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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple and most of your forms are slumping and sagging around each other with a sense of gravity. Sometimes there is a form which curves upwards, away from gravity, making it feel stiff or weightless. Here on your work I've highlighted a good form in green, and a less successful one in red. You want your forms to feel heavy in this exercise, like well filled water balloons. I'm happy to see you drawing through your forms here, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of 3D space.

When it comes to your shadows, they're a little bit tentative, and some of them read more like heavy line weight, hugging the form that is casting them, rather than clearly projecting onto the form below. They also don't appear to be following a consistent light source, with some of your shadows being cast downwards, and others being cast upwards. To help with this, choose a light direction before you start drawing your shadows and keep it in mind throughout. You can even mark it on your page if it helps. I've drawn on one of your pages here to illustrate this.

Moving on to your animal constructions you're working towards effectively employing the constructional method in your drawings. I do have some advice that should help you get more out of these exercises in the future.

I'll start by handling this query:

Also confused about how to draw the back legs. Not sure whether to make them sausages and draw through the body or make them two dimensional forms. Also not sure whether to cross hatch them.

I think it is more useful for the student to construct the far side legs with 3D forms and draw through things where possible. This helps to maximise the opportunities for creating and solving 3D puzzles and helps to develop a student's spatial reasoning skills. It's not always practical to fully construct the far side legs, if they are mostly obscured by the near side legs it is ok to draw them as shapes as shown in the donkey demo. As for whether to hatch the far side legs, that is a choice that is up to the student. If you find it helpful to push the far side legs back by hatching them then do so.

Demos- I'll try to keep this brief so that we can focus more on your own constructions.

It's great that you did them all, and it's great that you mostly stuck to the sausage method for leg construction when working through these.

To be frank, some of your demos look a little rushed. We've been over the importance of following each step of the demos to the best of your current ability during your lesson 4 feedback.

So if we take the running rat demo as an example, it's the second newest demo on the informal demos page, showing the most up to date techniques and should be followed directly to get the most out of it.

So, I've marked a couple of things on your draw along here that could be improved. Be sure to pay close attention to exactly what curves Uncomfortable uses when wrapping additional forms around existing structures, as they are important for explaining the relationship between these forms in 3D space. There were a couple of places where you drew a single line to extend your construction instead of a complete 3D form as shown in the demo. There was a form that was missing, as well as the contour curves for the intersections where leg sausage forms connect together. I think the ones on the front leg may have been missing in the demo, but they're present in the hind leg, and we've been over the importance of these contour curves before.

Moving on to your independent constructions, I can see that you're working on taking actions in 3D to build your constructions, though you’re not always sticking to this as closely as you could be. In lesson 4 we introduced the following rule - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Please refer back to your lesson 4 critique for an explanation on how this helps us build our constructions in 3D and example diagrams to help with this. So, if we take a look at this frog I've marked in red where you'd established forms for the feet, then cut inside the silhouettes of these forms when you drew the toes. This reminds the viewer that they're looking at lines on a 2D piece of paper and breaks your 3D illusion. For a better way to construct your feet, these notes on foot construction show how to think of your feet as boxy forms, then additively construct more boxes onto that structure for the toes.

In blue I've highlighted where you'd drawn a very complicated wiggly line to extend your construction along the underside of the neck and body. There's no way the viewer can understand what form this line is supposed to represent in 3D space, it can only be interpreted as a flat 2D shape. Remember to work by adding complete forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes. For constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given point, we have to build things gradually, adding complexity step by step. Skipping steps will make your drawing fall flat.

In green I've completed the boxy form for the muzzle. I can see you were thinking in 3D here, you just didn't quite finish drawing the connection between the cranial ball and the muzzle box. Defining how each piece connects together is an important part of figuring out these 3D puzzles and will help develop your spatial reasoning skills.

In purple I've issued another reminder for drawing the contour curves where leg sausages intersect. You've done this on some of your constructions, like this one they're just not included as consistently as I would hope to see.

The frog and the hybrid were probably the most blatant cases of working in 2D, but there are smaller areas where you refine your silhouette with little cuts and 2D extensions, such as here on this rhino.

Fortunately there are a lot of places where you're building your constructions in 3D by adding complete 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.

So, for example I've drawn over some of the additional masses on this rhino. The masses on top of the back had a pretty minimal overlap with the torso sausage, giving them the feeling of being perched on top of the animal, like they might wobble off if the animal were to move. So in my draw over I've given these additional forms a much bigger overlap, wrapping them around the torso sausage. Also notice the inward curves where these additional masses press up against the shoulder and thigh masses and wrap around those structures too. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

For the mass on the belly I've completed the form by drawing through where it passes between the front legs.

I've made some further alterations to your additional masses on this page.

1- It looks like you took your cranial ball and neck forms, and fully enclosed them within a larger form here. 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 forms 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.

2- Here there was an additional form with an inward curve where there was nothing but fresh air to press against it. I've broken it into pieces, building that inward curve from multiple masses, so each mass can remain simple where there is nothing to press against it and cause complexity.

3- Here I've drawn through another mass that was cut off where it passed behind another form, this time an ear.

4-

I think I get the idea of adding forms along the profile. I'm not clear about what to do with forms that are totally inside the profile.

Here I've included a couple of examples of how to design additional forms that do not break the silhouette of the construction. It's great that you're already considering these "in between" pieces, as we can use them to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. Here is an example of what I mean, from another student's work - as you can see, 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 and puzzles.

5- Here I took a form that had a pretty minimal overlap with the underlying structure, and wrapped it around a bit more to give it a better "grip" onto the leg there.

I noticed that there are cases where you're using extra contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid, such as the neck here and the neck and thigh here -Unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. With additional masses, our goal is actually to make the forms feel 3D by establishing how they wrap around and relate to the existing structure - that is something we achieve entirely through the design of their silhouette. While adding lines that don't contribute isn't the worst thing in the world, there is actually a more significant downside to using them in this way. They can convince us that we have something we can do to "fix" our additional masses after the fact, which in turn can cause us to put less time and focus into designing them in the first place (with the intent of "fixing" it later). So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

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.

You generally do pretty well at carving out angular eye sockets and attaching a boxy muzzle to your cranial ball. Though as I noted earlier in this critique you're prone to refining these base structures by making little cuts into your silhouette and little extensions with one-off lines. I'd like you to only take actions in 3D by adding forms to your head constructions.

Now, I'd really like to see you taking all your actions on your constructions in 3D space, so I am going to assign some revisions.

For these, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:

• Do not work on more than one construction in a given day. So if you happen to put the finishing touches on one, do not move onto the next until the following day. You are however welcome and encouraged to spread your constructions across multiple days or sittings if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability. That's not a matter of skill, it's a matter of giving yourself the time to execute each mark with care, and pushing yourself to complete each construction, capturing as much structural information as you can in each one, and not being tempted to rush ahead into the next construction too soon.

• Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, as well as a rough estimate of how much time was spent on it.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.