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

Starting with your organic intersections, most of your lines look smooth and confident, although there are a few other points of concern:

• Try to stick to simple sausage forms for this exercise. The simpler a form is, the easier it is to assert as being solid and three dimensional. Here I've traced over a couple of forms that are getting a bit complex. In the case of the red form I can understand that you deformed it to mould it around the underlying forms, however the sharp corners and flat sections of the blue form appear completely arbitrary. I'd also encourage you to avoid wobbly deflated forms, like the one on the lower left, we want the forms to feel inflated in this exercise, like well-filled water balloons.

• One thing I noticed was that you may not necessarily be thinking about how the pile as a whole sits in 3D space. I say this because of how this little form, is effectively floating in in space in front of the other forms. There's essentially nothing but empty space underneath it, especially to the right hand side, which tells the viewer that the pile itself is not stable, and thus not really abiding by a consistent gravity. When doing this exercise in the future, it's important that you always think about how you're building up a stable pile, working from bottom up. With each sausage, ask yourself whether it's being supported in space, or if it's floating.

• This next point isn't necessarily a mistake per se, but something that will help you to get more out of this exercise. In future please draw through all your forms when doing this exercise. Drawing each form in its entirety, instead of cutting them off will push you into thinking about how the whole form exists in 3D space, helping you to develop your spatial reasoning skills.

• When you draw your shadows you need to keep it clear in your mind how the pile of forms exists in 3D space. There are some places where your shadows contradict one another. Here is an example. The shadow I've marked with blue tells us that the lower form is in front, but the shadow marked in red tells us the upper form is in front. These can't both be true at the same time, and the contradictory information is confusing to the viewer, undermining the 3D illusion. There is a similar issue occurring with your line weight, where you're applying heavy line weight to sections of forms that aren't actually visible. I find that the most effective use of line weight, given the bounds and limitations of this course, is to reserve it for clarifying overlaps as explained here, and restricting it to localised areas where these overlaps occur. What this keeps us from doing is adding line weight to more random places, or worse, attempting to correct or hide mistakes with additional line weight. Keep your line weight subtle, it should be a whisper, not a shout. Usually a single confident, ghosted, super imposed stroke will be enough to create the desired effect.

• When you're designing your shadows, keep a single consistent light source in mind for the pile you're working on. In the page I've been using as an example, you have a mixture of shadows being cast straight down, and shadows being cast to the left. We have to be consistent to maintain the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

• You're projecting the majority of your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, but some of the shadow shapes you're drawing don't necessarily have a clear relationship to the shape of the form casting it. I've corrected two of them for you here to help set you on the right track.

Moving on to your animal constructions, one of the aims with these exercises is to take actions "in 3D" so that we can fool the viewer (and ourselves) into thinking that the construction is solid and three dimensional. For the most part, you're engaging with this concept pretty well, although I see a couple of points that require clarification. I've done a quick markup on this rhino to provide specific examples.

• During the course of your lesson 4 critique I explained that cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn will undermine their solidity, and said it was fortunate that this was something you hadn't done very much at all. I've marked in red where you'd made a substantial cut back inside the torso sausage, undermining the 3D illusion, and looking through your pages I can see this is something repeated a few times. As you appear to be specifically cutting into the belly, I believe this may be based on something seen incidentally in one of the older video demos for this lesson. Over the years, as Uncomfortable has critiqued thousands of homework submissions he has developed more effective tools and practices to help students develop their spatial reasoning skills. Unfortunately as the course content is currently in the middle of being overhauled, some of the older demo videos do not entirely reflect the newer advice, although they do still contain a wealth of useful information. In the mean time it is best to follow the the advice in your critiques first and foremost. If it contradicts what's shown in a demo, then it's possible that demonstration is simply a little outdated in that regard.

• In blue I've marked where the underside of the head appears to have been extended with a partial shape. It is difficult to understand how this addition actually connects to the boxy muzzle form in 3D space. This was also something we discussed in your lesson 4 critique, in the context of this cricket, and I demonstrated how we can build with complete 3D forms instead here.

• On the rhino, in purple I've marked where you clearly intended to draw an additional form, but it appears to just stop existing where it meets the leg. It is important to "draw through" and complete your forms, giving them their own fully enclosed silhouettes, so that you can understand how the whole form sits in space.

Speaking of additional forms, in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building onto our constructions with complete forms, and now in lesson 5 we delve a bit deeper into how we can design the silhouette of these additions in such a way that they appear to wrap around the existing structures convincingly.

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 these properties in mind, I've made a few adjustments to your rhino.

• The mass under the neck has been given a complete silhouette, drawing through where it passes between the front legs.

• The mass on top of the neck was pretty nice already, simple where it was exposed to fresh air, and wrapping around the neck. The change I've made here is to pull the mass down from the spine, around the sides of the body, and pressed it against the top of the shoulder mass, helping to anchor the additional mass more securely to the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• The mass on top of the rump was getting complex, with an inward curve where it was exposed to fresh air. I've broken it into two pieces, allowing each one to serve a specific purpose. Trying to do too much with a single mass tends to make them fall flat, for constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the underlying structures at any given point.

On a related note, there are a few constructions such as this rhino and this bird where you appear to be applying quite a few additional contour curves to your additional forms without necessarily considering what each one is going to achieve. Adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasise the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships. While adding lines that don't contribute much isn't the worst thing in the world 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. So, I would actively avoid using surface 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).

Also concerning contour curves. Be aware that using an elliptical contour curve tells the viewer that the form has a circular cross section. The contour curves I've traced over in red here describe a cone-like structure sitting cross-ways between the eyes, which I highly doubt was your intent. In green I've redrawn some contour curves that were flipped the wrong way. As your head construction suggests the muzzle is coming towards the viewer, the horns would also come towards the viewer. Take another looks at this diagram showing how the different ways we draw our contour curves change the way we perceive a form.

When analysing animal constructions I check how a student is doing with applying the sausage method of leg construction. Looking through your pages I get the impression that you understand the method, and are able to apply it correctly, as you have done with this camel. There are other constructions, such as this rhino where your leg construction appears a little lackadaisical, not necessarily sticking particularly closely to simple sausage forms, forgetting the contour curve at the joints, not attempting to build any bulk or complexity with additional forms. To get the most out of these exercises it is important to allow each one to receive as much time as it requires in order for you to complete the construction to the best of your current ability.

You're doing a good job constructing solid feet with complete 3D forms, nicely done. I think you may find it helpful to take a look at these notes on foot construction which show how we can continue this approach, using similarly boxy forms to construct toes.

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.

Conclusion

I've given you quite a bit to think about here, and I hope you'll take some time to go through the advice in this feedback and apply it. Overall there is enough here to suggest that you have a good grasp of the concepts covered in this lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Next is the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.