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

I believe this section of lesson 1 answers your question. Strive to use your whole arm for all constructional lines in your homework, but feel free to use your wrist for adding texture.

Starting with your organic intersections these are working nicely. You're keeping your forms simple which helps them to feel solid and 3D, and you're doing a good job of piling your forms up in a manner that makes them feel stable and supported, as you usually allow your forms to slump and sag over one another with a sense of gravity.

You're doing a good job with your shadows, you're projecting them boldly enough to cast onto the surfaces below, and you appear to be trying to follow a consistent light source.

In future, make sure you're taking your time with your contour curves, giving each individual line your best effort, even if the exercise demands a lot of lines. Some of your contour curves just look a tad careless compared to your organic forms with contour curves exercise from the previous lesson.

Remember you should be drawing around all your ellipses 2 full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This applies to the small ellipses on the tips of your forms. This leans into the arm's natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute the ellipses smoothly. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse freehanded in this course as introduced here.

Moving on to your animal constructions, as we have discussed previously there are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Unfortunately many of these constructions appear to have been starved of both these factors, and as a result you're not getting as much out of these exercises as you should be. We've been over space before, and as for time, make sure you're giving yourself as much time as you require to go though all the lesson instructions, carefully observe your references, and to plan each mark carefully, making full use of the ghosting method for each one. In all honesty some aspects of some of these pages appear to be a step backwards from what you have previously demonstrated that you're capable of here on one of your lesson 4 revision pages, as you've relapsed on a few issues we've previously addressed. My role as a TA is to help clarify things students may not understand from the lesson material, not as a replacement for a student's own effort in going through the lesson, or to nanny students into actually applying things they already know. It is not uncommon for students to forget things if they take a break between lessons and spread them out over a long period of time, however that doesn't seem to be the case here, as you submitted this lesson almost immediately after the 14 day cool-down. So the logical conclusion I'm led to here is that you may be (perhaps without even realising it) rushing your work. I'd like you to take some time to re-watch this video which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox, and what your responsibilities as a student are.

Using space on the page

As I think you're fully aware that most of your constructions came out too small (leading to issues like being unable to follow any of the head construction methods shown in the lesson to any recognisable degree) let's discuss a couple of strategies you can employ to help draw your next batch of constructions larger.

• All your pages are portrait format (the long edge of the page is vertical) but if your intent is to draw a single quadruped construction on the page it is going to generally make sense to rotate the page 90 degrees and draw on it with a landscape format (the long edge being horizontal). As the majority of quadrupeds being viewed from the side are longer than they are tall, this will help you make better use of the space on the page.

• To make your constructions larger, you're going to need to start with larger ellipses for the cranial ball, ribcage and pelvis mass. Something that can help with the size and placement of these first ellipses is to think about how tall the body is relative to the length of the legs. By observing this proportion in the reference, we can gauge how much space we'll need to leave beneath the rib cage ellipse to have room to construct the legs. Let's say the length of the leg is about equal to the height of the body for a given animal, in this case we'd draw the rib cage ellipse with enough space bellow it to fit one more ellipse of the same size, to leave room for the legs. If you're able to fit in three ellipses the same size under your rib cage, then you'll be leaving lots of space on the paper unused.

Taking actions in 3D

During your lesson 4 critique we introduced the following rule to help you to reinforce the 3D illusion of your constructions as you build them: Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Unfortunately you appear to be ignoring this rule on many of your constructions, this album contains a few examples where I've marked in red where you'd cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you had already drawn, undermining their solidity. I've marked in blue a few examples where you had extended off existing forms with one off lines or partial shapes, not providing enough information for the viewer (or you) to understand how those additions are supposed to connect to the existing structures in 3D space. Instead of altering the silhouettes of your forms in this manner, you should focus on building complete additional forms wherever you want to add to your construction or alter something. We'll talk more about this in the additional masses section of your feedback.

