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

Texture is optional in this lesson, so it is completely fine to keep it sparse, or leave it out altogether.

Starting with your organic intersections, you're keeping your forms fairly simple, and you're doing a good job of applying gravity to them, so that they slump and sag over one another.

Something that stands out is that you're not varying the degree of your contour curves to show how the forms turn in 3D space. Here I've redrawn the curves on one of your forms as an example. If you're unsure why the degree of the contour curve changes, please re-watch this video about ellipses where Uncomfortable explains how the degree shift operates.

Overall these pages are coming along well, so I'm going to take a moment to nit pick this particular form a bit. Try to stick to simple sausage forms for this exercise. This particular form is bloated in the middle, so that it is almost elliptical, which makes it appear a bit stiff. Resist the temptation to redraw lines to correct them, as we see with one of the contour curves on this form. 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. This isn't an issue with most of your forms, but in this case it looks like you'd drawn this form in front of the one behind it, without quite considering how it might sag around the form that is already present. Here is a diagram that illustrates the difference.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to clearly cast onto the forms below. I think you could perhaps be a little more patient when filling them in, there are a few spots where the edges of the shadows get a bit choppy, which is often a sign of filling them in in a hurry.

Moving on to your animal constructions, I can see that you've been working on taking actions on your constructions to support the 3D illusion we seek to create with these exercises and there is quite a bit of growth occurring as you progressed through these pages.

You do hop back and forth between 2D and 3D, especially in the earlier pages, and I've marked some examples in blue on this page of where you'd attempted to build your construction by extending it with flat partial shapes. Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. Please refer to your lesson 4 critique where Uncomfortable went over this idea in more depth and shared a number of diagrams and demos to help you to build your constructions in 3D.

As you also seemed to experience some difficulty constructing this rabbit which was in a similar pose, I've spent some time completely rebuilding a fox from scratch, and you can find a step by step demonstration here which should help you get a better idea of how to construct a seated animal, viewed from the front. When an animal is sitting (or lying down) all the pieces of the limbs shown here on the lesson intro page continue to exist, even though they tend to overlap more and may get very foreshortened. Do your best to identify and construct all these pieces, and do not just draw feet extended off the bottom of the body as partial shapes.

As a quick bonus, these notes on foot construction give a clearer example of how to use boxy forms to create feet with structure, and to add more boxy forms for toes.

Something else that should help you to build your constructions in 3D is to use sausage method of leg construction. I'm happy to see that you remembered this method and attempted to use it from your hooved quadrupeds onwards, although you appear to be drawing ellipses for your leg sections instead of sausage forms. This stiffens your constructions, and is noted on the lower left of the sausage method diagram as something to avoid.

You are off to a good start with exploring the use of additional masses to build on 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, 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 and puzzles.

It is good to see you fleshing out your constructions with additional masses throughout the set, and I have some advice that should help you to design them in such a way that they wrap convincingly around the existing structures in 3D space.

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.

Here I've made some edits to one of your giraffe constructions to show specific ways we could improve these additional masses.

• I've marked with an A where I've redrawn a single line or partial shape as a complete 3D form with its own fully enclosed silhouette.

• B indicates where I've made the shoulder mass a bit larger (the blue ellipse) and then used the shoulder mass as a device to help anchor an additional mass to the construction. Note how I've pulled the red mass down around the spine and pressed it against the shoulder. This introduces an inward curve in the additional mass where it meets the shoulder. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• The two spots I've marked with a letter C are where an additional mass was getting wobbly and complex where it was exposed to fresh air and there was nothing present in the construction to press against the mass and cause such complexity. With the green mass over the shoulder I've simplified it to an single outward curve where it is exposed to fresh air. On the leg I’ve separated the mass into two pieces, so we can have two bumps while still keeping each individual mass simple, solid and three dimensional.

• Where I've marked with a D I've given the additional mass a more generous overlap with the underlying structures. Wrapping the masses around the underlying forms more boldly helps to give them a good grip on the construction. Where the overlap is minimal it can make the mass feel precariously balanced, like it might wobble off if the animal were to move.

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:

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

While there is certainly room for improvement here, the amount of growth across the set indicates that you will continue to improve with practice, so I'll leave you to apply the advice in this critique independently, in your own time. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge.