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

Starting with your organic intersections you've got a good understanding of how to wrap these forms around each other as they sag with a sense of gravity, and most of your forms feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from these piles and nothing would topple off, which is what we're aiming for, good work.

Something that will help you to get more out of this exercise in future is to draw through all your forms. Drawing each form in its entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they pass behind another form will help you to get a better understanding of how these forms exist in 3D space. This isn't a mistake per se, but a bonus. If you watch the accompanying video, you'll see Uncomfortable demonstrates how to draw through your forms for this exercise.

I can see that you've included some cast shadows. You're pushing some of these shadows boldly enough to cast onto the form below, and I can see evidence that you're considering how the surfaces they fall upon turn in 3D space. Just like how we must apply gravity to all the forms, we also need to apply the shadows consistently to all the forms. Right now you're picking just a few forms to apply shadows to, breaking a basic assumption we have for reality. Here is what it might look like if we apply shadows to one of your piles more consistently. We need to be consistent by not only considering the shadow cast by each form, but also following a consistent light source.

Moving on to your animal constructions these are largely heading in the right direction, you're showing a good grasp of how the forms you draw exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

On several pages I can see traces of a faint underdrawing being used before setting about your main construction. Each line you draw in these exercises is a decision being made, and drawing faintly can tempt you into correcting (or completely disregarding) these decisions, as we see on this horse. Keep in mind the reasons we draw in ink. I get the impression that you're placing an "invisible" scaffolding prior you your "real" construction out of fear of making mistakes, or concern about how the finished construction will look. Right off the bat I can tell you that your constructions are plenty strong enough that you do not need these training wheels, and that mistakes are a normal part of the learning process (I make them all the time).

Furthermore, where these under-drawings progress to shapes and outer contours, as seen in the hind legs of this stag it becomes counterproductive to our goals with these constructional exercises, and serves as a distraction. In trying to get your forms to fit inside these 2D shapes you have predefined on the page it shifts your focus away from how the forms you draw exist in 3D space, back into the 2D world of a flat piece of paper.

In future I would strongly recommend that you maintain roughly the same thickness of line throughout the entire construction, applying further line weight to clarify overlaps towards the end.

During your lesson 4 critique we introduced the following rule to help you to take actions on your constructions that help to reinforce the 3D illusion. "Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. You were provided with an explanation of how altering the silhouette of a form you have already drawn makes it difficult to perceive as 3D, as well as a number of examples of how to build on your constructions with complete 3D forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes instead.

While you've quite a bit of experimentation with adding complete forms to build your constructions, you do make some additions with single lines and partial shapes, which doesn't really provide the viewer with enough information to understand how these new additions are meant to exist in 3D space. I've highlighted a few examples in blue on this stag, and on the feet of your komodo dragon.

That left foot is particularly flat, because as well as working with partial shapes you've also attempted to add a great deal of complexity with a single step. For constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the underlying structures at any given point. The simpler a form is, the easier it is to assert as three dimensional, and the more complex it is, the easier it is to accidentally flatten it out. When it comes to constructing feet, I have some advice on how you can tackle the construction of the base foot structure, and then the toes. As shown here on another student's work, we can use boxy forms - 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 structured that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

Where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of adding complete forms to your constructions, here in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design the silhouette of these additional forms.

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.

You're generally doing pretty well at designing your additional masses in such a way that the wrap around your existing structures believably, but I still have some advice on how you can take things up a notch. So, I've made some edits to your stag to illustrate how to use these additional masses more effectively.

I've marked with an "A" where I've edited somewhere where you had extended the construction with a single line or partial shape so the the addition is now a complete form with a fully enclosed silhouette.

I've marked with a "B" where I've adjusted additional masses that were getting complex where they were exposed to fresh air and there was nothing present in the construction to cause this complexity. This is generally done by breaking an inward curve into multiple pieces, so that each piece can stay simpler. (I've allowed inward curves on the antlers because we can treat these hard bony structures similar to how we approached insect constructions, such as with this beetle horn demo.)

The letter "C" denotes an example of where you'd introduced an arbitrary corner in an additional mass. As shown here we can avoid using arbitrary corners in additional masses by transitioning smoothly between curves when wrapping an additional mass around a simple rounded form such as the torso sausage.

That doesn't mean we should seek to avoid sharp corners and complexity with additional masses, just that they should be intentionally and specifically created in response to interacting with the underlying structures. In the area marked "D" I've redrawn the the shoulder mass, being more generous with it. We can think of this mass as a simplification of the bulky area housing some of the muscles that allow the animal to walk, we don't need to worry about this being anatomically correct for the purposes of these constructions, but it does serve a very useful purpose as an additional structure we can wrap additional masses around. Notice the sharp corners and inward curve where I've pressed the additional mass up against the shoulder. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

It's good to see you're using the sausage method of leg construction throughout your work, and you're doing an excellent job of keeping these sausage forms simple. You're a little intermittent about using a contour curve to draw the intersection where these sausage forms connect together in 3D space, sometimes it looks like you've drawn a circle around the joint instead, and sometimes they are absent, such as 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.

Another quick note, as introduced here the rib cage usually occupies roughly half the length of the torso. You have a bit of a tendency to make it smaller than this, drawing it as a ball. Here is a more correctly proportioned rib cage drawn in green on your stag.

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.

If we take this ox as an example, the cranial ball, eye socket, one eye brow form and the horns are well constructed. The rest of the face consists of a series of single lines and partial shapes, which brings us back to the point made earlier about taking actions in 3D by adding complete 3D forms and designing their silhouette to explain how these new pieces connect to the existing structures.

You also seem to be focusing on copying the opening of the eyes as you see them in the reference, or designing them in a way that looks visually appealing. In future I'd recommend that instead of this you draw the sphere for the eyeball and then wrap the eyelids around this ball like pieces of putty as shown here, this will push you to keep thinking about how these pieces exist in 3D space.

All right, I think that's plenty for you to think about. Overall your work is skillfully done, so I'll leave you to apply this advice independently in your own time and mark this lesson as complete. If anything I've said to you here or previously is unclear or confusing you are allowed to ask questions. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.