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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are looking great. You're drawing the forms such that they convey a believable impression of gravity as it presses down on the forms, causing them to slump and sag to either side.

When adding your cast shadows it will help if you remember to include them on the ground plane too. Right now your piles look like they're floating in space, which makes it harder to understand how the piles are supported.

Moving on to your animal constructions, you're showing that your spatial reasoning skills are coming along well, for the most part you're building these constructions from solid forms and fitting these pieces together in a manner that feels convincingly 3D. These are heading in the right direction, and I have a few pieces of advice to offer you that I hope will help you get even more out of these exercises in future.

You're doing a good job building your constructions with solid forms. Sometimes you undermine this solidity a little by coming back with additional line weight across several forms and allowing the line weight to make a little "bridge" between the forms, smoothing out the silhouette. This has the effect of taking your specific forms and stuffing them inside a fuzzy sock. It softens the distinctions between forms and makes the construction a little mushy. Instead of trying to modify the construction with line weight, we want to use an additional form whenever we want to alter the silhouette. Here are a couple of examples on your bear.

Your major masses are well proportioned and confidently drawn. When you combine the rib cage and pelvis mass into a "torso sausage" remember it should have a slight sag in the middle, as discussed in this section. Here is how this might look on your horse. Drawing it straight across tends to look stiff.

Where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building onto our constructions with additional forms, here in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how to design the silhouette of these additional forms. 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.

I can see this logic at play in a number of areas in your work, which is great. There is some scope for improvement, and I've used your horse as an example for the various points I wanted to call out.

A- Here I've taken the additional mass on top of the rump, and redrawn it, allowing it to interact with the bulky thigh mass. I've used a specific inward curve where the additional mass pushes against the top of the thigh. Then we can transition smoothly between curves to wrap the mass around the torso sausage. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

B- There are two things going on here. Where you had one long mass along the top of the neck and shoulder that had an inward curve pressed into it where it was exposed to fresh air, I've broken it into two masses. This allows each piece to stay simpler where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press against it. Take note that I've drawn both pieces with their own complete silhouettes, and where they overlap, they do so in 3D space. Please don't cut your masses off where they pass behind one another, as this makes it harder for the viewer (and you) to understand how they relate to each other in 3D space.

C- This point is specific to legs. I'm honestly very pleased to see that you've been working with the sausage method of leg construction throughout this lesson, and you're usually applying it well. Here is one example of something I saw on a couple of pages, which is a tendency to distort the uppermost leg section away from the properties of a simple sausage form. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer to understand how it exists in 3D space. So- we keep the sausages simple, then build on top of the sausages with additional forms as needed. I wanted to mention that you're off to a good start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these 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, 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.

D- Sometimes some of your masses (most notably the smaller ones on the legs) will stay soft and rounded all the way around their silhouette. This lack of complexity doesn't quite allow us to explain how the additional mass attaches to the underlying structures, leaving us with a blob that looks like it has been pasted on like a sticker. We want to be specific about how we design these additional masses, even when they are small. Sometimes you'll introduce a corner to these smaller masses that appears somewhat offset, we want to hook the corner along the edge of the sausage's silhouette, to give the illusion that the additional mass is wrapping around it.

E- Another thing to note in regards to these additional masses is that adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasise the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships, and they also suffer from diminishing returns where a bunch may not be any more impactful than just one. As such, it's always important to ask yourself for every mark you want to put down, "what is the purpose of this mark", "how can I draw this mark so it accomplishes its goal as effectively as possible", and lastly - "are there any other marks that are already accomplishing this goal". I'll just pop this note in this section, I noticed on a few of your pages that you'd added a few extra contour curves to your leg sausages too. As noted in the sausage method diagram we only need one contour curve at each joint (where two sausage forms intersect) as adding more along individual sausages is unnecessary and tends to make the construction stiffer.

Let's take a moment to talk about feet. I think you may find it helpful 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. 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. 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.

Overall you're honestly not that far off, and I can see you working through similar principles when you approach head construction, and there are definitely areas where you're following the process shown in that informal demo at least in part - but bring it all together in the way the demo shows, and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise.

I did notice on some of you constructions, such as this deer that you tend to use straight lines where the base of the boxy muzzle form connects to the cranial ball. As the surface of the cranial ball is rounded, it will create a series of curving lines where the boxy muzzle form connects to it. Think about the nature of the intersection when connecting a box to a sphere in the form intersections exercise from back in lesson 2. Here is a quick visual example.

Oh, also worth mentioning - when drawing eyelids, it helps a lot to actually draw each eyelid as its own separate additional mass, wrapping them around the eyeball as shown here.

Okay, I think that covers it. You're doing a great job and I'll be marking this as complete. The 250 Cylinder Challenge is next, best of luck.

Happy Holidays.