Hello Cloudstrife0142, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of drawing your forms wrapping around each other with a shared sense of gravity. Try to keep your forms simple in this exercise, avoiding sharp corners like this. You want all the forms you draw in this exercise to feel stable ad supported, like you could step away from the pile and nothing would roll or topple off. To help with this, I would advise to generally avoid laying sausages in parallel as seen here.

You're doing a good job of pushing your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the form below, but there are a couple of issues. I've highlighted on your work here in blue where you've drawn in shadows that the viewer cannot see. This causes contradictions in the 3D space that you're trying to create. It is good to visualise the whole cast shadow for the entire form (as this helps to make sure that we don't miss any piece of shadow) but in future be careful to only draw in the shadows that are visible.

In red I added a shadow on the ground plane, which does a great deal to help establish how the pile of forms are supported, instead of floating in mid air.

Moving on to your animal constructions

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. There are some pages like these birds where 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.

The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

As to time, just be sure to give each drawing as much time as it requires - not just for drawing, but for observing your reference as well. There are cases here and there where you oversimplify a little too much in ways that it suggests you could probably benefit from pushing yourself to spend more time looking at your reference (specifically doing so continuously throughout the drawing process, rather than only up-front). Sometimes students may feel rushed to complete some drawings faster, simply because they only have a certain amount of time in a given sitting. If you ever feel yourself pressured to work faster than you need, remember that you can always set a drawing down and pick it up another day. No need to call it done the moment you get up.

I can see you've been working on taking actions on your constructions in 3D by adding complete forms when you want to build on your existing structures. There are some places where you'd altered the silhouette of forms you had already drawn by extending your constructions with one off lines or partial shapes, as noted in blue on this bird. However this does get less frequent as you progressed through your assigned pages.

I think sometimes you accidentally cut inside the silhouette of a form you have already drawn where there is a gap between passes of an ellipse. We can see this on your frog where you had established a ball for the rib cage, and then went back to "pick" which of your (2D) ellipse's lines would constitute the edge of the (3D) ball form's silhouette. By picking the internal line, you left the section I highlighted in red outside of its bounds, leaving it to float out there arbitrarily. In future it will help maintain the 3D illusion of your construction if you pick the outer line of your ellipses as the silhouette of your forms, that way any stray lines will be contained inside your construction, and be less likely to remind the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat piece of paper.

Something I noticed in your submission is that you do quite well at putting the parts of your construction down in the correct size and position when the animal is viewed from the side, like this horse but sometimes struggle to position your forms accurately for three quarter views like the other horse. I think what is happening here is that you've drawn the torso sausage as though we're seeing the animal from the side, then drawn the legs from a three quarter view, which causes a bit of an awkward miss match.

So, to help with this I've made some notes with regards to this bear. This was another construction where the animal was walking more towards the camera in the reference than the side view shown in your construction. When you're planning the size and placement of your 3 major masses it is important to carefully observe your reference, rather than relying on a template that you have memorised. Here, the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis mass overlap. You can see a more extreme example of this being demonstrated in the puma demo on the informal demos page.

You're doing well at connecting your major masses into a torso sausage, and including ellipses for the bulky shoulder and thigh masses, good work.

The next point of note on the little bear demo is leg construction. I'm happy to see you working on using the sausage method for constructing your legs. There are some places where these sausage forms appear slightly haphazard, by not sticking to the properties of simple sausage forms that are introduced here. It looks like you understand how to use a contour curve to describe the intersection where your leg sausages join together, as you did correctly on these bears but you're not always consistent about remembering them, they seem to be missing on this horse. Using contour lines to define how different forms connect to one another is an incredibly useful tool (and one you use fairly well). It saves us from having to add other stand-alone contour lines along the length of individual forms, and reinforces the illusion of solidity very effectively. When it comes to constructing feet, it can help to draw the foot as a boxy form, then draw smaller boxes for the toes, as shown in these notes on foot construction.

Here is another example of leg construction on one of your antelopes. Instead of using irregular, complicated forms in an effort to capture the entire leg with your sausage chain, stick to simple sausage forms, then when your armature is in place you can come back with additional forms to build up necessary bulk and complexity.

The last step taken in the bear demo shows how to use additional masses to take a basic construction to the next level. 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.

There are some places, like the additional masses on the neck of this crocodile where you're avoiding certain kinds of complexity - like sharp corners and inward curves - resulting in a lot of softer, rounded corners instead. Unfortunately this absence of complexity robs us of the very tools we need to use to establish contact between these 3D structures, instead making the masses appear flatter and more blobby. Using specific sharper corners and inward curves can help give the additional mass a more secure grip onto the construction. You can see an explanation of this idea in this diagram.

Sometimes you try do do quite a lot with a single additional form, as shown here on this cat it works better to break these large additions into multiple masses, so that each mass can stay simpler where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing pressing against it to cause an inward curve. On the same image I made use of the shoulder mass to help anchor one of these additional forms to the underlying construction, as emphasised with the green arrow. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

That cat construction is also an example of using extra contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid - unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

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.

Okay, I have given you quite a few things to work on here, so I will be assigning some revisions for you to apply these points before moving forward.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- 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.

2- 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 4 pages of animal constructions.