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

Starting with your organic intersections you’re doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel sold, and for the most part they are wrapping over one another quite convincingly. One thing that can help here is to think about dropping each new form in from above, and allowing gravity to pull it down into a position where it feels stable and supported. Generally we’ll want to avoid trying to squeeze new forms in beneath forms we’ve already drawn, as this can destabilize the pile. Think of the forms as being soft and heavy, and try to build a pile where we could walk away from it and none of the forms would topple off.

You’re pushing your shadows boldly, so they clearly cast onto the surfaces below, and I can see that you’re aiming to stick to a single consistent light source for each pile. There are a couple of spots where the shadows got a little muddled up, and I’ve called out one example directly on your work here. Try to think though the order in which your forms are stacked when adding each shadow, to help avoid creating shadows which contradict one another.

Moving on to your animal constructions, there’s plenty here to praise, your linework continues to be smooth and purposeful, and I think there’s a fair bit of growth occurring across the set, as you appear to get more confident with the construction techniques shown in this lesson.

Overall I think you’ve made a good effort to build up your constructions like 3D puzzles, though there are quite a few places where you’d taken an action in 2D by extending off the silhouettes of existing forms with one off lines. I’ve highlighted a few examples with blue on your fox, but these blue areas exist only in two dimensions - there are no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how they are meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. Creating believable, solid, three dimensional constructions despite drawing on a flat page requires us to first and foremost convince ourselves of this illusion, this lie we're telling, as discussed here back in Lesson 2. The more our approach reinforces the illusion, the more we make new marks that reinforce it even further. The more our marks break the illusion, the more marks we make that then further break the illusion, for us and for everyone else.

While in this course we're doing everything very explicitly, it's to create such a solid belief and understanding of how the things we draw exist in 3D space, that when we draw them more loosely with sketching and other less explicit approaches, we can still produce marks that fall in line with the idea that this thing we're drawing exists in 3D.

In lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions “in 3D”- additional masses. I’m happy to see that you’ve been experimenting with additional masses throughout the set, and I’ve traced over two good examples in green on your fox, with the one on the base of the tail being very well designed.

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, here I’ve taken this logic and used it to replace the flat extensions on the front legs with additional masses, as well as simplifying and completing the silhouette of the mass under the neck.

With the green additional mass on top of the back the change is more subtle. That additional mass you constructed was wrapping round the pelvis, but if you really think about the structure that is present as you're adding that additional mass, the ribcage and pelvis are already completely engulfed by the torso sausage, leaving no protruding forms or structures for the mass to interact with.

So instead,the mass should not actually be worrying about the ribcage or pelvis, but rather wrapping around the whole torso sausage. Thus, we do need to put some thought into the nature of the forms we're dealing with. Note that while I'm not wrapping the mass around the ribcage or pelvis, I am wrapping them around the top of your elliptical thigh mass, which is where we get a lot of bigger muscles that help the animal to walk around. We don't need to worry about this in terms of being anatomically correct, but they do serve a purpose to make the construction more solid by giving us something to press our other masses up against. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. The shoulder masses can also be used the same way, which is why I’d made them a bit larger with the purple ellipses.

I’m happy to see that you’ve been continuing to use the sausage method of leg construction, and you’re much more consistently applying the contour lines at the joints where your sausage forms intersect. While you are a bit prone to altering your leg constructions in 2D with one-off lines, there are also quite a few constructions where you’ve made a good start at using additional forms to build upon your legs in 3D, your elephant has some nice examples. I did notice that a lot of these additions 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, on another student's work. 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.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, a form 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. Please try using this strategy for constructing feet in future.

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:

• 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.

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 in most cases you’re trying to fit the pieces of the head construction snugly together, so if you dial into that specific five-sided eye socket shape I think you’ll have a smoother task fitting those puzzle pieces together. Sometimes it seems like the informal head demo is not a good fit for certain heads, but as shown in in this rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All right, I think that should cover it. While I think your constructions will continue to improve over time, I think you’re heading in the right direction and I’ll leave you to apply these points as you practice independently in your own time. I’ll go ahead and mark this as complete so you can feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge. Keep up the good work.