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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along quite well, you're keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and most of them are slumping and sagging over one another, coming to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported. I'm happy to see that you're projecting your shadows boldly, so that they clearly cast onto the surfaces below.

Here are a few things I spotted that could be improved:

• The form on the far right of this page appears precariously balanced, like it might fall off the pile at any moment. We want all the forms in the piles to feel stable.

• I've circled some areas on this page where I wasn't sure if you were adding form shadows, or if your additional line weight got really thick and aggressive. Remember we're drawing cast shadows only, and that additional line weight should be kept subtle.

• Remember to draw around the small ellipses on the tips of your forms two full times before lifting your pen off the page.

Moving on to your animal constructions, it looks like you're investing a good bit of time into these constructions, and you're making progress towards fitting the pieces of your constructions together like a 3D puzzle.

There is a fair bit of advice I can share with you that I hope will help you with your future constructions, let's start by tackling those major masses you talked about having difficulty with.

Core construction

It can be quite challenging to judge where and how big to draw these first major forms. You're doing pretty well with the cranial ball and the pelvis mass, it looks like what is throwing you off in most of these is the ribcage. As discussed in this section of the lesson intro page, the ribcage should occupy roughly half the torso length. On many of your constructions you'd drawn the ribcage as a sphere, which resulted in it coming out too short. As an example I've redrawn the ribcage on this horse to show how to use a longer ellipse that occupies half the torso length. Aside from that, the core construction is pretty good on this page, as you'd combined the ribcage and pelvis masses together into a simple "torso sausage." On the second Oryx the core construction seems to have got a bit muddled up, as the torso sausage gets cut off where it passes behind the legs, suggesting that the legs were drawn first. Try to stick to the order of construction shown in the demos, it will help you build your constructions in a logical manner, and avoid this sort of confusion. Here are corrections to the core construction of the oryx, making the ribcage larger, and completing the silhouette of the torso sausage.

Leg construction

I should also touch on leg construction. It looks like you're making a real effort to apply the sausage method of leg construction as was requested in your previous critique. You're not always sticking to sausage forms, for example the hind legs of the bearded dragon mostly consist of ellipses, which are rather stiff. You're also a bit inconsistent about applying a contour curve at each joint, to show how the sausage forms intersect. You'll find these curves drawn in red on this oryx. On the same image I also added a blue ellipse at the top of the hind leg, indicating the bulky thigh mass, which is pretty much the same idea as how you'd constructed the shoulder. You can find an explanation of shoulder and thigh construction in this section of the wolf demo.

Working in 3D

The next point I need to talk about is a bit of a recap of something we covered in your lesson 4 critique. Hopefully you will recall that we went over how to build constructions "in 3D" and introduced the following rule to help you to only take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion we seek to create: "Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape."

Now, while I can see that you've been more respectful of the solidity of your forms (you don't often cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn) you do sometimes hop back into working in 2D by extending off existing forms with one off lines and partial shapes. You can find a few examples noted on your horse. Keep striving to only take actions on these constructions "in 3D" by drawing complete new forms wherever you want to build or change something, and by establishing how the new forms connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I think in some places you're making small alterations to the silhouettes of your forms by tracing around your construction to add extra line weight. This softens the distinctions between your forms, flattening them out somewhat. Instead, additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps between your forms, and restricted to localised areas where those overlaps occur, as discussed in this video.

Additional masses

In lesson 5 we introduce the idea of additional masses to provide students with a tool to help them use additional forms to flesh out their basic construction and add complexity as needed. I'm happy to see you're exploring the use of additional masses on your constructions, though as noted with the masses on this horse there is scope to be more intentional with the design of their silhouettes.

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.

You can see this in action on this oryx where I've drawn several additional masses, mostly to replace partial shapes or one-off lines. Notice with the two purple masses on top f the torso, that I've pulled them down around the side of the body and pressed them against the protruding masses of the shoulder and thigh (the blue ellipses from earlier). The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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. 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.

Other notes

As a quick bonus I'd like to share 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

Some of your application of texture is coming along well, though there are a couple of places where you're decorating your drawings by leaning into form shading, such as under the neck of your Mongolian horse, or copying colour patterns, such as the spots on one of your seals. If you're unsure why I'm calling these out as issues, please revisit your lesson 4 critique, where I talked about how to approach texture in this course.

This isn't a criticism of your work, but it is worth noting that seals aren't really quadrupeds. Their limbs are primarily adapted for swimming, and when on land true seals are unable to walk on four feet as their hind limbs consist of an-unrotatable rear flipper. Instead they have to ungulate their bodies to produce forward movement. This isn't actually a problem for your submission, as your two random animal pages, the tortoise and the bearded dragon, do walk on four legs.

Conclusion

All right, I've called out quite a few points to work on here, so I will be assigning some revisions for you to work towards tackling these points. This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and you may need to spend a fair bit of time reading through it all, and revisiting the various sections I've linked. Once you've had chance to absorb this information you'll find your revisions below.