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

Starting with your organic intersections most of your linework is smooth, and you are keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid.

The individual forms are fine, but there are issues with how you’re relating them to one another to build up a pile. On this page in particular, it looks like a bunch of flat shapes stamped on top of one another.

When you do this exercise, imagine there’s a plate in front of you, and you’re dropping sausage forms in from above, one at a time. As the form lands on the pile, it will slump and sag over and around the forms below, to come to rest in a position where it feels stable and supported. One thing that helps to get your forms to wrap around one another in 3D space (instead of cutting through one another, or simply existing in 2D) is to imagine the lower edge of the upper form curving around the surface of the lower form, like a contour line. It sounds more complex than it really is, this diagram provides a visual example.

The lower 3 forms on this page are heading more in the right direction, they’re relating to one another fairly well n 3D space. Think about your forms as being soft and heavy for this exercise, like well-filled water balloons. Notice how the topmost form in this pile appears to defy gravity, arching upwards through its midsection, with nothing there to support it in that position. This gives the impression that the form is either stiff or weightless, which isn’t the effect we’re aiming to achieve with this exercise.

To be frank, the shadows are a bit nonsensical, which is a pretty strong indicator that you might not know which form is in front of another, or how they’re meant to overlap, and you’re getting in a bit of a pickle when you come to add the shadows. If you think through your shadows a bit more logically, you’ll be able to use them to support the 3D illusion of your piles, rather than making them more confusing. On this page I’ve labelled your forms in the order I think you drew them (assuming you were building from the bottom up) and added colour-coded shadows for each form. Make sure you stay consistent when applying your shadows, if you’re asserting that form E is on top of form D, then form D won’t be casting a shadow onto form E, as I’ve indicated with the orange circle. If you find yourself getting confused about which form is in front at any given point, you can use line weight to clarify overlaps prior to adding the shadows.

We also want to keep a single consistent light source in mind for each pile, and project all of the shadows away from that light source. If we look at form A in your pile, resting on the ground plane, its shadow suggests the light is coming from the left and the right at the same time. I’ve simplified it in the draw-over, projecting the shadow away from a light source in the upper left.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are off to a pretty decent start. It looks like you’ve made an effort to follow the construction methods shown in the lesson, as well as applying some of the points covered in previous feedback, such as remembering to draw most of your constructions large enough to use most of the space on the page, and making a clear attempt to use the sausage method of leg construction.

From the looks of it, I think you’re making an effort to work in 3D and the biggest issue you’re running into is keeping your linework under control without sacrificing confidence. While your linework is an improvement on some of your lesson 4 work, there are still issues and I think it is worth taking some time to discuss them, along with possible causes and solutions.

• Some (not all) of your ellipses are a bit distorted and uneven, for example the pelvis mass of this camel. Something that will help keep your ellipses smooth and even is to draw around them 2 to 3 times before lifting your pen off the page, as discussed in this section. You’re doing this some of the time, but not consistently, and it is something we insist on students doing for every ellipse freehanded in this course.

• Some of your leg sausages are a bit wibbly-wobbly, and all these lumps, bulges and corners make the forms appear less solid and three dimensional. Remember that these sausages should stick to the same properties as organic forms meaning two round ends of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. Granted this can be tricky, but remember to take as much time as you need to ghost each and every form you draw, whether an exercise requires one form, or a hundred. I’ve seen in your organic forms and organic intersections exercises that you can keep these forms simple when you give them your full attention.

• Throughout most of your work I can see you’re making an effort to draw smooth continuos marks, but your linework tends to get more haphazard when you get to smaller forms such as faces and feet. Sometimes when dealing with things that are small, they may seem less important, and we might give them less time and attention, getting sloppier without meaning to. Every line you add to a construction serves a purpose, and deserves your full attention, again, make sure you’re ghosting your lines, even when they get small. Something else that can help to keep control over your lines while still drawing from the shoulder, is to let your pinkie finger touch the page, instead of hovering your hand above the paper. As discussed in this section we can glide the pinky finger along the page for extra support and stabilization, while still driving the motion from the shoulder.

• It is great to see that you’re using line weight to clarify overlaps between forms and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. Sometimes this lineweight gets very thick and choppy, and I’m guessing that what happens is you’ll add a superimposed stroke, miss where you intended the line to go, and then add another stroke (or two, or three) on top to try to “fix” it. It is totally normal for additional line weight to miss the line it is supposed to be superimposed onto sometimes, as we expect students accuracy to develop gradually over time. When this happens, it is generally best to treat the line as if it were correct and move on, as adding more ink to the area will just make it messier.

Moving on, there are a few constructional points I wanted to clarify.

In order to respect the solidity of your forms and maintain the 3D illusion of your constructions, don’t cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have drawn, at all. I think it is probably unintentional, but quite often you’ll slice off pieces of your ribcage or pelvis mass when constructing the torso sausage. Here is an example on one of your camel constructions, where the torso sausage slices off the red section of the ribcage, flattening the construction. Here I’ve redrawn the torso sausage, being careful to enclose the ribcage and pelvis masses without cutting into them, and allowing the midsection of the torso sausage to sag slightly. If the torso sausage is drawn straight across it tends to look stiff, and if the underside gets pinched inwards then it is no longer a simple sausage and we get a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of the construction.

It is good to see you’ve stuck with the sausage method for almost all of your leg constructions. One aspect of the method which appears to be confusing you is how to apply a contour line at each joint, as marked in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram. For example on this image I’ve traced over what I think are your efforts at applying these curves, where I get the impression that you know you need to add something to the joints, but aren’t sure what you’re trying to achieve. With these lines we’re hoping to show how the sausage forms fit together in 3D space, just like the contour lines we add in the form intersections exercise.

I’ve put together a step by step leg construction for you here where I’ve tried to show more clearly exactly what the contour lines at the joints are for. In particular look at step 3, where the red contour lines show which parts of the sausage form we can see (highlighted in orange) and which parts of the sausage form are penetrating inside other forms (highlighted in purple). Also note the liberal use of additional forms in the last step, I notice you often leave your legs at the simple sausage chain step, when there is usually much more going on in the reference that we can construct.

In lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions “in 3D”- additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses on the majority of your constructions, although it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette 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.

I’ve opened up your bear construction to point out a few things regarding masses.

• You usually do well at keeping them simple where they are exposed to fresh air, which helps them to feel solid.

• I thought the interaction between the two masses on top of this construction was handled really well. There’s a clear 3D relationship between them, with the smaller mass on the neck wrapping around the larger mass, nice work.

• You’re sometime adding sharp corners to parts of additional masses where there is nothing present in the existing construction to cause this kind of complexity, so they appear random. Here I’ve redrawn the masses, eliminating the unexplained sharp corners. Where the torso sausage is smooth and rounded I’ve transitioned more smoothly between curves instead of using a sharp corner. There are cases where we can introduce sharp corners, which I’ve demonstrated where the large red mass has been pressed against the top of the thigh to help to anchor it to the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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. I think in some cases you’re working with this sort of strategy in mind, but you need to be more patient and careful with your linework to make your intentions clearer.

The next 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.

As there are a number of areas where I would like you to demonstrate your understanding, I will be assigning some revisions.

Please complete the following:

• 2 pages of organic intersections.

• Draw along with the informal head demo to help you understand head construction, and this donkey demo which provides a detailed example of using the sausage method of leg construction. Follow the steps as closely as you can.

• 4 additional pages of animal constructions.

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

• 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.