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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are hitting the right notes. You're keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and you appear to be thinking through how your forms sit in space, rather than just drawing flat shapes on top of one another.

Something I think will help you to get a bit more out of this exercise is to think about dropping each new form in from above, and how these forms might sag and wrap around the forms below to come to a position where it feels stable and supported. I notice you'll often draw new forms in front of the existing ones, this diagram I made as part of another critique shows a visual example of the difference.

You're doing a good job of projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the surfaces below, and appear to be following a consistent light source. Try to think a bit more about how the various curving surfaces that the shadows are being projected onto will affect the shape of the shadows.

Oh, and in this case it wasn't too big of a problem, but in future try to make sure the whole page is in the photo. Cropping off sections of your work can make it more challenging to asses, and may lead to less accurate feedback.

Moving on to your animal constructions, there's a lot you're doing fairly well, such as laying out the major masses of the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis as specified on the lesson intro page, and "drawing through" your forms which helps to develop a stronger understanding of how they exist in 3D space. I can see you're making an effort to follow the lesson instructions, and I really appreciate that you attempted to use the sausage method to construct the legs of your otters, even though the otter demo doesn't actually use the sausage method.

When it comes to your application of the sausage method of leg construction, there is certainly scope for improvement, and honestly I feel you could have paid more attention to the step by step leg construction draw overs I provided on your work as part of the feedback on your lesson 4 revisions.

It is good that you're working by adding a complete form for each limb section, rather than working with flat partial shapes. You could be sticking more closely to simple sausage forms and I've marked some examples of not-so-sausagey-sausages here. I'm noticing some of your leg forms continually swell through their midsection, which makes them bloated and stiff. Try to keep the ends rounded, roughly equal in size, and aim to keep a consistent width along the length of the forms.

You don't appear to be attempting to apply a contour curve to each joint as shown in step 2 of the demo I provided previously. However you do sometimes add contour curves to the surface of individual sausage forms, when I made a point of specifying not to do that. Here are some examples.

When it comes to how you're fleshing out your leg armatures, things are a bit mixed. I can see some spots where you're making progress with adding complete 3D forms to your leg constructions, as well as spots where you slip back into working in 2D by altering the silhouettes of your leg forms with one off lines or partial shapes. Here are some examples. remember we want to avoid altering the silhouettes of forms we have already drawn, as this undermines the 3D illusion, both for the viewer, and more importantly, for you as you build the construction. In this image I've redrawn two of those flat, 2D extensions with complete new forms, as well as adjusting the design of the additional form I marked out in green in the previous image to give it a clearer relationship to the underlying sausage forms.

It certainly can be challenging to figure out how to design these additional forms, where to keep them rounded, where to include corners and complexity, and how to make them feel 3D without relying on a bunch of additional contour curves.

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.

So, I've taken this logic and applied it to some of the larger additional forms along the torso here. I've taken those rounded blobs that were perched on top of the spine and pulled them down around the side of the body, to give them a firmer grip. With the two red masses I've made use of your protruding shoulder and thigh masses to introduce some specific complexity. Notice the use of some sharper corner and inward curves where the additional masses meet these protruding forms. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. With the purple mass on top of the back I've completed it's silhouette, allowing it to overlap the two red masses in 3D space, instead of cutting it off.

I've taken the addition under the neck and completed it (instead of cutting it off where it meets the head) as well as simplifying the silhouette where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present to press against it and cause complexity. It looks like you were trying to draw and additional mass and the fur all in one go. Trying to add too much complexity with a single form will make it difficult for the viewer to understand how it is supposed to exist in 3D space, so it will feel flat. Make sure you have something solid in place to support the tufts of fur.

Notice how I haven't added any additional contour lines to these masses. 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 emphasize 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".

Those contour lines aside, there are two main tools we have at our disposal when building up our constructions with new forms, and making those forms feel solid and 3D:

• Purposeful design of the masses' silhouettes (as discussed above). This is the tool to use if you're adding something that wraps around the existing structure.

• A contour line more similar to those used in Lesson 2's form intersections - which defines the joint or seam between two intersecting/interpenetrating forms. This is the tool to use if you actually have forms that are being "welded" together, like how the individual sausage segments in the sausage method have their joints defined with a contour line.

As a quick bonus on constructing paws, I'd like you to study 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

The next 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 rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

The last topic to talk about is texture and detail, and I have 4 points for you to take into consideration.

• I can see a lot of places where you're trying to draw fur with zig-zagging lines, breaking the third principle of markmaking. We want to take the time to draw each tuft one at a time, intentionally designing each one. Zigzagging lines quickly become monotonous and don't add much to the construction, other than making it busier. Each mark you add to the construction should add information for the viewer. If you find yourself adding a quick bit of detail for the sake of decoration, just leave it out.

• When adding fur it is generally best to focus on where it breaks the silhouette and leave the interior sparse as discussed in this section of the lesson intro page. Scrolling through your pages, I think you understand this idea, but tend to get a bit carried away with the details. Remember, with each mark you add, ask yourself what it is contributing to the construction. In many cases, you'd already given the impression that the animal was furry by designing tufts on the silhouette.

• Painting shadows directly with a brush pen makes it much more difficult to design specific shadow shapes, and gives a result that is clumsier than what you're truly capable of. Reserve the brush pen for (carefully) filling in shadows shapes you have already outlined with your fineliner.

• I think leveraging the implicit approach to texture introduced in lesson 2 would allow you to control the detail density on your 3 reptile constructions, rather than having to explicitly outline every scale.

As there are a number of areas I'd like you to demonstrate your understanding, I am going to have to assign some revisions. Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

• Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark using the ghosting method), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete:

• 2 pages of animal constructions, focusing purely on construction with no texture.

• 2 pages of animal constructions which may include texture if wish to add it.