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

Starting with your organic intersections you’re doing a good job of capturing how these forms slump and sag over one another with the influence of gravity, and your piles feel stable, like we could walk away and nothing would topple off, nice work.

Shadows on the first page look good. On the second page the shadows are a bit minimised, and in combination with your heavy application of line weight, it is not always easy to differentiate between the two. Try to push your shadows boldly, as seen on the first page. Keep line weight subtle, and restrict it to localised areas where overlaps occur, as discussed in this video.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall you’re doing a good job! I can see you’ve been taking care to build your constructions up in 3D, working through the addition of complete new forms thought most of the constructional process, and thinking about how these pieces all fit together. I’ve got a few pieces of advice that I think will help you with these constructional exercises in future, much of it geared towards how to make the relationships between your forms clearer and more specific, so the constructions feel solid as a whole.

You’re doing well with laying down your core construction of the cranial ball, rib cage, and pelvis mass, and connecting these big basic forms together. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with building onto your basic constructions using additional masses quite extensively throughout the set.

Some of these masses are working better than others, and I’ve noted a few places that have room for improvement on this elephant.

It can be tricky to figure out how to design these additional masses, and 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.

On this draw over I’ve applied this logic to some of the masses on your elephant, as well as supplying an alternative solution for constructing the trunk. Instead of trying to achieve all that complexity with one big mass on top of the back, I’ve broken it into pieces, constructing each bump one at a time, allowing each mass to stay simple where it is exposed to fresh air. I’ve also made use of the protruding shoulder and thigh masses to press additional masses against, helping to anchor them to the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I noticed that you did explore layering multiple masses to build some of the larger or more complex additions, such as along the back of your springbok, but it wasn’t always clear how those additional masses were supposed to relate to one another in 3D space. As shown here once an additional mass is on the page, it becomes part of the existing structure of the construction, and any more masses you add overlapping it should wrap around the surface of the existing mass in 3D.

Next I wanted to take a moment to talk about leg construction. It is good to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method, and your legs feel quite solid. Some of your leg constructions are looking a bit stiff, and I think it is because sometimes your leg forms are trending towards stretched spheres, becoming bloated through the middle and missing the subtle curvature along their length, so try to stick to the properties of sausage forms described in the sausage method diagram in future.

You’ve made a good start with using additional forms to build onto your leg armatures, though this can be pushed further. 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 as puzzles.

Continuing down to feet, I have a quick bonus which I think may help you to construct paws. I'd like you to take 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.

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:

• 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.

Okay, I think that should cover it. You’ve done well here, and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Best of luck with the Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.