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

Starting with your organic intersections, nice work! You're drawing the forms such that they convey a believable impression of gravity as it presses down on the forms, causing them to slump and sag to either side.

You’re doing doing well with the shadows, projecting them boldly so that they cast onto the surfaces below. I can see that you’re considering the curvature of these surfaces, as well as the direction of the light source, when designing these shadow shapes, and thinking through the 3D thinking challenge that this presents.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are similarly well done, I'm seeing a lot of strong signs of the development of your spatial reasoning skills, and I have a relatively short list of things to bring to your attention that could be improved.

• I’m happy to see you building up your constructions as 3D puzzles, drawing complete forms and establishing how they fit together with specific relationships. There are a few places where you’ll take an action in 2D space by adding a detail with a one-off line that can only be understood as existing on the flat space of your piece of paper. I’ve marked out some examples of this with blue on your cat. As with the larger forms, smaller additions can be constructed in 3D too, as shown with green here.

• When it comes to paws, as a bit of a bonus I’d like to share these notes on foot construction with you. These show how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form, by that I mean 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. hen we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

• When attaching the legs to the body, avoid deforming the upper leg sausage to do so, as seen in this cat. Remember a sausage form should have two round ends of equal size, connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is to understand how it is supposed to exist in 3D space, so the more likely it is to feel flat. Instead, it works well to use ellipses to capture the bulky shoulder and thigh masses, where the limbs connect to the side of the torso. You can see these how this would work with the ellipses drawn in blue on your work here, and the upper leg sausages drawn in green. Once the chain of sausage forms are in place we can add any extra bulk needed for that particular leg with additional forms, as shown in purple.

• Constructing big simple shoulder and thigh masses has another benefit. We can use these protrusions to help anchor additional masses to the torso. Here is an example of what I mean, using your cat again. I’ve redrawn the mass above the shoulder area, pulling it around the side of the torso, and pressing it against the top of the shoulder, causing a specific inward curve in the silhouette of the additional mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• Another thing I wanted to mention is that you’ve made a good start with building onto your leg constructions with additional forms, but there is a way we can push this still further. A lot of these additions 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.

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.

Oh, also worth mentioning - when drawing eyelids, it helps a lot to actually draw each eyelid as its own separate additional mass, wrapping them around the eyeball as shown here.

All right, you’ve done very well here, and I’m happy to mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work!

Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.