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

Starting with your organic intersections you’re keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and I’m happy to see you’re drawing each form in its entirety so you can fully understand how it sits in space.

With each form you add to the pile, think about how gravity will pull the form down, making it slump over the forms below to come to rest in a position where it is stable and supported. You usually do this well, but I noticed the form at the top left of this page is unsupported along half its length, and looks like it might topple off the pile at any moment.

You’re projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the surfaces below, and I can see you’re keeping a consistent light source in mind for each pile. A couple of your shadows seem a little oddly-shaped, and I’ve made a couple of notes on one of them here. When designing your shadows be sure to consider the relationship between the form casting a given shadow and the surfaces receiving it, as well as the light source.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are coming along really well. Your linework appears confident and purposeful, and you’re clearly putting a lot of thought into how each piece of your construction exists as a solid 3D form, and how all these pieces will connect together with specific relationships.

Speaking of how pieces connect together, I noticed you’re still somewhat inconsistent about applying a contour curve at each joint when constructing the legs. I can see that you do understand how to apply them correctly, but it looks like sometimes you forget about them. These little curves might seem insignificant, but defining the intersections where forms connect together is a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction, so try to remember them in future.

I wanted to mention that you’re off to a great start with building onto your leg sausages using additional forms, but this can be pushed further. A lot of these focus primarily on forms 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, on another student's work. 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.

I’m happy to see that you’ve been using additional masses to build onto your constructions, and you appear to get more confident with them as you progress through the set. I’ve noted a couple of masses on this cougar where their design didn’t quite make sense in terms of how they were supposed to connect to the existing structures in 3D space.

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.

Here I’ve taken this logic and applied it to some of the masses on your cougar. With the mass on the base of the neck, I’ve used an outward curve where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press against it, in this case this is also closer to what we see in the corresponding reference image. With the mass under the belly I’ve allowed it to pass between the front legs instead of stopping abruptly, and I’ve also pulled it up around the side of the body to give it a firmer grip on the construction, and made a similar adjustment to the mass along the back of the thigh.

The design of your masses does improve across the set, and I’m pleased to see that you’re breaking large or complex additions into pieces, so that each mass can serve a specific purpose. I did think that the masses along the top of your final hybrid construction appeared a bit thin and precariously balanced, like they might topple off if the animal were to move. They’ve got a fairly minimal overlap with the underlying torso sausage, and this doesn’t quite convey how they’d sit across the width of the back of the animal. I’ve redrawn these masses here, allowing them to sit across the width of the animal’s back and pulling them around the side of the torso. With the green mass I’ve also made use of the protruding shoulder mass, pressing the additional mass against the shoulder and introducing a specific inward curve where they interlock. The more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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. It does look like you’re somewhat familiar with the informal head demo, as with this cougar you’ve nailed the pentagonal shape of the nearest eye socket, and wedged the muzzle snugly against them. Sometimes it seems like this method is 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.

The last thing I want to mention is just a minor suggestion. If we look at this section of your crocodile, it looks like you were trying to outline every scale on the tail. I think this would have been a good opportunity to practice the implicit markmaking techniques introduced in the texture section of lesson 2. This would allow you to control the detail density, rather than being locked into drawing every scale.

All right, you’re doing an excellent job of building solid constructions and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.