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

Starting with your organic intersections your forms have a good sense of weight to them, and it is great to see that you've drawn through all your forms here as this will help to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

You're doing a pretty good job here, though I think something that may help you when practising this exercise in future is to think about dropping each new form in from above, and how it will land on the pile and slump and sag around the existing forms under the force of gravity to come to rest in a stable position. Think of the curvature of the forms that are already in the pile, and see if you can wrap new forms around the surfaces that are already in place. You can use your knowledge of the contour curves running across the surface of the forms to help inform your decisions, here is a visual example.

Your shadows show a significant improvement from your previous submission, you're projecting them boldly, so that they clearly cast onto the forms below, and you're doing a good job of following a consistent light source. Keep in mind that the shape of the shadow depends not only on the form casting the shadow, but also on the curvature of the surface that it is being cast onto.

Moving on to your animal constructions there's a lot of solid work here, as well as a few areas where I can provide some advice to help you get a bit more out of these constructions. I think it will be best to go over the key areas Uncomfortable discussed in your last round of feedback, to highlight areas that have improved, along with things that show scope for further growth.

Using the space on the page

This is a bit mixed, there are some constructions like this horse which make good use of the space available on the page, and others like this wolf which could have been drawn twice as large. Drawing smaller makes things more difficult than they really need to be, making it more difficult to think through the spatial reasoning problems involved with these constructions, as well as harder to engage your whole arm, which can result in stiff or clumsy linework.

The scale of your drawings might not seem like a big deal, bit in order to fully explore constructing smaller elements like heads and feet, it really does help if the drawing as a whole is larger. This will help you get more out of these constructional exercises in future.

Leg construction

It looks like you've made considerable effort to stick to sausage forms for constructing your legs, and you've been quite conscientious about remembering to apply the contour curves at the joints, showing how these sausage forms fit together in 3D space. There are a few spots where your sausage forms swell through their middle like an ellipse, but these are the exception rather than the norm, so I think you're on the right track.

I'm really happy that you've started building onto your sausage armatures with additional masses where you want to add any bumps or complexity. We'll talk a bit more about additional masses in the next section.

When it comes to feet I can see you're employing some elements of these notes on foot construction that Uncomfortable shared with you previously, some of the time. If we take this wolf as an example we get a clear sense of these feet being boxy forms, but drawing the toes as single lines starts to flatten these structures out. If you take another look as the notes, you'll see that we can use similar boxy forms to attach toes to the foot.

With the hind feet of your hybrid we can see that you'd tried to capture the entire foot, with all the complexity of the toes, as a single form. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer (and you) to understand how that form is supposed to exist in 3D space. By trying to capture more complexity than can be supported by the underlying structures the foot reads as a flat shape, rather than a 3D form. Instead, to maintain the 3D illusion we'd build this in stages, starting with the foot, then constructing the toes one at a time.

Additional masses

There's a bit of a tendency for some of the masses on your early constructions to be a bit vague and blobby, as if you weren't sure how to wrap them around the underlying structures and hedged your bets by keeping them soft rounded all the way around their silhouette. I can see you getting more specific with the design of your masses as you worked through the set, showing that both your understanding and confidence with these masses is developing.

The mass on top of the rump of this horse is well done. It is mostly following the properties demonstrated in this diagram, staying fairly round and simple where it is exposed to fresh air, then becoming more complex where it wraps around the torso sausage. You've got specific sharp corners where the mass meets the torso sausage, and an inward curve where you've pushed the additional mass up against the top of the thigh mass, which helps to anchor your new additional mass to the underlying structures. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

That being said, I do have a few pieces of advice for you to keep in mind.

Make sure each addition has its own complete silhouette. You're generally doing pretty well here, but occasionally you'll add a partial shape, which doesn't explain how the new addition connects to the underlying structures in 3D space. Here is an example marked in blue on your chicken. I also marked in red some (admittedly rather small) spots where you'd cut back inside the cranial ball, which undermines the 3D illusion of this structure. So as shown here we could build the rear end of the chicken with complete forms, to give it a better feeling of solidity. I've also dropped in a simple form for the wing, I feel that's a fairly significant structural element of this animal so I'd make a point of including it. For how to give the impression of something being feathery, you might find it helpful to take a look at this example where Uncomfortable starts with a simple form and adds feathers using a textural approach.

For notes on how to further improve the design of your additional masses I've done some drawing on your hippo.

