Hello Lost247365, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections the first thing that stood out to me is that some of your lines are fairly wobbly, it is more obvious on the first page, but still present in places on the second page and intermittently throughout your animal constructions as well. I know wobbly (hesitant) lines have been called out a few times on your previous lessons, and I'd like you ask yourself these questions as a checklist of possible causes to troubleshoot the issue.

• Are you prioritizing a smooth confident stroke? Or are you more concerned with accuracy? A smooth stroke that doesn't quite go where we intended is considered more correct than a mark that is accurate but wobbles. Prioritizing a smooth stroke is likely to lower your accuracy temporarily, but it will improve with practice.

• Are you using your whole arm to draw, or do you sometimes draw from your wrist? Drawing from the wrist can produce stiff marks, and is best reserved for textural marks.

• Are you using the ghosting method in full for every line? By separating each line into the stages of planning, preparation, and execution we can stop our brain from making course corrections mid-stroke and trust in our muscle memory to execute the line with confidence. I don't generally like to tell students to execute their marks more quickly (as it can lead to rushing or drawing haphazardly) but I do think it would be worth experimenting with drawing your lines at different speeds so you can find a sweet spot where your marks are executed quickly enough for your brain not to interfere mid-stroke.

• Are you very tense when drawing? Are you gripping the pen very tightly, or pressing down hard into the page? This is more advice from personal experience, but I found when I was tense I got muscle tremors resulting in wobbly lines, and I had to remind myself to physically relax a bit to combat that problem.

• Are you doing regular warmups to get mileage with the exercises from previous lessons? By conciously and consistently applying the principles of markmaking and the ghosting method for a few minutes a day we can develop good habits to apply to the more taxing constructional exercises introduced later in the course.

Moving on to how you're handling the organic intersections exercise, there are a few points to call out.

• When doing this exercise, it's important that you always think about how you're building up a stable pile, working from bottom up. With each sausage, ask yourself whether it's being supported in space, or if it's floating. If we look at this page it looks as though the large blue form was drawn first. For the blue form to be stable and supported it would rest on the ground plane. This means there is no space beneath it to fit all of the red forms.

• If we take a look at the two largest forms on your first page, whichever form was drawn first, it was drawn stuck up straight in the air with nothing to support it in that position. This becomes apparent if we remove either the right or the left form from the equation. With each form you add, imagine you are dropping it in from above, and allowing it to fall and come to rest in a position where it is stable and supported.

• In your feedback for lesson 2, Tofu asked you to draw through your forms when practising this exercise. Perhaps you did not understand what he meant, so here I've drawn through the forms on one of your pages as an example. By drawing each form in its entirety, instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they pass behind one another, you will develop a stronger understanding of how these forms exist in the 3D space you're trying to create.

• You are projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, which is great. You're leaving out the cast shadows on the ground plane on both pages, giving the impression that the piles are floating in space. Please include the shadows on the ground plane as this will show how the whole pile is supported.

• Remember to draw around the small ellipses on the tips of your forms two full times before lifting your pen off the page. This will help to execute them smoothly and confidently.

Moving on to your animal constructions, you certainly haven't shied away from challenging yourself here, I can see you've jumped into foreshortened angles and difficult poses and you're managing them pretty well. It looks like you've put a lot of thought into how to build your constructions up like 3D puzzles, and I'm seeing a fair bit of growth across the set.

There are a few places where you'd hopped back and forth between working in 3D (drawing complete new forms and establishing 3D relationships between the new forms and the existing structures) and working in 2D (adding one-off lines and partial shapes that only exist in the 2D space of your flat piece of paper). I've marked a couple of examples on this tiger where it looks like you'd extended off existing forms with single lines, not quite providing enough information for the viewer (or You) to understand how the hatched areas actually connect to the existing forms in 3D space. With the area I circled on the muzzle I wasn't sure if you started with the smaller form and extended it, or the larger one and cut back inside its silhouette, but either way I couldn't understand how the pieces fitted together in 3D space. I've gone ahead and drawn additional masses to replace the extensions on the torso sausage here. For the most part it looks like you're very much thinking in 3D, and these occasional 2D actions happen where you forget to complete a form or (understandably) lose track of exactly what is happening when you have a more complex area with a lot of different forms interacting.

It is great to see that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction here, and for the most part you're applying it well. There are a few spots where your leg sausages continually swell through their midsection and become bloated, which makes them stiff. When it comes to how to connect the legs to the body, I do recommend sticking with large ellipses for the shoulder and thigh masses, as discussed in this section of the wolf demo. I noticed a few places where the shoulder/thigh was either quite small, or complex enough to be mistaken for an additional mass. By keeping the shoulder and thigh masses simple (using ellipses) we can more easily understand them as solid 3D forms. By being quite generous with their size, we can later use the shoulder/thigh masses as useful protrusions to help anchor additional masses to the construction.

As a quick bonus, I think you may find it helpful to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms 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.

I'm happy to see that you've made extensive use of additional masses to build onto your basic constructions, and experimented with applying them to finer areas such as legs, and designing them in a variety of ways.

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.

On this hippo I've used red to mark out a few spots where it looks like you'd run the silhouette of your additional masses along the outer edge of the existing forms. This makes the additional masses feel flimsily attached, like they might wobble off if the animal were to move. (Side note, the blue ellipse represents the thigh mass, as I wasn't quite sure how you were attaching the hind leg to the body there.) So instead, as shown here we pull the masses around the sides of the body to give them a firmer grip on the construction. I've also made use of the shoulder and thigh masses to help anchor the additional masses to the construction, notice the specific use of inward curves where the shoulder/thigh masses protrude from the torso sausage and press into the additional masses. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

I see that on some of your pages you'd piled quite a few additional contour lines to the surface of your additional masses. Adding this type of contour line (like from the organic forms with contour curves exercise) can help a form feel more 3D in isolation, but doesn't really help to clarify the relationships between your forms or solidify the construction as a whole. The type of contour line introduced in the form intersections exercise is much more effective in this regard, and it also only allows us to add one contour line per intersection. The type of contour line running along the surface of a single form allows us to add as many as we want, but unfortunately they suffer from diminishing returns, where the first one may be quite helpful, but the second much less so, and the third is largely redundant. While adding contour lines that don't contribute much isn't a big deal in itself, it can sometimes lead students to thinking that adding contour lines will "fix" a mass that doesn't feel 3D, causing students to invest less thought into the design of their masses. So, when you go through the planning phase of each contour line you wish to add, be sure to ask yourself what it is contributing to your construction, and if it is the best tool for the job.

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.

I can see you using some elements from the informal head demo on some of your constructions, for example this puppy has the muzzle wedged snugly against pentagonal eye sockets. 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.

Oh, one last nit-pick. It looks like you used pencil to lay down a flow line on most of your pages. You're not using a full-on underdrawing so I'm not too concerned, but consider this a reminder to stick to the recommended tools in future.

All right, I think that should cover it. I'm pretty happy with how your animal constructions are progressing, but I'd like to see you take another swing at those organic intersections before moving forward.