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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing fairly well, I'm getting a good sense that you're understanding these as volumes in 3D space rather than flat shapes on a page, and you're usually capturing how your forms slump and sag over one another with a shared sense of gravity. I have a few quick pointers for you to keep in mind when practising this exercise in future.

• This exercise isn't so much about getting forms to cut through one another, focus your attention on how each form you add will sag and deform to wrap around the forms below, coming to rest in a stable position.

• Try to stick to simple sausage forms for this exercise, they're generally easier to assert as being solid and three dimensional.

• Resist the temptation to redraw parts of your forms to make corrections.

• You're doing a good job of projecting your shadows boldly, so they cast onto the forms below. Try to keep a consistent light source in mind for each pile, and to consider the shadows cast by each form away from this light source. For example on this page the large form at the bottom appears to be casting a shadow to the right, when most of the other forms are casting shadows to the left.

Moving on to your animal constructions right off the bat there's something that stands out, as it was addressed in your lesson 4 critique.

During the previous critique we introduced the following rule to help you to only take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion we seek to create.

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.

Take a look at this diagram showing examples of the various types of actions we can take when engaging with a construction, using the context of a sphere. When working on organic constructions in this course we'd like students to strive to only take actions by adding in 3D.

Right now, you're quite freely altering the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, usually by extending them with one-off lines or partial shapes, but sometimes you'll cut back inside forms you have already drawn as well. I've marked some examples of cuts in red and extensions in blue on this bear and this lizard. These blue areas exist only in two dimensions - there is no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how they are meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it.

Instead of altering silhouettes in this manner we'd like you to attempt to build complete new forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes wherever you want to build or alter something. And by doing so we can establish how they connect to the existing forms in 3D space. Please reread your lesson 4 feedback for a fuller explanation, and take care to study the various diagrams and demos I shared with you to help you to apply this concept to your constructions.

There are areas where it looks like you're accidentally undermining the solidity of your constructions by tracing back over large sections to add line weight, and in doing so, making small cuts and extensions to your various forms. The best use of additional line weight, given the bounds and limitations of this course, is to reserve it for clarifying overlaps, and restricting it to localised area where those overlaps occur. I'd like you to watch this video showing how to use line weight. It was added quite recently, so you may not have seen it yet. Here I've marked out in red a few examples where additional line weight is undermining the solidity of your construction, and in blue a reminder to stick to the first principle of markmaking introduced back in lesson 1.

On this lizard I noticed several places where it looks like you'd tried to cover up some of your lines with something white. Please stick to the recommended tools in future.

Another point we discussed in your lesson 4 feedback was leg construction. I'm happy to see you've made an effort to use the sausage method for most of your leg constructions, though you don't always adhere to all of its specifics.

• Remember to start with simple sausages. Sometimes you appear to deliberately over complicate the form in an effort to capture the whole leg in one go (which flattens it out) or switch to drawing stretched spheres or ellipses (which are too stiff).

• Remember to include contour curves for the intersections at the joints but not additional contour curves on the surface of individual sausage forms.

• Remember to use complete new forms wherever you want to build onto your leg structures. Right now it seems to be about 50/50 whether you'll add a form, or just a one-off line.

Moving down to feet, I think you will find it helpful 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.

Circling back to the idea of taking actions in 3D. In lesson 5 we introduce students to additional masses to use as a tool to flesh out their constructions with complete 3D forms. It is quite common for students to experience some difficulty figuring out how to design their additional masses so that they attach to the underlying structures 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.

Now, while you tend to use additional masses quite sparingly, I did spot a couple of places where you'd applied them really well. I've traced over one such example in green on your antelope. Here your mass stays simple where it is exposed to fresh air, a gentle outward curve, and where you've attached it to the torso sausage you've used specific sharp corners and inward curves, really capturing how you've wrapped the additional mass around the torso sausage, great job!

The mass above the shoulder area wasn't quite as well designed, and I've used orange to point out where you'd introduced a sharp corner to the mass at a seemingly random spot on the torso sausage. The underlying surface of the torso sausage is smooth and rounded, so there's no logical reason for a sharp corner here. Instead, I've pulled the mass down around the side of the body a little more, and pressed it against the top of the shoulder mass. The bulky shoulder/thigh masses protrude from the torso sausage, so they make great structures for introducing specific complexity to additional masses and 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.

In purple I've drawn additional masses in a few spots where you'd extended the construction in 2D, with one-off lines.

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.

Now, this feedback is quite dense and I expect you may need to read through it a few times to fully absorb everything. You may also want to revisit your lesson 4 feedback and the various diagrams and demos I shared with you previously to help you to take actions on your constructions in 3D. Once you've had time to go through all this information carefully I'd like you to complete some additional pages to address the points I've called out here.

In addition, when tackling these pages I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Focus on construction only, don't worry about adding texture or shadows.

• 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 4 pages of animal constructions.