Hello Gdom512, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections, you have submitted 2 pages of organic forms.

Here is a link to the organic intersections exercise instructions, which you need to watch and read again to refresh your memory.

This isn't the exercise that was assigned but there are a few things to call out.

• As explained by Uncomfortable in the feedback for your lesson 4 revisions, do not draw around these forms more than once.

• The ellipses on the tips of the forms are only visible on the ends that point towards us. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.

• Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines should be shifting wider as we slide along the sausage form, moving farther away from the viewer. This is also influenced by the way in which the sausages themselves turn in space, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb to follow. If you're unsure as to why that is, review the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Moving on to your animal constructions I can see places where you've had a good crack at following parts of the demos, and a certain ammount of 3D thinking. Unfortunately (possibly due to the big gap between submissions) there does appear to be a great deal of instruction from earlier lessons and previous critiques which has been forgotten.

General Approach

Jumping right in with how you're arranging your constructions on the page, you are unfortunately doing yourself something of a disservice in this regard, and making things harder than they need to be. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. So, to give yourself opportunity to produce work to the best of your ability draw bigger.

On a related note, randomly cropping your work like this is extremely unhelpful, as only being able to see a portion of a construction makes it much harder to assess, and in turn, more difficult to offer advice on how to make improvements. So in future make sure you submit an image of the entire page, and that the page only has your homework on it, with no additional doodles, thumbnails or rough ideas. I also think it is possible that your scanner settings are doing you a disservice and eating some of your lines. Scanners will try to "clean" an image, filtering out fainter marks, which loses some of the nuance to your work. See if you can set your scanner to "photo" mode (or just take photos of your work) as this tends to give a truer representation of what is going on in your drawings.

When it comes to time I get the impression that you may not have been investing as much time as is really needed to draw each mark to the best of your current ability. Some of your line work is sketchy or scratchy, not really sticking to the principles of markmaking that were introduced in lesson 1. Lines should be smooth, continuous and unbroken. Furthermore you should employ the ghosting method for every line you make. Separating the mark making into steps of planning, preparation, and execution will encourage you to make sure each line serves a clear purpose, as you'll do your thinking in your head, rather than on the paper.

Core construction

I urge you to revisit this section and this section of the lesson intro page which cover the specifics of core construction. I think you understand these elements but are not applying them consistently. You generally start with ellipses for major masses, but don't appear to have the specific proportions laid out in the lesson intro in mind. Sometimes you connect the rib cage and pelvis masses into a torso sausage, and sometimes you don't. Quite often you forget to connect the cranial ball to the torso with a simple solid neck.

How to take actions in 3D

The next two points I need to talk about were covered extensively by Uncomfortable in your lesson 4 feedback. Admittedly this was 2 years ago but it is often necessary for students to take their own steps in ensuring that they do what they need to in order to ensure they're addressing the issues that have been called out. It's very easy to simply come back from a break and continue forwards with the next lesson without consideration for what issues may have been called out (or perhaps having them more loosely in mind, but without specifics), and each student needs to decide what it is they need to apply the information they're given as effectively as they can. For some that means reviewing the past feedback periodically, for others it means taking notes, and for yet more it's a combination of the two or something else entirely. I'd recommend you watch this video which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox, and what your responsibilities as a student are.

So the first of these two points is in regards to how to ensure we take actions on our constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion, rather than undermining it. To help you with this, Uncomfortable introduced the following rule. "Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form."

So for example I've marked on this page of deer with red some places where places where it looks like you have cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn.

On this page you will find more examples of cutting back inside the silhouettes of forms you had already drawn highlighted in red. In blue I have highlighted some places where you had attempted to extend the silhouette of existing forms by drawing single lines, which doesn't provide enough information for you or the viewer to understand how those additions are meant to connect to the construction in 3D space.

In purple I've circled some areas where it is unclear where the silhouette is supposed to be. By having all these lines representing the edge of one form the viewer is given a number of possible interpretations, and regardless of which one they choose, there will still be all these other lines on the paper to contradict that decision and remind the viewer that they are just looking at lines on a flat piece of paper.

For the legs of the deer on the left of this page, and any other situation where a form gets cut off the page, you should not be leaving those forms open-ended. Cap them off (in this case with an ellipse) to close it so you're left with a solid 3D form, not a flat shape on the page.

Leg construction

The other point from your lesson 4 critique is leg construction. I'm happy to see that you've tried to construct your legs with 3D forms, but I'd like you to use the sausage method as introduced in the previous lesson. You can find an example of applying the sausage method to animal constructions in the donkey demo on the informal demos page. Also, don't forget the big elliptical shoulder and thigh masses on the sides of the body, there are a few constructions like these where you appear to have attached the legs to the bottom of the body, which is incorrect.

it is good to see that you've constructed most of your feet with complete 3D forms, I think you would still benefit from taking a look at 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.

Additional masses

The next point I need to discuss is additional masses. I can see a few places where you've experimented with using additional masses, and thought about how they might wrap around the existing structures, though there is scope for improvement here.

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 made a couple of edits to this bison which is really tiny but features some of your more coherent attempts at using additional masses. I started by constructing a solid neck, in green, so that the mass above the shoulder would have something to connect to. Then I redrew the mass above the shoulder as a complete 3D form with its own fully enclosed silhouette, rather than a partial shape. I've pulled it down from around the spine, and pushed it against the shoulder mass, to give it a stronger grip on the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

The mass on top of the back has been redrawn to wrap around the mass above the shoulder and press against the top of the thigh mass. Notice how I have not drawn any additional contour curves on the surface of the additional masses. The 3D illusion is achieved solely by how we design their silhouette, and how this connects to the structures already present.

Under the belly I've redrawn a mass that was soft and rounded all the way around its silhouette. What we had here was a simple blob, but unfortunately that oversimplification robs us of the tools we need to explain how this form attaches to the belly in 3D space. We introduce specific sharp corners to help explain how the mass wraps around the underlying structures, you can see this demonstrated in this diagram.

Head Construction

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.

While I can see you puzzling out how to use elements of this method of head construction on quite a few pages, you're not very consistent with it. Here is the eye socket shape you were searching for on your page with a ton of iterations of the deer head. 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. Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can.

Conclusion

This feedback is, by necessity, very dense, and I'd like you to take as much time as you need to read it thoroughly, as well as reviewing the relevant sections of lesson material and your lesson 4 critique. You may also want to take some notes in your own words to remind yourself of what to work on. Once you've done that I'd like you to complete the missing organic intersections, and some extra animal pages, to address the points I've raised here. For these I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Stick to one animal construction on each page, and try to draw big enough to make use of the space available on that page.

• 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, 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 organic intersections.

• 6 pages of animal constructions. (You may choose what kinds of animals you'd like to draw.)

If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions.