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

Oh btw I'm still quite unsure about my mark making what could I improve on it?

When I'm critiquing homework I check that the student is making an effort to stick to the principles of markmaking that were introduced in lesson 1. I'm happy to see that the vast majority of your lines are smooth, continuous and unbroken. As far as this lesson goes, you're doing a good job with your markmaking.

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of drawing most of your forms slumping and sagging with a sense of gravity. I did spot one form that was curving upwards away from gravity, with nothing underneath that area to support it. This makes the form feel stiff or weightless. You want all your forms to feel stable and supported in this exercise.

Some of your forms are getting just a little bit complex and wobbly, like they've been partially deflated. You want to think of these forms like well filled water balloons for this exercise. The reason for this is that the simpler a form is, the easier it is to draw it in a way that feels 3D. The more complexity we try to add with a single form, the more likely it is to fall flat. I'm not hugely concerned in your case, because I get the sense that you "believe your own lie" and feel that these forms are 3D, but keep this advice in mind moving forward.

You're doing a good job with your shadows, you're projecting them far enough to cast onto the form below, and they have a clear direction, well done.

The next point isn't necessarily a mistake, since it is not clearly defined in the instructions for this exercise. In future, it will help you develop your spatial reasoning skills if you draw each form in its entirety (drawing through) instead of allowing some of them to get cut off when they pass behind another form. I’ve highlighted some examples of incomplete forms on your work here to illustrate the point.

Moving on to your animal constructions you're clearly treating these constructions as exercises to improve your spatial reasoning skills and taking care to take actions in 3D, nice work.

Observation

I think something that would help here is to perhaps spend a little more time observing and analysing 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 simplified. For example the deer at the bottom of this page is missing some joints in the front legs.

I have a couple of points you can try out to help you analyse your reference more effectively. I've shown them on one of your deer here Thank you for including your references by the way, this makes giving this advice easier, because I can show it visually on your reference too.

So, in red I've highlighted the gaps between the legs. We can carefully analyse the shape of these "negative spaces" and use them to help us plan the positioning of our legs.

In blue I've drawn a box that suggests the overall proportion and orientation of the torso. Sometimes thinking of the subject in terms of a box can help us to understand what angle we're viewing the animal from, which we can use to plan the size and placement of the rib cage and pelvis more accurately.

These aren't things that you need to draw, but things you can think about in order to understand your reference and plan your constructions.

Legs

Moving on, it looks like you're working on using sausage method to construct your legs, which is good. Sometimes your legs sausages get quite elliptical- continually swelling through their midsection instead of maintaining a consistent width. I've drawn over an example here, in purple on your buffalo. Using elliptical forms for your leg constructions will make them feel stiff, try to use sausage forms.

On the same buffalo, also in purple I made a note that the front legs seem to be connected to the head or neck, instead of to the shoulder mass. In blue I redrew the shoulder mass as a large ellipse. This mass serves as a simplification of some of the bulky muscles that allow the animal to walk, so don't be afraid to be more generous with it.

On that buffalo page I made a little note on feet. I think you made things a little hard for yourself by choosing reference images where the buffalo are standing in long grass and we can't see their feet. I'm happy that you completed the construction with a solid form and gave him something to stand on, but buffalo do have cloven hooves. In future if you're doing a project like this and part of the animal is hidden, I'd advise finding a supplementary reference where your can see the hidden parts, to help you complete your work more accurately. At this point I'd normally drop in these notes on foot construction and talk about building up a series of boxes - a box for the base structure, boxes for the toes, etc. to build up the foot in stages, but I believe Uncomfortable already shared that with you.

The last notes on those buffalo are regarding additional masses.

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 t 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, on the rear end of the top buffalo I noted in green how you did a wonderful job of wrapping that additional mass around the thigh,the more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

On that same mass, it looks like you also wrapped it around the rib cage. However if you really think about the structure that is present as you're adding that additional mass, the rib cage is already completely engulfed by the torso sausage, leaving no protruding forms or structures for the mass to interact with. So instead, as shown in the note on your work, those masses should not actually be worrying about the rib cage, but rather wrapping around the whole torso sausage.

On the same page, on the lower buffalo's neck I noticed there was a mass that had an inward curve where it was exposed to fresh air and there was nothing there to press into it and cause that depression. So I separated that mass into two pieces so that each one can stay simple but still approximate the desired silhouette.

I've done another edit here on one of your deer. I wanted to make the point that if we draw the shoulder mass bigger, we can then use that mass as a very useful structure to help anchor our additional masses to the construction. I'd also taken a mass on the leg that was trying to achieve too much and broke it into pieces.

When it comes to adding masses to your legs you're off to a good start, but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these 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, 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.

Sometimes there are cases where you're using extra contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid, as seen on the skunk at the bottom of this page. 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.

Looking through your work, I do get the impression that you're treating your heads as 3D puzzles and trying to fit those pieces together. You're usually drawing angular eye sockets, though in some cases they should be bigger, and I'd like you to pay close attention to that pentagonal shape. You have the right idea with building a boxy form for your muzzle, though you're not always consistent about wedging it against your eye sockets. So, to get you started I have redrawn the first few steps of head construction next to your deer here. In addition to the constructional points I just talked about for the eye socket and the muzzle, I also rotated the whole construction to be closer to what was shown in the reference. I hope that helps. Oh, and one last note, instead of drawing eyelids as lines, draw them as entire forms - like a piece of putty being stuck over the eyeball, as shown here. This will help you focus more on how it wraps around the ball structure.

All right, I have given you 4 key areas to work on (marked in bold above) so I will be assigning some revisions to address these points.

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

1- 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.

2- 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.