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

Starting with your organic intersections you've done a good job of drawing your forms slumping and sagging over one another with a shared sense of gravity. Your forms feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from your piles and nothing would topple off, which is what we're aiming for, well done.

The form at the top of this page is getting a little bit wobbly and complex, focus on having your sausage forms feel inflated and heavy for this exercise, like well-filled water balloons.

Something that will help you to get more out of this exercise in future is to draw through all your forms. Drawing each form in its entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they pass behind another form will help you to get a better understanding of how these forms exist in 3D space. This isn't a mistake per se, but a bonus. If you watch the accompanying video, you'll see Uncomfortable demonstrates how to draw through your forms for this exercise.

Your shadows show that you're thinking about the curvature of the surfaces that the shadows are being cast onto, as well as the forms casting them, good work.

Moving on to your animal constructions before I get into the meat of this critique let's handle the questions you had about your major masses.

• On page 10, with your larger construction the rib cage is too small, it should occupy roughly half the length of the torso. The rib cage is more correctly proportioned in the thumbnails at the bottom of the page, with the angle appearing more natural in the upper iteration than the one right at the bottom.

• The angle between the rib cage and pelvis will vary between different animals, and what pose they're in in your reference. The area between these two masses can be quite flexible in certain animals, so just do your best to figure out how they're oriented on a case by case basis. Uncomfortable brings up these angles in the video to make students aware that it is something that they should think about and look for in their reference, not as a hard and fast rule to use the exact angle shown in his demo.

• Yes, for our purposes the pelvis mass is a squished ball.

You're keeping your mark making confident and purposeful throughout your pages, which is great, and I can see that you're developing an understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

I have a couple of other notes for your core construction.

• Don't forget to encapsulate rib cage and pelvis mass together with a torso sausage, as this is how we connect these major masses together in 3D space. I noticed if you draw a three-quarter angle and your major masses overlap on the page you'll sometimes skip connecting them with the torso sausage, as seen on this page of rhinos. You can see an example of applying the torso sausage to a foreshortened pose in this puma demo.

• This connecting stage is also necessary for joining the cranial ball to the body, remember to construct a simple, solid neck. If we look at your mouceros at the bottom of your page of hybrids as an example, the head is just floating in front of the body.

Some references are more appropriate than others. This photo is undeniably cute, but it also makes for a very difficult construction, with the spine being curled into a foreshortened position and most of the legs being hidden. Even though this is a tough pose, you should still approach it with the techniques taught in this lesson, constructing your major masses and connecting them together with a torso sausage and a neck. On this drawing You've got some construction for the head and the tail, but the body is a series of lines and partial shapes.

Remember the rule we introduced to help you to only take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion. Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes. Adding to your constructions with single lines and partial shapes doesn't really give enough information for the viewer to understand how these additions are meant to exist in 3D space.

For these constructional exercises please "draw through" your forms, instead of cutting them off where they get obscured by another form. Imagine that you're doing these drawings with "X-Ray Vision". This will reinforce your understanding of 3D space, and maintain the 3D illusion of your constructions. Wherever you draw a partial shape instead of a complete form, this undermines your 3D illusion instead.

The next thing I need to discuss is leg construction.

It's good to see that you're working on using the sausage method for constructing your legs, though there are some things to work on here.

1- Sometimes you're constructing your legs from ellipses or stretched spheres, for example with the rapaca at the top of this page. This is something to avoid, as noted on the lower left of the sausage method diagram because they make your construction stiff. Instead, try to stick to the properties of simple sausage forms as closely as you can.

2- You're fairly inconsistent about applying a contour curve at the joints, for the intersections where these sausage forms connect together in 3D space. Using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool. It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively. So, while these little curves might seem insignificant, it is important that you remember them in future.

3- It's good that you've experimented with building on your sausage armatures with additional forms on some of your pages. There a re a fair number of pages where you've left your sausage chains totally bare like this. Remember that the sausage method isn't about capturing the legs exactly as they are, but in laying down a foundation that captures both structure and gesture in equal measure. Once in place, it is usually necessary to build upon this base with additional forms to capture all the bony lumps or bulky muscular areas that cannot be captured with these simple sausage forms.

Here I've put some leg construction notes directly onto one of your rhinos to help you understand these points.

When it comes to constructing feet, I have some advice on how you can tackle the construction of the base foot structure, and then the toes. As shown here on another student's work, we can use boxy forms - 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 structured that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

Moving on, the next area to talk about is additional masses. It is good to see that you've explored using some additional masses on most of your constructions, and I can see that you're thinking about designing these masses in a way that defines their three dimensional relationship with the structures already present in your constructions, which is a really good start.

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, there are a few ways in which we could improve your use of additional masses to take your constructions to the next level.

• Sometimes you'll avoid certain kinds of complexity like sharp corners and inward curves - resulting in a lot of softer, rounded corners instead. Here is an example. Unfortunately this absence of complexity robs us of the very tools we need to use to establish contact between these 3D structures, instead making the masses appear flatter and more blobby. Take a look at this diagram which shows how to use sharp corners and inward curves to establish how an additional mass wraps around an underlying form.

• Avoid trying to achieve too much with a single mass and making them too complex, for example on the rump of this rhino The simpler a form is, the easier it is to make it feel solid and three dimensional. Where you wan to build multiple bumps onto your construction, use a separate mass of each one, as shown here.

• Pay attention to the underlying structures in your construction, and how they might influence the silhouette of your additional masses. On the same rhino construction you've got an additional mass above the shoulder area that runs straight across the shoulder mass. If we think about the forms that are present, that shoulder mass will protrude from the torso sausage, so when we add an additional mass on top is will press up against the shoulder and then curve inwards, ash shown here. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• I'm noticing that you often pile quite a lot of contour lines onto your additional masses, potentially the result of you realising that your additional masses feel flat, and trying to make them feel more three dimensional. Unfortunately those contour lines help a form feel more three dimensional on its own, in isolation - but does not solve the problem at hand, which is the lack of relationship being defined between the mass and the structure to which it is attaching. Furthermore, using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses, exacerbating the issue. So, I would actively avoid using contour lines in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

• While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, as seen on the upper legs of this alpaca, 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.

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:

1- 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.

2- 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.

3- 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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Conclusion

All right, you've made a good start, but I've given you a number of things to work on, and I will be assigning some revisions for you address these points before moving forward. For these I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• 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 4 pages of animal constructions. If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.