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

Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing a pretty good job with your forms, they feel solid and believable, and you're allowing your forms to slump over one another as you pile them up, sagging over the forms below so that they come to rest in a position where they feel stable and supported.

There are some issues with your shadows.

• We only draw the shadows that are visible. We "draw through" our forms and include the parts we cannot see, as we can then clarify which form is in front by applying additional line weight to areas where overlaps occur. However we cannot clarify shadows in this manner, so drawing the hidden parts of shadows is quickly going to become very confusing. Here is an example where you appear to be adding a shadow the viewer cannot see.

• When we set out a premise for the little 3D world we're creating, such as "forms cast shadows away from a light source in the top left" we need to apply this consistently across the whole pile. If you have some forms that cast shadows, but others that do not, along with shadows being cast in different directions, this will undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief and remind them that they're just looking at a flat piece of paper. I took one of your pages, identified your most correct looking shadow, and redrew the rest of the shadows to match it here. Notice how the shadows are consistently projected away from the specified light direction in the top left, and how the inclusion of shadows on the ground plane helps the pile as a whole feel stable and grounded. Consider each form one at a time, think about what shape the whole shadow for the entire form will be, even though we won't see all of it. Then you can draw the visible parts of that shadow.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall you have done a pretty good job with your construction, but in a lot of ways, your efforts have been directed somewhat incorrectly. To put it simply, you've clearly been very focused on producing a detailed end result, and while you still stuck to a lot of the main principles of the course and this lesson, most of the detail you added didn't really help towards the overall goal we have here. In some ways, it obfuscated a lot of your good work, hindering your efforts rather than helping them.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Therefore the marks we put down for texture serve a particular purpose, and when you add texture - especially a lot of the arbitrary little lines you added here and there along the animals' body (well after already having given an impression of short fur) didn't really accomplish that overall goal any better. They were largely superfluous.

When working through your drawabox drawings in the future, think about what it is you're trying to achieve with your drawings, and focus on concrete goals. "A detailed drawing" isn't concrete, nor is "a nice drawing". Instead, try to think in terms of who is looking at the drawing in the end, and what they get out of it. What information is transmitted from you to them, by way of this collection of lines on the page. Allow that perspective to steer your actions, and to rein you in when you get too caught up in it all.

Circling back to how you're handling the constructional aspect of your drawings, I'm getting a sense that you have a clear understanding of how the pieces of your constructions exist in 3D space and fit together with specific relationships. Remember though, at no point during the constructional process should we undermine the solidity of our forms by cutting back inside the silhouette of a form we've already drawn, as highlighted in red here. Not only does this remind the viewer that the drawing is just lines on a flat pieces of paper it will also remind you that the drawing is flat as you're constructing it. I've also marked in blue here where you'd added the toes using partial shapes, instead of complete new forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes, which doesn't quite provide enough information for the viewer to understand how they connect to the foot in 3D space. Looking through your pages, I can see that you do understand how to build your constructions up in 3D, you're just a bit inconsistent about applying that to your work as you tend to hop back and forth between 2D and 3D as you work through these. 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.

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, 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. Try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

One of the tools we introduce in lesson 5 to help students build up their constructions with 3D forms is additional masses. I can see you applying these fairly well to some of your more construction focused pages, and I've noted a couple of pointers for you on this antelope.

• With the large mass on top of the back, I've introduced a specific inward curve where it meets the top of your shoulder mass. By interlocking additional masses with the existing structures we can anchor them to the construction quite effectively. The shoulder and thigh masses are very useful for this.

• The long mass under the belly and chest was getting a bit too complex, I've broken it into two pieces, one for each bump, allowing each one to stay simpler where it is exposed to fresh air and there is noting present in the construction to cause complexity.

• Sometimes the masses along the legs appear a little more hastily designed than the larger ones on the torso. Be intentional with the design of every mass, no matter how small.

It can be tricky to think through how to design the silhouette of additional masses. 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.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. I noticed you often imply your eye sockets using a dashed or broken line, which breaks the first principle of markmaking introduced back in lesson 1. As noted on the above antelope draw over, I'd like you to be very clear and specific about constructing your eye sockets in future.

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. Sometimes it seems like it's 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.

Okay, I think that should cover it. I think your understanding of 3D space is coming along well. You just need to tone the superfluous details down, and bring yourself back to focusing on the core structure above all. Really any situation where the detail obfuscates that structure, rather than reinforcing it, is a situation where you need to question exactly why that's happening. I get it, detail is a lot of fun to get into, but don't fall into the trap of jumping into detail too soon and applying it to a half-baked construction.

So, keep working on the points discussed here, but I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

We're currently holding a promptathon (and it would be great to see you take part). Once that is concluded feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.