Hello Julti29, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing pretty well, you're capturing how these forms slump and sag over one another with a sense of gravity, and piling them up in such a way that each form feels stable and supported, like we could walk away from the pile and nothing would topple off.

Something that will help you to get more out of this exercise is to draw through your forms wherever possible. Right now you often cut them off where they pass behind one another, but by "drawing through" and completing your forms you can develop a stronger understanding of how the forms exist in 3D space. In all fairness the example homework image has some forms that are incomplete, but if you watch the video demonstration for this exercise you can see Uncomfortable showing how to draw through your forms. To get you started I've completed a few of your forms for you on this page.

Another point to remember is to draw around the small ellipses on the tips of the forms two full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass.

Moving on to your animal constructions, on the whole these are coming along well. I'm seeing a fair bit of attention being paid to building your constructions like a 3D puzzle and establishing believable relationships between the various pieces. I've got a fair bit of advice that I hope will help you when practicing these constructional exercises in future, and I'll start by going over six points quite briefly before moving on to two areas I'd like to talk about in a bit more detail.

• You're doing pretty well at establishing your 3 major masses and combining the ribcage and pelvis mass into a "torso sausage." As introduced in this section the ribcage should occupy roughly half the torso length. I noticed you often (though not always) draw the ribcage as a sphere, which results in it being a bit less than half the torso length.

• You often fall short of drawing around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page, which was an issue I specifically called out in your lesson 4 critique. Keep in mind that the advice in these critiques is designed to be applied by the student as they move forward, so that issues do not need to be called out repeatedly. Drawing through your ellipses will help you to execute them smoothly, I noticed some places like the tail of the fox on the right of this page where some of your ellipses look a touch hesitant and wobbly.

• I'm happy to see that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction throughout the set. You're inconsistent about applying a contour curve at each joint to show how the sausage forms intersect. This suggests that you understand how to do so, but perhaps may be forgetting them sometimes. These little curves might seem insignificant but they are a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of these constructions so please remember to include them in future. You may find these curves easier to draw if you allow a more generous overlap between your sausage forms.

• 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 even 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.

• As a bit of a bonus on constructing paws, I'd like you 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. Try using this strategy for constructing paws in future, instead of trying to capture all of the complexity of the foot and the toes in one go, and having it fall flat as a result.

• You're still filling in form shadows on some of your constructions, such as along the underside of the neck and antlers of this deer. Remember that we're focusing on cast shadows only, and that for a cast shadow to exist there needs to be a form to cast the shadow and another surface to receive it. This video provides an explanation on the difference between form shadows and cast shadows.

The first area I wanted to get into in a bit more detail is additional masses. I'm happy to see that you've used this tool to build onto your constructions quite liberally, and that you've been experimenting with applying them in different ways. The results are a bit mixed, as it can be quite tricky to figure out how to design each mass so that it connects to the existing structures in a way that feels convincing and 3D.

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, with that in mind I've taken your page of hybrids and marked up a couple of issues I saw occurring intermittently across the set, as well as highlighting an example of one of your masses that was spot on. In red I'd traced over a number of forms that were incomplete. Remember when we're drawing a new form to add to our construction it should have its own fully-enclosed silhouette. In purple I pointed out a couple of places where you'd introduced unexplained complexity to your additional masses, which will make them appear flatter.

In this image I've redrawn some of the masses (and the foot) ensuring each one has a complete silhouette that establishes how it connects to the existing surfaces. Notice with the large mass above the shoulder how I've pulled it down around the side of the body and introduced a very specific inward curve where it presses against the top of the protruding shoulder mass, effectively interlocking them and helping to anchor the additional mass to the construction. Those bulky shoulder and thigh masses we draw in with ellipses are a goldmine for this sort of thing, and while they are not always easy to observe in the reference, they are usually present due to the amount of musculature in this area that is needed to help the animal to walk.

We can continue this process further, as shown here where I'd drawn in more of the remaining masses in purple, followed by green. Once a mass is in place it becomes part of the existing structure, and any more masses we add in that area should wrap around its surfaces accordingly. Notice on top of the rump where I had previously pointed out an unexplained inward curve, how we can create a similar impression by layering multiple masses, and allowing each one to stay simple where it is exposed to fresh air. This will help the construction to feel more solid than it would if we attempted to add too much complexity with a single mass.

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.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can.

It looks like you are somewhat familiar with this method, although sometimes you're pretty vague about the shape of your eye sockets- leaving gaps in them, and you hop between drawing eye sockets as pentagons (5 sides as shown in the demo) and hexagons (with six sides). Sometimes you do a good job of wedging the base of the muzzle snugly against the eye sockets, and sometimes you'll draw them over the top of one another like this which is a bit confusing, and will undermine the 3D illusion we're trying to create.

Sometimes it seems like the informal head demo 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.

On a fairly minor note, one thing that can help specifically when dealing with eyes, is to draw the eyelids themselves as their own separate additional masses (one for the upper lid and another for the lower lid). This can help us better focus on how they're actually wrapping around the eyeball itself, as shown here, much moreso than drawing the eyelids as single lines.

All right, I think that should cover it. I do hope that you'll take some time to go through this information and apply it to your practice, but these constructions coming along well so I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.