Additional Lineweight

On the last image in the above album, of one of your hybrids, I think some of those smaller cuts and extensions are occurring accidentally, where you'd traced back over the silhouette with a pass of additional line weight. Adding line weight across several forms in this manner makes little cuts and extensions between your forms, softening the distinctions between them, leaving you with a flatter construction. Additional line weight should not be used to reinforce the whole silhouette, it is best reserved for clarifying overlaps between your forms, and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur, as discussed in this video.

Leg construction

The last point we've covered previously is using the sausage method of leg construction. You're using sausage forms to build quite a few of your legs constructions, though there are some places where your leg forms are becoming stretched spheres (which as noted on the lower left of the sausage method diagram is something to avoid, as they're too stiff) and there are cases where you're even drawing around them twice, like ellipses. There are also cases like the hybrid at the top of this page where you appear to be drawing arbitrary shapes in an effort to capture the whole leg in one step. By sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms we can build a foundation that feels solid and 3D- over-complicating these forms is going to make it more difficult to understand how they exist in 3D space, so they will feel flat. Once the simple sausages are in place we can build all kind of lumps b,umps and complexity onto them with additional forms, to arrive at a more characteristic construction of the leg in question. You can see a good example of this in this ant leg demo.

On some of your pages, such as these bears you'd added a bunch of extra contour curves to the surface of individual sausage forms. By leveraging a contour line at each joint to show how the sausage forms intersect as highlighted in red here we make the use of additional contour lines on the surface of individual forms redundant.

All righty, that should cover all the things that have lapsed from previous lessons. We're about an hour into this critique, which is standing at over a thousand words, but I still have a few points to get to, covering specific things which are introduced in lesson 5.

Core construction

It is good that you're starting your constructions off with simple forms for the cranial ball, ribcage and pelvis masses. Keep in mind that the ribcage should occupy roughly half the length of the torso, there are a few constructions such as the bear at the bottom of this page where the ribcage is enormous. I'd like you to review this section which introduces how to combine the ribcage and pelvis masses into a "torso sausage" as quite often you'll connect the two masses with a line on the top side, but leave the underside open, giving yourself a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of your construction.

You're showing that you understand how to connect the cranial ball to the torso with a simple solid neck, although you don't always do so. This is an important step to remember, so don't leave the cranial ball floating in front of the body.

Additional masses

Where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building onto our constructions with complete additional forms, here in lesson 5 we introduce additional masses as a tool to help students design their additional forms more specifically, establishing believable relationships between existing structures and new ones.

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.

I've provided a couple of quick additional notes for additional masses on one of your bison here. Notice how I've pulled the additional mass above the neck down from on top of the spine, around the side of the body, and pressed it against the top of the protruding shoulder mass, creating a specific inward curve. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. Also notice that I have not applied any additional contour lines to the additional mass to make it feel 3D. Our goal here is to get the masses to feel 3D by designing their silhouette in a manner that explains how they connect to the existing structures in 3D space.

As your use of additional masses is a bit sparse (you tend to favour altering the silhouettes of your forms with one off lines instead) I don't have that much to go on here, and I'm hoping I'll be able to provide more comprehensive advice with your next batch of constructions.

Head Construction

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. 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.

As a quick bonus to help you with tackling seated or reclining poses (such as what you tried out with your cats) I'd like to share this fox demo I made as part of another student's critique. This shows how to tackle poses where the legs are overlapping and foreshortened, as well as providing an example for how to use the sausage method of leg construction, additional masses, and the informal head demo method of head construction.

Conclusion

I'm certain you have every ability to do a great job with this lesson, but right now you don't appear to be making full use of the information at your disposal. This feedback is, by necessity, very dense, and I expect you will need to read through it all several times, and possibly take notes in your own words to help absorb it all. Once you have had some time to go through all the information here, and in your lesson 4 critique, I'd like you to complete some revisions to work on the various issues I've called out here. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Stick to one construction per page, making every effort to use as much of the space available as you can.

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 6 pages of animal constructions.