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

Starting with your organic intersections these are working quite well, your forms are simple, which helps them to feel solid, and you’re clearly thinking about how gravity will affect your forms, pulling them down until they rest in a position where they feel stable and supported.

Something that will help you to get a bit more out of this exercise is to “draw through” and complete your forms wherever possible, instead of cutting them off where they overlap. This will push you into figuring out how the whole form sits in 3D space. While this isn’t shown in the example homework for this exercise, it is shown in the video demonstration, so give that another watch if you’re unsure what I mean.

You’re projecting your shadows boldly so that they cast onto the surfaces below. Remembering to include the shadows cast onto the ground plane will help your piles feel like they’re supported as a whole.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are coming along quite nicely, for the most part you’re doing a good job of building your constructions up from 3D forms, starting with big simple structures and adding complexity piece by piece. I particularly like your boxy muzzle constructions, you’re doing well at establishing a clear specific relationship where they attach to the cranial balls, and extruding them boldly.

Speaking of head construction, I do have some advice for you which is less about any particular mistakes, and more of a recommendation of how to approach head construction in future. 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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

One thing that can also help, specifically when dealing with eyes, is to draw the eyelids themselves as their own separate additional masses (one for the upper lid and another for the lower lid). This can help us better focus on how they're actually wrapping around the eyeball itself, as shown here, much moreso than trying to draw a single "eye" shape and having that conform to the eyeball's curvature.

I didn't see you making this mistake much at all, but I figured I'd just call this out - don't cut into the silhouette of forms you have already drawn, as you did here. When our ellipses get rather loose, always pick the outermost perimeter as defining the silhouette of that form, just so all of its linework exists inside that space, rather than floating outside of it.

Continuing on, your leg constructions are suffering from the same issues I called out in your lesson 4 critique:

• Sometimes you construct your legs from ellipses instead of sausage forms, which makes them stiff. Sausage forms should consist of two round ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width.

• You don’t appear to be attempting to define the intersections where the sausage forms penetrate one another by drawing a contour line at each joint. These little contour lines might seem insignificant, but they are an incredibly useful tool for establishing how these forms fit together in 3D space, and reinforcing the solidity of the construction as a whole, so make sure you remember to include them in future.

You may want to consider revisiting previous feedback more frequently, so that you can remember to apply the advice that has been provided, and avoid having the same mistakes called out repeatedly.

I wanted to mention that you’re off to a decent start with building onto some of your leg constructions with additional forms, but this approach can be pushed much 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.

I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses on the majority of your constructions, although it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette in a way that feels convincing.

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 took some time to make some adjustments to the additional masses on your horse with notes that I hope will help you when designing your additional masses in future.

• I started by making the shoulder mass larger, with the blue ellipse. You’re doing a good job of attaching the legs to the sides of the body with an ellipse, but it does help to be more generous with the size of the shoulder. We can think of the shoulder as a mass that houses some of the bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk. We don’t need to worry about this being anatomically accurate, but to does serve a purpose by providing a protrusion on the side of the torso that we can use to help anchor additional masses to the construction.

• We can see the bulky shoulder an thigh masses being used to help anchor the two red masses on the back of the horse, notice the specific inward curves where the masses have been pulled down around the side of the torso and then pressed against these protrusions. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• I wasn’t sure if you were treating the addition on top of the neck as texture, or an additional form. It is quite a substantial addition so I’ve treated it as a fleshy mass.

• Sometimes when students try to achieve a lot with a single mass, it can result in accidentally overcomplicating them and having them fall flat. You’ve managed to keep that long mass on the chest and belly fairly simple, but I’d still suggest breaking it into pieces as I’ve shown on your work, so each form can serve a more specific purpose.

• When introducing complexity (sharp corners and inward curves) to an additional mass, we want it to be a result of the mass reacting to the structures that are physically present in the construction. On the mass on the back/rump of the horse you’d used a sharp corner in an arbitrary spot on the smooth rounded torso sausage, which makes it look like the mass already had corners before it came into contact with the construction. In these areas it will work better to transition more smoothly between curves instead.

I didn’t see this much, but occasionally you’d make an addition to your construction with a one-off line or flat partial shape, such as these toes. While this strategy worked fine for adding edge detail to leaves, that is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build onto forms that aren’t already flat we want to construct complete new forms instead. You can see how this would apply to feet with these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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.

All right, I think that should be plenty for you to think about. You’ve done a good job with this lesson and I’ll be marking this as complete. Hopefully the advice provided here will help you to get even more out of these constructional exercises when you practice them in the future. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.