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

Starting with your organic intersections you've done a good job of drawing your forms slumping and sagging over one another with a shared sense of gravity, and show a good understanding of how each form relates to the others in 3D space.

The shadows are working well, you're projecting them far enough to cast onto the forms below, and I can see that you're considering the curvature of the surfaces that the shadows are being cast onto, as well as the forms casting them, good work.

Something you could pay a little more attention to in future is your contour curves. They're smooth and confidently drawn, which is great, but sometimes they miss the edges off the forms, or get slightly skewed. Keep working on having the contour curves fit snugly against the edges of the form, these certainly aren't bad, just something I noticed that could be improved.

Moving on to your animal constructions these are excellent. I can see that you've put a great deal of care and attention into taking actions that reinforce the 3D illusion of your constructions and they all feel solid. You're showing a good understanding of how the pieces of your constructions exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships.

Where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building on our constructions with complete 3D forms, here in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design 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.

You're generally doing a very good job of designing your additional masses so that they wrap around the underlying structures in a way that feels convincing.

Something I did notice is that sometimes when your masses overlap they appear to phase through each other and occupy the same space at the same time, like this example. Instead of having masses go through each other, try to have one wrap around the other. Here is what it might look like if we wrap the blue mass over the red one, and here is the opposite, with the red mass being piled on top of the blue one. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Something else to watch out for is drawing additional masses whose silhouette runs almost parallel to the edge of the form they're attached to, with minimal overlap. This can make the masses feel precariously balanced, like they might wobble off if the animal were to move. Here I've redrawn one such mass on the belly, really pulling it up around the sides of the body, to give it a firmer grip onto the rest of the construction.

You're making very effective use of the sausage method of leg construction throughout your pages, and I have just a couple of tips for you as you move forward. Firstly, these sausage forms aren't necessarily meant to simulate bones. Sometimes they may happen to be an approximation of the bone structure, especially on bony sections of lower limbs, however where the legs are bulky it is fine (and encouraged) to draw a wider sausage form that encompasses more of the volume of the leg whilst staying simple. Here is an example of what I mean.

Secondly, I wanted to note that you are off to a great start with exploring the use of additional masses to build on your leg structures, 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, I've 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.

I noticed there were a few places where you omitted feet. I know it's really tricky when the feet aren't visible in the reference. When this happens I'd encourage you to seek out a secondary reference (a Google image search for the animal in question + feet should do the trick) and use that as a guide to help you to construct something rather than leaving them out entirely. When it comes to constructing feet, I have some advice on how you can tackle the construction of the base foot structure, and then the toes. As shown here on another student's work, we can use boxy forms - 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 structured that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach 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. I can see that you were following this method pretty faithfully on many of your pages, and your constructions do feel solid. 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.

So, great work! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move on to the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.