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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along well. You're drawing the forms such that they feel solid, with a strong impression of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another, and your cast shadows are bold and follow the surface of the forms upon which they're cast, rather clinging to the forms. One small thing though - remember that the farther contour curves along a sausage's length should be wider - right now you tend to draw them with roughly the same degree, or have them get narrower at the far end of the form.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your regard for general construction shows clear attention being paid towards the relationships between your different forms, and defining them clearly. You're doing a good job of building up your constructions using complete forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes.

Your design of these additional forms' silhouettes is coming along reasonably well, and I'm seeing some growth across the set. 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'm happy to see places like the chest of this horse where you've taken a large addition along the chest and built it by layering multiple masses together, allowing each one to stay simple where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press against it. It is not uncommon for students to try to achieve too much with a single mass and have it fall flat, so it is nice to see you using multiple masses here.

I did spot a couple of ways that I think the design of some of your additional masses could be improved, and I've marked out some examples on this bison. Sometimes (although not often) you seem to actively avoid introducing any complexity to a mass, such as the one I've traced over in red, leaving them soft and rounded all the way around their silhouette. This lack of complexity robs us of the tool we need to explain how the mass connects to the underlying structures, so it looks a little flat as a result. Something i see a little more frequently, with the masses I'd traced over in purple, is a tendency to have your additional masses overlap with the underlying structures just slightly, and have the additional mass' silhouette run parallel to the edge of the underlying forms for long distances. This can leave the additional mass leaving precariously balanced, or flimsily attached, like it might wobble off if the animal were to move. Instead, as I've shown on your work here, we can pull the additional masses more boldly around the surfaces of the existing forms, giving them a firmer grip on the construction. You'll also see that I've introduced some specific sharp corners to the mass that was previously traced over in red, giving it a clearer relationship to the torso sausage.

The other edits I made here were to construct a neck, to explain how the head connects to the torso (in green) and to enlarge the shoulder mass (in blue). We can think of the shoulder and thigh masses as a simplification of the bulky muscles we find in this area, which will be present in most quadrupeds as they help the animal to walk and run. By being more generous with the shoulder mass, we can use this protruding structure as a very helpful element for anchoring additional masses to the construction. Notice the specific inward curve in the purple mass on top of the shoulder area, where I've pressed it up against the shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Moving on to your leg constructions, 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.

You're making pretty good use of the sausage method of leg construction, though I do notice a tendency for some of your legs to come out a little stiff. Study your reference carefully to find the subtle curvature of the limb segments. It's not always obvious, but by including a subtle curve to the leg sausages we can introduce a sense of gesture or flow to the construction. Here is an example using red arrows to show the curvature of the leg sections in one of your horse references.

In general I'm seeing a strong focus on the 3D aspect of your constructions, and that's coming along really well, though I feel there is some room for improvement on the observational side of things. This is actually not uncommon - when students start focusing very heavily on their construction, it often can mean that they're unintentionally pulling time from the other areas, like observation or going through the instructions. You're doing great with the instructions, but there are areas where your observation falters somewhat. There are some constructions where the length or position of the legs, squirrel tails, or sometimes the orientation of the head, ends up being somewhat different to your reference material. Not a huge problem, as our goal is not to replicate the reference perfectly, but to construct something that feels solid and 3D, but it can suggest that more time should probably have been spent observing in between drawing actions, so that the forms you put down were more directly informed by what was actually there.

When it comes to observation, there is one trick that Uncomfortable doesn't delve into in the course (due to its focus on 2D shapes, with can be misinterpreted by students pretty easily, so at least for now he hasn't included it), but which can be very useful for those who aren't sure how to focus their observation. As shown on the same horse image, we can focus on the "negative shapes" that occur between the different forms in our reference, and keep this in mind when laying out the structures of our actual construction. Note in particular how I'm working completely with straight edges - this allows me to be very specific with those shapes, and thus gives me something more concrete to keep in mind when constructing. Conversely, the reference itself on its own can have a lot of little curves and blobby areas that are just too vague and complex. Sticking with straight lines helps us simplify everything down to the most important, meaningful information, so that it's more manageable to keep in our heads.

As a quick 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.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. I can see that you're fairly familiar with the construction method shown in this informal head demo, and are pulling elements of it into your various head constructions. This is great, as across the various head demos in this lesson, the informal head demo is 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.

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.

Keep striving to employ this method in its entirety, as closely as you can. I'm seeing that you're doing a good job of wedging the base of the muzzle snugly against the eye sockets, but you'll often leave out buttressing the brow ridge/forehead plane against the top of the eyes sockets, as shown in step 5 of the demo. 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.

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 trying to draw a single "eye" shape and having that conform to the eyeball's curvature.

All right, I think that should cover it. You've done a great job with this lesson so I'll go ahead and mark it as complete. We're currently holding a promptathon (which I'd love to see you take part in) but once that is over you can feel free to move onto the cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.