Hello MajorLee12, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections, nice work. Your forms have a good sense of volume to them, and I can see that you’re thinking about how gravity will pull the forms down and cause them to slump over one another into a position where they are stable and supported.

You’re projecting your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the surfaces below, but remember the shadows should be projected away from a single consistent light source for the whole pile. As I’ve noted directly on your work here, sometimes you’ll have one form casting shadows in multiple directions, or another casting no shadows at all. This inconsistency will confuse the viewer, undermining their belief in this little 3D world that you’re trying to create.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall I think you’re doing a great job. I’m really pleased to see that you’ve been striving to build up your constructions like 3D puzzles, and it looks like there’s a fair bit of growth occurring across the set. I’ve got a few pieces of advice to offer, but I expect this is going to be a bit shorter than your lesson 4 critique.

So, your constructions are developing in the right direction, most of the time you’re doing really well at constructing new forms wherever you want to add to your constructions or change something, but I did see a few spots where you’d extended the silhouettes of existing forms with a one-off line, making a quick addition in 2D space, like here on this horse’s cheek. I’m pretty sure this was a lapse in concentration, rather than not understanding how to construct it in 3D, but just in case here is how we could construct a complete form instead. By doing so we define a specific 3D relationship between the new addition and the existing structures, helping to support the 3D illusion.

It looks like you’ve got more comfortable with the sausage method of leg construction, and are applying it well. I wanted to mention that you’re off to a great start with using additional forms to build up complexity along your leg armatures but there is a way we can push the method even further. A lot of these additions focus primarily on forms 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, on another student's work. 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.

When you design the shape of your additional masses you’ll usually apply the logic shown in this diagram, where you’ll 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.

With that in mind, avoid any cases where you end up with inward curves along the outer edge of a given mass (where there's nothing to press in on it to create that inward curve). If it is necessary to build up an inward curve there, this can be done by layering multiple masses as shown here.

One thing I did notice with quite a few masses was that while you were quite willing to wrap them around your basic torso and leg sausage structures, in some cases you seem to be avoiding having additional masses overlap and wrap around one another in 3D space. If we take a look at your fish for example, you’ve got a series of additional masses along its back that get cut off where they pass behind one another. Give each mass a complete silhouette, and if they need to overlap, allow them to do so in 3D. I’ve included a couple of diagrams there to illustrate the difference.

On the same image I’ve called out how sometimes your linework gets a little loose and sketchy, particularly when constructing heads. Rather than implying the presence of the eye sockets, or the structure of the muzzle, by drawing parts of them, it helps to construct them fully, as specifically as you can. Remember these are just exercises designed to help you improve your understanding of how forms fit together in 3D space, so don’t worry about whether the drawing looks appealing.

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. These pages appear to be hitting a lot of the right notes, but the photo is a little too blurry to tell exactly. Sometimes it seems like the informal head demo 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, if you run into a situation where part of your construction won’t fit on the page, such as the bear on the left here, it helps to “cap off” the forms with an ellipse instead of running them off the page as pairs of lines and leaving them open-ended. You can see Uncomfortable using this strategy with the tail in the running rat demo.

Another thing I notice when looking at that page, is that you were doing an excellent job of using box-like forms to introduce structure to the feet, but when you added the toes it looks like this was done by adding one-off lines or partial shapes (in 2D). I’d like you to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. That would allow you to keep working in 3D, even for these smaller structures.

All right, I think that should cover it. You’ve done a good job and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep up the good work. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.