Hello Haider4123, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections, your forms have a good sense of weight to them, and they all feel stable and supported, which is what we're aiming for. You're keeping most of your forms simple here, which helps them to feel solid.

I'm noticing that your forms often cut through one another, instead of wrapping around each other. I think something that may help you when practising this exercise in future is to think about dropping each new form in from above, and how it will land on the pile and slump and sag around the existing forms under the force of gravity to come to rest in a stable position. Think of the curvature of the forms that are already in the pile, and see if you can wrap new forms around the surfaces that are already in place. You can use your knowledge of the contour curves running across the surface of the forms to help inform your decisions, here is a visual example.

Your shadows are working well, you're pushing them boldly enough to cast onto the forms below and their direction is fairly consistent. I've marked on your work here a couple of spots where shadows were minimised to the point that they looked like line weight, and a couple of places where your additional line weight was causing confusion.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are coming along well. Your markmaking appears well planned and purposeful, and for the most part you're building your constructions up from 3D puzzle pieces so that they feel solid.

There are a few places where you've undermined the solidity of your constructions by altering the silhouette of forms you have already drawn. If you're unsure why this flattens your constructions please reread your lesson 4 critique where I went over this in more detail. I've marked some examples on this dog using red for cuts and blue for extensions. Across the various pages there are quite a few places where it looks like you accidentally cut back inside your construction by using the inner line of your (2D) ellipse to represent the silhouette of your (3D) ball form, leaving a stray line outside the construction to remind the viewer that they are looking at lines on a flat piece of paper. To avoid this problem be sure to use the outer line of your ellipses as the silhouette of your forms in future. You're also a bit prone to having your additional line weight jump from one form to another, making a little bridge and smoothing out the distinction between forms, which flattens things out somewhat. Instead, focus on using line weight only to clarify overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here.

Moving on, I'm happy to see that you've been working with the sausage method for constructing legs, and that you've usually remembered the contour curve for the intersection at the joints. There are some places, usually the upper sections of the legs, where you appear to be stepping away from the properties of simple sausage forms in an effort to capture the entire leg in one step. The more complex a form is, the more likely it is to feel flat. So, we keep these sausage armatures simple, then build up any extra bulk and complexity with additional forms. Here is how this would work on your dog.

Speaking of adding masses to your leg constructions, you're off to a good start but this can be taken 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.

This next point is more of a recommendation than a criticism. On this giraffe it is sensible to use flat shapes for the far side legs, as they overlap with the near side legs to such an extent that fully constructing them could possibly get confusing. On this horse in a three quarter view there's no particular reason to draw the far legs as flat shapes, they're clearly visible, and in quite dynamic interesting positions. It seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to practice your construction.

Moving on to how you're tackling your feet constructions, you're maintaining the 3D illusion reasonably well by making an effort to build them with complete 3D forms. I think you may still find it helpful to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between the different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define those edges themselves - to lay down a structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

The next topic I wanted to talk about is additional masses. Here you're doing a good job of wrapping your additional masses around the underlying structure in a way that feels convincing and helps to reinforce the 3D illusion. 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.

I've made a few edits to the additional masses on this dog that should hopefully help you with designing your masses in future.

• Between the front legs I've redrawn a flat 2D extension using an additional mass. Remember to draw complete forms wherever you want to build on your constructions.

• The mass at the top of the neck had been cut off where it passed behind the ear. Draw through and complete your forms.

• It looked like you had drawn multiple masses on top of the neck, and it is great that you're exploring layering them up to build complexity, and avoided trying to do too much with a single mass. Keep in mind that where masses overlap, you should allow them to do so "in 3D," wrapping each new mass around the structures that are already present and giving it its own complete silhouette. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• With the larger mass on to pf the back, it looks like you tried to wrap it around the pelvis mass to help anchor it to the construction. This is good 3D thinking, but if we consider the forms that are present in the construction, the pelvis mass is already fully enclosed within the torso sausage, so does not protrude and cannot be used to introduce complexity to additional masses. Instead, we'd use the thigh or shoulder mass for this purpose, as these structures do protrude from the torso sausage.

• Notice with each additional mass I've redrawn, I haven't needed to use any additional contour curves on the surface of the form to make it feel solid. Throughout your pages, it looks like you habitually add one or two extra contour curves to most of your additional masses, when I think they'd probably feel quite solid and 3D without the extra contours. 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 contour lines on additional masses 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 next 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.

While I can see you've used some elements of this method some of the time (you're definitely trying to wedge the muzzle snugly against the eye sockets in most cases) there's also a lot of variation, either from experimenting, or misunderstanding elements of the method. 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.

On your alligator, I see you wound up having to cut back inside the boxy muzzle form to create the open jaws. We can draw an animal with it's mouth wide open by constructing a separate box for the lower jaw, as demonstrated with this squirrel. This allows us to work additively, instead of cutting inside the silhouette of forms that have already been drawn.

Oh, also worth mentioning - when drawing eyelids, it helps a lot to actually draw each eyelid as its own separate additional mass, wrapping them around the eyeball as shown here.. This will help push you into thinking about them in 3D.

This is a bit of a moot point, as you've already finished the lesson, but for future reference I don't really recommend drawing humans in this lesson. While humans are certainly animals, there are so many other resources out there that specifically teach constructive figure drawing in the context of humans, that trying to apply animal construction techniques from this lesson to a human isn't really the best use of your time. The head in particular seems to be veering away from the methods taught in this lesson, and looks like you may have mixed in elements of the Reilly method.

Also in relation to your hybrid, the wings are feeling quite flat. Not necessarily a problem for the sections of membrane, but a bit of an issue for the visible arm structures along the top edge. Remember that for constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given point. By drawing the whole "arm" as one shape, the viewer (and you) will find it difficult to understand how it is supposed to exist in 3D space. If I were to try to construct these, I'd probably use the sausage method for them. Breaking the construction into more steps, so each piece added is simple and solid.

All right, I think that covers it. Hopefully the advice I've given here will help you when practising these constructions in future. You've shown a clear understanding of the lesson material and I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.