Hello 4kthom, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections on this page you're mostly drawing forms in front of one another, rather than piling them on top of each other in 3D space. Some of this is due to drawing forms parallel to each other and some of this is due to not wrapping them around the form below. Another point that should help you with this exercise, when drawing forms over one another try to avoid overlapping them at the peak of the lower form. This helps prevent your forms from looking like they're just drawn over one another as well as helps create the illusion that they're wrapping around each other. It sounds trickier than it actually is, here is a visual example.

It helps to make this exercise more manageable if you stick to simple sausage forms, for example the form on the lower right of this page is getting too complex. The simpler a form is, the easier it is to keep is feeling 3D.

This next point I'm not 100% sure on, but it looks like you may be trying to draw forms underneath a form you've already drawn. The first form you draw should be at the bottom of your pile, and you draw new forms piling them up on top, figuring out how the new forms wrap around what you have already drawn. This order is shown in the exercise instructions and the accompanying video. When you try to add forms underneath what you've already drawn it will either destabilise your pile, by lifting your earlier forms up into the air, or there won't be room for the new form to exist in the 3D space that you're trying to create.

The next point isn't necessarily a mistake, since it is not clearly defined in the instructions for this exercise. In future, it will help you develop your spatial reasoning skills if you draw each form in its entirety (drawing through) instead of allowing some of them to get cut off when they pass behind another form. You do draw through most of your forms, and that's great, but I've highlighted some examples of incomplete forms on your work here to illustrate the point.

Your shadows are shallow and hug the form casting them instead of being projected onto the form below. I've beefed them up a bit on one of your pages here. Note how I made a clear decision about where the light would come from, and projected the shadows away from that light source onto the form below.

Moving on to your animal constructions you're doing well at treating these constructions as exercises or puzzles to improve your spatial reasoning, and you're taking the majority of the actions on your constructions "in 3D" which is good to see.

You do occasionally pop in a quick extension to your constructions with a one-off line or partial shape instead of a form with its own complete silhouette. I've highlighted an example of this here on one of your rhinos. Really push yourself to make sure each new addition to your construction is a 3D form, in order to get the most out of these exercises.

Even small additions to your construction should be done with complete 3D forms as shown here.

Something that jumped out when I was looking through your work was the gap in the silhouette of this lizard on the tail. I know I've reprimanded you for repeating or redrawing lines before, but in this case it would be better to add to this line and close the gap in the silhouette (as you did on the tail of your other lizard. Leaving gaps in the silhouette leaves the viewer to decide for themselves where the edge of the construction will be, and reminds them that they're looking at lines on a 2D piece of paper instead of a 3D construction. Something else that struck me as odd about that tail was the presence of some contour ellipses which tell the viewer that the tail has a cylindrical cross section, which is great, but that there are also contour curves which communicate a larger cylindrical form occupying the same space on the page. This conflicting information can confuse the viewer. I've diagrammed on your work how we might go about extending the tail without contradicting the information that is already on the page.

Another confusing area I spotted was the hind leg of this horse which appears to have two separate chains of sausage forms occupying the same space at the same time. This breaks your 3D illusion by forcing the viewer to choose which version is correct, and whichever one they choose, the lines for the other will still exist on the page to contradict that illusion.

On this page your feet seem to be missing. I'm guessing the feet were hidden by long grass in your reference image. When this happens I recommend searching for a second or supplementary reference where the feet are visible and using that to add feet to your construction. As an extra added bonus, these notes on foot construction may help.

Something else I think may be missing is the far hind leg on your hybrid. I would usually expect to be able to see at least part of the other hind leg in a three-quarter view like this. Unless you intentionally designed your hybrid to be a 3 legged animal I would suggest you carefully consider the placement of all 4 legs when constructing quadrupeds in future.

When you make an addition to your construction, you want it to be connected to your underlying structures in a specific manner. I noticed that on this lizard the ellipse for the shoulder mass isn't attached to the body. I've redrawn part of the construction here to connect the leg to the body. While I was there I redrew the basic structure of the leg, which had been constructed from ellipsoid forms instead of sausages. I should also note that in most cases you will want to make your shoulder mass larger, and have it extend further up the sides of the body. This mass is a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that help the animal to walk, so don't be afraid to be generous with it.

You're generally doing well at using sausage forms to construct your legs, although you're inconsistent when it comes to applying a contour curve to define the intersection where 2 sausage forms join. These little contour curves might seem insignificant but they do tell the viewer a lot of information about how the forms are orientated in space as well as reinforcing the structure of your legs by establishing how the forms connect together. So try to remember to include them in future.

I'm really pleased to see you making liberal use of additional masses to build on the basic structures of your constructions throughout your pages.

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 noticed that on some of your constructions, like this lizard your additional masses overlap with the underlying structures juuuust slightly, and the edges of these two forms run almost parallel to each other. This can make those additional forms look precariously balanced, like they might topple off if the animal were to move. Instead, we wrap these additional masses around the existing structures. I've redrawn some of your masses here to demonstrate the concept. Notice the inward curve on the front mass, where I took the opportunity to wrap it around the shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. Notice that where I've drawn additional masses overlapping, they do so in 3D space. Each new form interacts with what is already on the page. It is great that you're not shy about pilling multiple masses on top of each other to build your constructions, though sometimes they seem to overlap in 2D, for example on the back and chest of this horse.

I've also redrawn a few masses on this rhino to give the mass above the shoulders a more specific silhouette (green arrows to show how I was thinking of wrapping it around everything that's already drawn) and to complete the silhouette of a few masses where I know you were thinking in 3D, but didn't quite complete the form.

I noticed that there are cases where you're using a lot of contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid, In particular with these bears - unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines 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).

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Your head constructions do get more solid and convincing as you progress through the set. 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.

Now, I have given you a number of things to work on here, so I will be assigning some revisions.

I'd like you to complete 1 page of organic intersections and 4 pages of animal constructions, please. For these, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Do not work on more than one construction in a given day. So if you happen to put the finishing touches on one, do not move onto the next until the following day. You are however welcome and encouraged to spread your constructions across multiple days or sittings if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability. That's not a matter of skill, it's a matter of giving yourself the time to execute each mark with care.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, as well as a rough estimate of how much time was spent on it.

These restrictions are designed to put you in the mindset to invest as much time as you need in order to work to the best of your current ability. If anything that has been said to you here, or previously is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.