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

Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along fairly well. You're doing a good job of establishing how the forms pile upon one another, slumping and sagging under the forces of gravity.

You're projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, and I'm happy to see you keeping a consistent light source in mind.

There was something that struck me as odd on your second page. With the form I've traced over with red here I would expect it to be resting on the ground plane (as there is nothing else beneath it to support it) yet the shadow didn't really communicate this. By expanding the shadow further along the underside (as I've done in blue) we can more clearly communicate how this form is supported in space.

I'd also suggest the topmost form on the same page could be simplified a bit (think of these forms like well filled water balloons) and laid onto the underlying forms cross ways instead of parallel to help it feel more stable.

Moving on to your animal constructions, for the most part you've done a bang up job. There are a couple things I can provide additional advice on to keep you on the right track, but I can see that you're making a great deal of effort to apply the principles from the lesson as closely as you can, and paid attention to building things up with individual, solid, 3D forms - rather than viewing the additions as flat shapes or individual marks on the flat page.

The first area I wanted to talk about is additional masses, which I'm pleased to see you've applied liberally to your constructions to flesh them out in various ways. It can be tricky to think through exactly how to design each mass, and 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.

Something I noticed across many of your constructions, is a tendency to introduce sharp corners to your additional masses in places that appear arbitrary. I've pointed out a few examples with red arrows on this hare. All complexity in these silhouette designs must occur only in response to existing structures. I've also noted in green where you had some sharp corners caused by pressing the mass against the top of the thigh, so that works well. Where the underlying surface is smooth and rounded, such as the torso sausage or a leg sausage, we'll want to transition smoothly from curve to curve as shown in this diagram instead.

Here I've applied this to a few of the masses on your construction. You'll notice I smoothed out a sharp corner in the large mass on top of the back that you'd drawn at the edge of the ribcage. One of the standard steps we apply to most of our animal constructions is taking the ribcage and pelvis and using them as the basis for a larger torso "sausage". In doing this however, the sausage swallows up the ribcage and pelvis masses, leaving no trace of those initial masses to protrude. If they were sticking out from the torso sausage, then we'd be able to use them to introduce complexity into our additional masses, but since the ribcage and pelvis end up blending smoothly and seamlessly into this new sausage mass, there's nothing left of them to wrap around. The only surface for our new masses to attach to is that of the sausage.

There are, however, other structures we can use to help anchor our additional masses to the torso. Those big shoulder and thigh masses are a gold mine for this sort of thing, and while they're not easy to spot, they are always present in one form or another simply because quadrupedal animals need a lot of muscle in that area to help them walk and run.

Once an additional mass is in place, it becomes part of the existing structure of your construction, and any more masses you add to that area should wrap around them. I've shown this on the draw over- constructing the red masses first then introducing the purple masses wrapping around the red ones. Long story short, with each mass you add, think through the 3D surfaces that are present in the construction at that moment, and think about moulding your new form to those surfaces like you're pressing a piece of clay or putty against your construction.

Continuing on to how you're handling leg construction, I'm happy to see you've made effective use of the sausage method throughout the set. I wanted to mention that you're off to a great start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be taken even further. A lot of these forms focus primarily on masses 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 as puzzles.

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

It does look like you're fairly familiar with this demo, and I can see some pages where you've followed it almost exactly, such as here. There are a couple of pages where the size or shape of the eye sockets aren't quite what is shown in the demo, but you're clearly thinking about fitting all the pieces of your head constructions tightly together like a 3D puzzle, and they're feeling solid, which is great to see.

One thing that can help, specifically when dealing with eyes, is to draw the eyelids themselves as their own separate additional masses (one for the upper lid and another for the lower lid). This can help us better focus on how they're actually wrapping around the eyeball itself, as shown here, much moreso than trying to draw a single "eye" shape and having that conform to the eyeball's curvature.

Now, all in all your work really is coming along well, so I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.