Hello WhiskerExpert123, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique. Thank you for letting me know that this is a redo, I'll be checking your work against your previous submission and the advice that you previously received.

Starting with your organic intersections Your forms are slumping around each other with a shared sense of gravity, and I'm happy to see that you're drawing through them as this helps reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

You're generally pushing your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, but do try to fill them in neatly and completely. You're allowed to use a brush pen or marker to help fill in cast shadows, if you want to.

My main suggestion for you here would be to draw your forms bigger. Your lines a bit cramped and busy within your stack of forms, and there is a lot of unused space on the page. Drawing bigger will encourage you to use your whole arm, and will help your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning.

Moving on to your animal constructions I'll be looking at the 5 topics Uncomfortable discussed in your previous critique:

1- Using the space on the page

2- Core construction

3- Additional masses

4- Leg construction

5- Head construction

Use of the space on the page.

I think the point about drawing bigger applies here too. This wolf is reasonably sized, but on many pages your drawings are pretty small. This was something Uncomfortable talked about in your previous submission. It looks like you did read and understand this, some of your drawings are a little bigger, and you've made a point of drawing two on a page instead of 4, but if we look at these deer they're just way too tiny for you to follow all the constructional steps and be able to see what you're doing. By drawing this small you're making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself.

I understand that some students naturally feel more comfortable drawing small, but the size of your drawings is a choice that you can make, and the more you practice drawing bigger the easier it will get.

Core construction.

From what I can see it looks like you're drawing though your ellipses more consistently now, good work.

The size and shape of your rib cage generally looks more appropriate now too, well done.

I noticed you often add 2, 3 or even 4 contour lines to your rib cage and pelvis masses. Adding a single contour line can help a great deal in your efforts to have a form feel 3D. The second however will help much less - but this still may be enough to be useful. The third, the fourth... their effectiveness and contribution will continue to drop off sharply, and you're very quickly going to end up in a situation where adding another will not help. Be sure to consider this when you go through the planning phase of the contour lines you wish to add. Ask yourself what they're meant to contribute.

You're a little inconsistent with how you incorporate your rib cage and pelvis together into the torso sausage. For example the raccoon at the top of this page has the torso sausage arching upwards. Uncomfortable already explained that we want the torso sausage to sag, because it is easier to add masses on top of the sausage than it is to try to paste them to the underside.

Another example, on these horses you appear to have pinched or squeezed the underside of the torso sausage upwards, instead of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here. This complexity undermines the solidity of the form, giving us something of a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of our construction.

Additional masses.

You're still using a lot of sharp corners in unexpected places.

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.

Now, we do use sharp corners on additional masses, but they occur in specific places, as a response to that soft ball of clay being deformed as it presses against the underlying structures of your construction. I've redrawn some of your masses on this horse. In blue I made the mass of the shoulders and thighs bigger and simpler. We'll talk more on legs later, but these blue ellipses are a simplification of some of the big muscles involved in locomotion, and we can use these to help wrap our additional masses around, to help make them feel stable and secure. We get these inward curves and corners specifically where the additional mass interacts with another structure. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Leg construction

I can see you're doing a much better job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms for your basic leg structures, good job! Some of them are elliptical on the horse at the bottom left of this page but on the whole its a big step in the right direction.

You're not very consistent about applying the contour curve at the joints as shown in the instructions here. In many cases I think you may have missed the contour curve because there wasn't enough overlap between your sausage forms to add it. Remember to overlap the sausage forms more, so you can add this contour curve, such a small mark might seem inconsequential but it does a lot to reinforce your 3D structure, and to tell the viewer how the forms are oriented in space.

In general, I am noticing a tendency to lay down your sausage structures more like bones, keeping them relatively thin even when the animal's legs are much thicker all the way around. Remember that what we're doing here is no different from constructing insects, or plants - we're not concerned with the fact that there's actual anatomy inside, just with the forms we can see. Therefore the presence of bones - at least in what we're doing in this course - doesn't matter. Instead, we draw our sausages such that they fill in as much of the structure as they can while still maintaining the characteristics of simple sausages. Then we can build up whatever other bulk is necessary (which may have been too irregular and have thrown off the simple sausage points) using additional masses.

Head construction.

I'm going to repeat the advice from your previous critique, before talking more specifically about your work.

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.

Okay, looking through your work I can see that you're certainly trying to apply construction to your heads, but in most cases your efforts are being undermined by how small your drawings are. I took one of your clearer head constructions and drew over it here to show what changes you could make to follow the method shown in the informal head demo more closely.

I can see you put a great deal of time and effort into your homework. Your drawings are well observed, I can see that you're studying your references carefully and extracting a lot of information from them, you do have the potential to do an amazing job here in this lesson.

At the moment when it comes to texture and detail I can see a bit of a tendency for you to copy what you see without really considering if what you're drawing is texture or colour, this is evident in the visible stripes on these tigers. I'd recommend that you review these reminders from the texture section of lesson 2.

Conclusion You've made a lot of progress! I am going to ask you for some revisions, to help you to apply the feedback that you have received, so that you can get the most out of these exercises in the future. You may need to read through all the information in this critique (and your previous one) a few times, and refer back to it frequently as you complete these revisions. It may be a good idea for you to take some notes from your previous critiques and put them somewhere visible as a reminder when you’re working through these exercises. Putting things down in your own words may help you to understand and remember what is being asked of you. It may also be worth your time to revisit this video which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox. Of course if anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.

Please complete 6 pages of animal constructions. You may choose what animals you would like to draw. In addition, I'd like you to stick to the following restrictions:

1- Only draw 1 animal construction per page. Draw it as big as you can without going off the edge of the page. Right now the small size of your drawings is undermining your efforts.

2- The first 4 pages should be construction only. Construction is the main focus of this lesson and I think adding texture is currently distracting you from what you really need to work on. You may add texture to the last 2 pages if you'd like, but it is optional.