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

Starting with your organic intersections you've done a great job of drawing your forms slumping and sagging over one another with a shared sense of gravity. The piles feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from the piles and nothing would wobble off, nicely done.

Something that could do with some attention is your markmaking. I've circled a few examples here that represent different variations of a similar issue- you're not always committing to marks you have already made, and are attempting to make corrections. The area I've circled in red contains a section of the top form that has two possible interpretations of its silhouette. It could be sitting snugly against the forms below, or possibly there is a gap. You've also redrawn the contour curves in this section. This forces the viewer to choose which line they think is correct, and whichever one they choose there will always be another one present on the page to contradict that decision, undermining the 3D illusion, and reminding the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat piece of paper. The line I've circled in green took me a moment to understand its purpose, but it looks like the form at the bottom of the pile was originally longer and you changed your mind about how big to make it. You must commit to a form once it is on the page, it cannot be ignored or discarded, think of it like a real, solid water balloon. Furthermore, the ghosting method emphasises the importance of making one mark only. Correcting mistakes isn't actually helpful, given that the end result of the exercise is far less relevant and significant than the actual process used to achieve it. Rather, having a habit of correcting your mistakes can lean into the idea of not investing as much time into each individual stroke, and so it's something that should be avoided in favour of putting as much time as is needed to executing each mark to the best of your current ability.

The area I've circled in blue looks less like a deliberate attempt to correct your lines, and more like generally being loose and sketchy. Remember as introduced in the principles of markmaking marks should be continuous and unbroken. Be sure to draw from your shoulder, often these short choppy marks are a symptom of students reverting to drawing from their wrist or elbow. The orange area looks like you may have been attempting to add line weight. I'd like you to take a look at these notes on how to apply line weight. Usually a single ghosted super imposed stroke will be enough to get the desired effect.

Your shadows are coming along pretty well, you're projecting them boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, and I'm seeing that you're considering how the curvature of those surfaces will affect the shape of the shadows. I've highlighted in blue here what appears to me to be a form shadow, you may find it helpful to review this video where Uncomfortable discusses the difference between form shadows and cast shadows.

Moving on to your animal constructions there are some things that are working well- it is good to see you've drawing through most of your forms, and great to see you've fully constructed the far side legs (even though this isn't shown in many of the demos) as this will help you to figure out how your forms connect together in 3D space and push you into developing your spatial reasoning skills. There are however some points to address before you can really get the most out of what this lesson has to offer.

The first of these featured quite heavily in the feedback of your lesson 4 work. One of our primary objectives for these constructions is to create the illusion that the drawing is 3D, we want you and the viewer to believe this lie. To do this, it is important not to take any actions on your constructions that undermine this 3D illusion, and to that end we introduced the following rule- "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." In this diagram Uncomfortable shows examples of the various actions we can take on a sphere. When working on organic constructions in this course we ask students to work solely by addition in 3D. You can find a fuller explanation on this and links to several diagrams and demos of how to do this by reviewing your lesson 4 critique.

Unfortunately there are places where you've taken actions in 2D on every single construction in this set. Here I've marked on one of your birds in red where it looks like you've cut back inside the ball form you had established for the head, and in blue where you extended the construction with one-off lines. There are some other places where this construction has been extended in 2D, but as these appear to be attempts to build additional forms we will discuss them and show a more effective way to handle them later in this critique.

I've given this deer the same treatment, marking cuts in red, and some examples of flat extensions in blue. The area I've circled on the foot has been drawn 4 times, causing the issue we went over in relation to the organic intersections- flattening the construction by confusing the viewer. Remember to take your time and use the ghosting method for every line, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.

So- if extending the silhouette of your forms with one-off lines flattens them out, how do we build onto our basic constructions to make them more closely resemble the animal we're drawing? This is where additional masses become incredibly valuable.

It is good to see that you've explored building additional masses onto most of your constructions. 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, as promised, here I've drawn some complete additional forms on your bird, in places where you were definitely thinking of drawing additional forms, but didn't quite give each one its own complete fully enclosed silhouette.

For thinking about the design of additional masses I'd like you to take a look at this draw over on your deer.

I started by making the shoulder larger- with the blue ellipse. Remember that the legs of quadrupeds attach to the sides of the body, not the bottom. We also use this ellipse as a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, so don't be afraid to make it bigger.

In red I've redrawn your additional masses, and there are 3 points to note here:

• I've wrapped the masses around the underlying structures quite boldly, giving them a firm grip. There's a tendency for quite a few of your additional masses to be perched on top, or stuck to the edges of your constructions, which can make them feel precariously balanced, like they might wobble off if the animal were to move.

• I've made use of the shoulder mass (with the additional mass under the belly) and the thigh mass (with the additional mass on to of the rump) as structures to wedge the additional masses against. Notice the specific inward curves where I've pushed additional masses against the shoulder and thigh and wrapped them around. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• Thirdly, notice none of the additional masses have any additional contour curves drawn on them. I noticed that you often add quite a few extra contour curves 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 on additional masses 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).

In green I have also redrawn some of the flat extensions I highlighted on the legs earlier, using additional forms instead.

Speaking of legs, it is good to see you sticking with the sausage method of leg construction here. You're missing the contour curves for the intersections where these sausage forms connect together in 3D space, which was something I brought up in your lesson 4 feedback. These little curves might seem insignificant, but they are 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.

Moving down to feet, here you're fairly prone to reverting to working in 2D by drawing one-off lines and partial shapes. Remember each addition should be a complete form. I think you may find it helpful to study these notes on foot construction that show how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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. It does look like you're thinking about how the various pieces of your head constructions fit together in 3D space. It also looks like the quality of your markmaking deteriorates when you get to the smaller pieces of head constructions- there are quite a lot of choppy little scratchy marks where lines should be continuous, and I think my earlier advice about going through each stage of the ghosting method for each line applies here.

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

This feedback is, by necessity, quite dense, and I'd like you to take as much time as you need to read it thoroughly, as well as reviewing the relevant sections of lesson material and your lesson 4 critique. You may also want to take some notes in your own words to remind yourself of what to work on. Once you've done that I'd like you to complete some extra pages to address the points I've raised here. 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.