• I've marked with an A where you appear to be using the rib cage mass to introduce complexity to your additional mass. You're starting to think in 3D here, which is great. If we think about what is really going on with the forms that are present in the construction, the rib cage mass is already fully enclosed within the torso sausage, so it does not protrude and isn't suitable for anchoring additional masses to. A structure we can use for this purpose is the shoulder mass, as this does protrude outside the torso sausage. So what I've done is make the shoulder mass a bit bigger (with the blue ellipse) and used that to wrap the additional mass around instead.

• Reading through your previous rounds of feedback, I see that Uncomfortable called out being unwilling to allow your additional masses to overlap as an issue to work on. I can see in examples like the masses above the shoulder of this hippo that you've addressed this and allowed your masses to overlap. This is progress. Something to note, where I've marked with a letter B, I've redrawn one of your overlapping masses so that instead of just overlapping on the 2D space of the paper, it wraps around the other additional masses in 3D space. I've also included a pair of separate diagrams to more clearly illustrate the difference.

• Where I've marked with a C you'd included some sharp corners that appear a bit offset, rather than hooking around the edge of the underlying forms. Again I've popped in a pair of separate diagrams for clarity. We want to make sure that the complexity in additional masses occurs as a direct result of interacting with the structures already present in the construction.

• Not related to additional masses- the pink line is a correction for the lower edge of the neck. This appeared to stop where it reached the side of the cheek, defining a 2D relationship between the head and the neck. Instead, be sure to "draw through" and connect the neck to the cranial ball as shown.

Head construction

Here I'm assessing your understanding of the head construction method shown in the informal head demo as discussed in previous rounds of feedback.

• I can see that you've paid close attention to the specific shape of the eye sockets shown in the demo, pentagons with a point facing down, good work.

• It looks like you're definitely trying to wedge the base of the muzzle snugly against the edge of the eye sockets. You've got it correct on this horse but on this wolf it looks like it is sitting a bit too low. I've thrown together some diagrams here for clarity. We want to run the base of the muzzle flush against one of the edges of each eye socket, not just touching the points at the bottom of the eye sockets.

• I get the impression that you're working towards the goal of transforming the cranial ball into a series of planes as discussed in the accompanying text for the informal head demo. There's some good 3D thinking going on here, but for where you're at right now I'd urge you to not skip steps and jump straight from the eye sockets to a series of complex planes as seen in this hybrid. Instead, follow the steps shown in the demo as closely as you can. Define the footprint for the muzzle, and extrude that footprint as a simple foundational form before jumping into anything more complex. This will help you keep track of where each individual line is meant to go and avoid the asymmetry issues we see in the hybrid. As shown in this rhino head demo it is possible to start with the simple structures shown in the informal demo and then build a great deal of complexity onto that.

• Also in relation to the hybrid, I'd like you to take another look at this and this from one of your previous rounds of feedback, where Uncomfortable demonstrated how to establish a mass for large bulky areas of fur, then design individual tufts of hair as edge detail.

Other notes

• As far as I can make out, this tiger skips over the step of joining the rib cage and pelvis mass into a torso sausage, giving something of a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of the construction.

• There are a few places, like the neck of this giraffe and the tail of this tiger where you've used a ton of ellipses. This isn't a huge problem, and is certainly preferable to drawing flat shapes, but keep in mind that everything you draw in these constructions should serve a clear purpose. You probably only need enough ellipses to show how the form turns in space, and to allow you to build the edges of the form in overlapping line segments (like from the branches exercise in lesson 3) if necessary. Avoid "filling" a form with ellipses without considering what each individual ellipse is going to achieve.

• The most effective way to tackle texture, as a learning tool within the context of this course, is to follow the guidance introduced in the texture section of lesson 2. I think copying the stripes on this tiger and colouring in the mane and tail of this horse probably come from something seen incidentally in one of the older video demos for this lesson. Not a huge deal, but just so you're aware, it will be more useful to you as a student to focus on using cast shadow shapes to imply smaller forms running along an object's surface. For a brief recap I'd suggest reading these reminders.

Next steps

All right, your constructions are heading in the right direction, and you've made significant improvements from the last set, with a clear intent to address (most of) the issues previously raised by Uncomfortable. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you can move on to the cylinder challenge. I've given you quite a bit to think about here, and I hope you'll continue to practice applying this advice to your constructions independently, in your own time.