forms for your leg armatures, just be sure to remember the contour curves at the joints when using this construction method in future. What we're doing with these is similar to the form intersections exercise from lesson 2. Solidifying the construction by explaining how the forms connect together in 3D space. These little curves might seem insignificant, but they are an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the 3D illusion very effectively.

I wanted to mention that you're off to a great start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be taken further. A lot of these forms focus primarily on masses 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 as puzzles.

Speaking of additional masses you're doing a great job of wrapping these around the existing structures in a way that reinforces the 3D illusion rather than undermining it. I think you understand these masses very well, but I will still drop in a piece of prewritten text that explains how to think about designing additional masses, in case it is useful to you:

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, your additional masses are working very well, though I have made a few edits to this bison for things you could tweak to make them more solid in future.

A- This mass under the neck appeared to stop existing where it passed behind the front leg and the head. I've "drawn through" to give the mass its own fully-enclosed complete silhouette so we can more easily understand how it exists in 3D space, rather than needing to add extra contour curves to the surface in an effort to make if feel more 3D after we've already drawn it.

B- This section of the undercarriage had been extended with a single line. I do see where you're coming from, with what is visible in the reference, but as this structure has some volume to it I'd still draw it as a complete 3D form. As discussed in this section extending these constructions with single lines only really works for forms that are already flat.

C- Here I've pulled the large mass on top of the neck down from the spine around the sides of the body and pressed it against the top of the shoulder mass to help anchor it more firmly to the construction. This is something you're already doing well on a number of your other constructions. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

D- Rather than pressing an inward curve into an additional mass where it is exposed to fresh air, we can build it in pieces, allowing each one to stay simple there there is nothing present in the construction to press against it. Introducing unexplained complexity to additional masses can make them feel flat.

E- This mass disappeared where it passes behind another additional mass. I think this might be the animal's tail, so I've rooted it to the torso sausage with an ellipse.

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:

• 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.

Looking through your work I can see you pulling some of these key points into some of your head constructions, as well as a fair bit of experimentation. Try your best to employ the informal head demo 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.

As some of your head constructions are already hitting a lot of the right notes, I'll share a quick bonus tip with you. When drawing eyelids, rather than drawing single lines it helps a lot to actually draw each eyelid as its own separate additional mass, wrapping them around the eyeball as shown here. This will help push you into thinking about them in 3D.

Okay, I think that covers it. 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.