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

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of keeping most of your forms simple. This one seems pretty far from simple, but perhaps it is not the effect you intended to create. Between some of your lines being very faint and leaving some of your forms incomplete it is a little hard to tell. In the future I'd like you to draw through all of your forms. Much like when we drew through our boxes earlier drawing through these organic forms will help us develop a better understanding of the 3D space we're attempting to create. It really will help you get more out of this exercise by drawing every form in it’s entirety instead of allowing some of them to get cut off where they go behind another form.

Try to have your forms slump and sag under a shared sense of gravity, and remember all the forms should feel stable and supported, like you could leave them and none of them would topple off.

You're doing a good job of pushing your shadows far enough that they cast from one form onto another but their shapes are a bit chaotic in places. I've made some suggested corrections to them here. Consider each form one at a time, think about what shape the whole shadow for the entire form will be, even though we won't see all of it. Then you can draw the visible parts of that shadow

Moving on to your animal constructions There are some pretty significant signs suggesting that you may have underestimated just how much time these drawings might demand of you. This is something we've discussed in the past, but I'll try to explain it further.

One of the main issues that stands out most simply comes down to observation. From what I can see, you're not spending as much time as is really needed studying your reference. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. This is explained in more detail in this section of lesson 2. Right now, because there does appear to be a greater reliance on memory rather than direct observation (not everywhere - some parts come out stronger and more directly informed than others), there are definitely elements that come out looking highly simplified.

Everything you add to these constructions- every form, every mark, needs to be the result of a conscious decision. If I were to point to something in your construction and ask "why did you do this?" the answer should not be "I don't know". The answer can be wrong, in the sense that your thinking was wrong, but as long as you're thinking it through and have some reason you can give, correct or not, that shows you thought about it

This elephant for example gives the impression of not taking the time to assess each action before performing it. You need to think before every mark you make, to give yourself a chance of completing these constructions to the best of your current ability.

Thinking is also necessary when it comes to applying the past advice. You can't just read it, and expect it to sit in your subconscious to be applied readily going forward. There are some things we've already discussed that need to be readdressed before we can get into the meat of the feedback for this particular lesson.

First- 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 as to why, and examples of how to build on your construction with additional forms instead. I've marked in blue on this otter some of the places where you're extending your silhouettes with single lines, and again in blue on this elephant along with a reminder to draw through your forms and an example of a line that appears to have been made without due thought or planning.

Second- your use of the sausage method for leg construction is entirely inconsistent. I have asked you twice before to remember to use a contour curve for the intersection between sausage forms to reinforce the joints. I've marked on your work exactly what I'm asking for. Twice. And you're still leaving them out more often than you include them. These little contour curves might seem insignificant but they do tell the viewer a lot of information about how the forms are orientated in space as well as reinforcing the structure of your legs bu establishing how the forms connect together. So try to remember to include them in future. The size, proportion, orientation and placement of your leg sausages often deviates significantly from what is present in your reference material, which is a sign that you need to take more time to observe, plan, and ghost each form before you draw it.

One thing that can help with determining how to position things like legs is to pay attention to the "negative shapes" that exist between the limbs and body. You can then, with each of these individual shapes, try to construct sausage structures that create similar shapes in your drawing. They won't necessarily be perfect right off the bat, but paying attention to them and taking the time to identify those shapes in your reference will help. It will simply require more time observing. Here is a breakdown of the negative shapes between the legs of your elephants and the reference material.

You're doing a good job of starting your constructions with simple forms for the cranial ball, rib cage and pelvis. When you join the rib cage and pelvis together into a torso sausage remember that these forms should fit snugly inside it. So in future avoid leaving forms floating loosely inside it, like the pelvis on this elephant and the rib cage on this horse. Remember that the shoulder and thigh masses are a simplification of some of the big bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, so they will be bigger than what you drew for this elephant and this horse and the legs of these animals attach to the sides of the body, not the bottom.

Moving on, where the concept of adding whole forms to our constructions was introduced in lesson 4, in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design the shape of these 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 made some edits to some of the additional masses on this otter making use of the underlying structures of the shoulders and hip mass to wrap these masses around, introducing inward curves and corners there these masses press against other forms. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

When you use additional masses I am noticing that there are a some cases where you tend to avoid certain kinds of complexity - like sharp corners and inward curves - resulting in a lot of softer, rounded corners instead. Unfortunately this absence of complexity robs us of the very tools we need to use to establish contact between these 3D structures, instead making the masses appear flatter and more blobby.

I'm also seeing a bit of overuse of contour lines, potentially the result of you realising that your additional masses feel flat, and trying to make them feel more three dimensional. Unfortunately those contour lines help a form feel more three dimensional on its own, in isolation - but does not solve the problem at hand, which is the lack of relationship being defined between the mass and the structure to which it is attaching. Furthermore, using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses, exacerbating the issue. So, I would actively avoid using 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.

I can see that you're applying some of this constructional method to some of your heads. I can see that you're making an effort with them, though they're not very consistent.

Okay, this critique has already become pretty long so I think it’s time I give you your next steps. I’ve conferred with Uncomfortable and he agrees that it is appropriate to ask you to redo this lesson in full, and submit it anew. When you're done, you'll need to send it in as a fresh submission, which will cost you another 2 credits.

In addition, when you do your homework please 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 (which as I noted earlier is something you sometimes don't do as well as you could). Please mark on your pages what date(s) you worked on them and approximately how long for.

You've clearly made an effort to follow the lesson instructions, but in neglecting to go back and review past feedback as much as you required in order to apply it, you've unfortunately undermined those efforts, and not held to your responsibilities as a student here. If you're not sure what your responsibilities as a student are, give this video a watch, it explains how to get the most out of this course. I know this may be a bit of a blow, but these things happen. Hopefully it will be an opportunity to reflect upon how you approach the information imparted to you, and will be able to revise how you approach such things for your betterment going forward. If anything that has been said to you here, or previously, is unclear, you are welcome to ask questions.