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

Starting with your organic intersections, your forms have a feeling of weight to them, as you've effectively captured how they slump and sag over one another with a shared sense of gravity. All your forms feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from the piles and nothing would topple off, which is what we're aiming for with this exercise, well done.

In future I would suggest you keep your forms feeling inflated for this exercise (like the simple sausage forms from the organic forms exercise) rather than drawing the wobblier, deflated forms such as the top two on page 15. Keeping the forms simpler will make it easier to assert the form as solid and 3D.

I'd also recommend you challenge yourself by attempting to add more forms to your piles in future, as 3 and 5 forms per pile is quite conservative and I get the impression you're capable of more.

Shadows are looking good, you're pushing them boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, their direction is consistent, and the reflect an understanding of the curvature of the surfaces that the shadows are being cast onto. One area you could pay a little more attention to is shadows cast onto the ground plane, as right now these appear more generic than the shadows you've drawn being cast from one form onto another. As the ground plane is flat, shadows cast onto it will be a projection of the shape of the forms casting them.

Moving on to your animal constructions, it is great to see that you're engaging with these constructional exercises like three dimensional puzzles, and figuring out how all the pieces your draw fit together with specific relationships. I'm happy to see that you've drawn through your forms quite consistently throughout these pages, this helps to build solid 3D constructions as well as helping you to develop a stronger spatial reasoning skills. I can see a considerable amount of growth across the set, and I'm confident that you'll continue to improve with practice. I do have a few pieces of advice to offer which should help to keep you on the right track when doing these constructions in future.

Leg construction

It is good to see that you're working with the sausage method to construct your legs.

• Make sure you're drawing complete forms with fully enclosed silhouettes when using the sausage method. You’re doing this well most of the time, but there are few places where you've drawn a flat partial shape. I've marked a couple of them in blue on this zebra.

• Try to stick to simple sausage forms for your base armatures, as closely as you can. Sometimes you do this well, but there are a number of places where it looks like you're deliberately deforming your sausage forms to make them fit more closely to the leg you see in your reference. We can see an example of this in this zebra where it is particularly prominent in the lower sections of the legs nearest the viewer. Remember the sausage forms aren't necessarily supposed to capture the leg exactly as you see it, their purpose is to construct a framework that has both gesture and 3D structure. Once you have the sausages in place you can build any extra bulk and complexity you need using additional forms. You've shown a developing understanding of how to do this on this faun.

• I think this is something you've already addressed as it is mostly occurring in your early pages. As shown on the sausage method diagram we want students to apply a contour curve at the joint, where two sausage forms intersect, but not along the middle of the sausage forms. You had this reversed on your dog.

• It is good to see that you're usually constructing your feet with complete 3D forms, it is quite common for students to treat feet as an afterthought and revert to drawing flat 2D shapes. I still think it might be helpful for you to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to think about feet as a boxy form, introducing structure by implying the different planes of the box by use of corners in the silhouette. Notice how he also employs this strategy for the toes. Drawing toes with single lines can flatten out your feet so keep that in mind in future.

Additional masses

It is good to see that you're experimenting with using additional masses on many of your constructions. 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.

So, with that in mind I've made a few edits to this zebra.

• With the mass that was running all the way along the zebra's back, I've broken it into 3 pieces, so each individual piece can stay simpler and a achieve a specific purpose. Trying to achieve too much with a single mass often leads to it becoming complex where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to cause such complexity.

• Notice the green arrows, I've used these to show places where I've wrapped the additional masses around the shoulder and thigh masses. The bulky areas of the shoulder and thigh can be very useful structures for introducing specific complexity to additional masses and anchoring 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.

• I've also added a couple of additional masses to the legs, remember these masses can be used anywhere on the construction that you feel they may be helpful.

• On the knees of this faun it looks like you've tried to fully envelop parts of the leg with new forms. While it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made.

Head construction

Your head constructions are generally working quite well, I can see that you've made a real effort to engage with them in 3D by adding complete forms instead of one off lines. You've been conscientious in keeping each addition simple, and haven't tried to add too much complexity on one go or skip steps, so the results are solid.

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.

Additional line weight

Your additional line weight is more subtle than in your lesson 4 submission, good work. You're still tracing back over large sections of the silhouette and adding line weight in places that don't make sense and confuse the viewer rather than reinforcing the 3D illusion. Here are some specific examples. Tracing back over the silhouette of your construction isn't helpful, as it switches a student's way of thinking from drawing forms in 3D space, to lines on a flat piece of paper. As discussed in your lesson 3 and 4 critiques, additional line weight should be reserved for clarifying overlaps, and restricted to localised areas where these overlaps occur.

Conclusion

These pages show a developing understanding of the concepts this lesson seeks to teach. I'll leave you to apply the advice in this critique independently, in your own time, and go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6. Best of luck, and keep up the good work.