Hello DynastyK96, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections your work is hitting the right notes, you're keeping your forms simple and are drawing them wrapping around one another with a sense of gravity.

I did notice that you're not really making full use of the space available on your page with this exercise, so in future I'd encourage you to draw bigger- which makes it easier to draw from your shoulder and easier to think through the the spatial reasoning problems provided by this exercise. I'd also encourage you to explore adding more forms to your piles, push yourself to figure out how to add more forms while still keeping all your forms stable and supported, this will help you to learn more from this exercise.

You're doing a good job of pushing your shadows far enough to cast onto the form below, and their direction is consistent. Be sure to consider the shadow cast by the entire form when practising this exercise in future, here I've made some suggested additions to two of your shadows.

I would also note that I don't think you're filling in your shadows to the best of your current ability. There are lots of little white gaps in your shadows and spots where you've overshot the outline you had established for your shadow shapes. Take as much time as you need for every step of every exercise and do not rush. You're welcome to use a brush pen (or just a thicker marker) to fill in large areas of shadow- though it should still be done carefully.

Moving on to your animal constructions there are a few clues that suggest you may be underestimating just how much time these constructions might demand from you.

One of these clues comes down to observation. From what I can see, you're not spending as much time as is really needed simply studying your reference. Sometimes students will spend lots of time studying their references up-front, but then will go on to spend long stints simply drawing/constructing. Instead, it's important that you get in the habit of looking at your reference almost constantly. Looking at your reference will inform the specific nature of each individual form you ultimately go on to add to your construction, and it's important that these are derived from your reference image, rather than from what you remember seeing in your reference image. This is explained in more detail in this section of lesson 2.

Right now, because there does appear to be a greater reliance on memory rather than direct observation (not everywhere - some parts come out stronger and more directly informed than others), there are definitely elements that come out looking highly simplified. For example this cat has the entire complexity of each leg simplified to one or two forms. I am sure you could find more structural information than this if you spent more time with it.

Another indicator for not spending sufficient time on a construction is when the relative sizes of the various parts of a construction get a bit out of hand. Looking at the same cat construction, one front foot is about twice the size of the other. Getting the proportions accurate is very much a secondary goal compared to upholding the principles of construction and not undermining the 3D illusion of your work under any circumstances, but there is a difference between students who plan the sizes of their forms and try to keep things accurate, and students who don't think about it at all. Be the former. When it comes to constructing feet, starting with a boxy form for the foot and adding more boxy forms for the toes as shown here is much more effective than trying to draw the toes and foot all in one go.

The third indicator that suggests you may need to spend a little more time on these is that there are a few lines here and there that are just a bit hesitant which suggests you might not have been using the ghosting method to full effect.

The last indicator of rushing would be that your drawing of the pelican demo is missing the additional form at the base of the neck and the crest on the back of the head shown at step 5, suggesting that you may have been in a hurry to finish the demo and move on to the next construction. It is important when you're following a demo to follow each step as closely as you can, as you're learning the techniques that you'll need to apply to your own constructions.

Moving on, throughout the majority of your pages you're doing a good job of starting your constructions with simple solid forms and building things up step by step.

For constructional drawing we never add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures, and for our first step that means starting dead simple. Jumping straight into something complicated as your first step doesn't give you a solid 3D foundation to work with, it will make your drawing look flat. We can see this happening in your final 3 constructions. If we look at this carp it honestly looks like you decided to start your construction by copying the outer contour of the body I traced in red, instead of applying the constructional techniques you've been learning in this course.

So, I've whipped up this demo to show you how we might apply construction to a fish. When faced with a reference that doesn't conform to the typical quadruped arrangement shown in most of the demos we may have to think a little harder about how to plan things, and what constructional tools to use, but it can still be done.

You're generally sticking to the rule that Uncomfortable introduced in your lesson 4 critique, "Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette." Though I did notice some places where you'd modified your silhouette with additional line weight. I find that the most effective use of line weight - at least given the bounds and limitations of this course - is to use line weight specifically to clarify how different forms overlap one another, by limiting it to the localised areas where those overlaps occur. You can read more about this here.

The next point I need to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working towards using sausage method on the majority of your pages, which is good. There are some places where your leg forms are a long way off simple sausages as introduced here. I've marked some examples (good and bad) on your horse. I'm not sure if this stems from a lack of control over the forms you draw- in which case more time ghosting will help, or a miss-conception that the leg sausages are meant to capture the entire leg in one go.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms. Please refer back to your lesson 4 critique where Uncomfortable shared a number of examples of how to do this. I've also redrawn one of your horse's legs step by step for you.

Now, while you may have neglected to use any additional forms on your leg constructions, I'm happy to see you tried using additional masses on the torsos of some of your constructions.

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.

In addition to the examples already provided to you in this critique and your lesson 4 critique, I've also made a specific correction to the additional mass on this antelope. I can see that you're clearly thinking about how your additional masses wrap around the underlying structures of your constructions, but in this case I want you to think again about what structures are present. You'd pushed this mass up against the edge of the rib cage, but the rib cage is already fully enclosed by the torso sausage, so it won't protrude and cause complexity in your additional mass. Instead, we can make use of your nice big shoulder mass to wrap the additional mass around and help anchor it to the construction. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I noticed that you're using extra contour lines to try and make your masses feel more solid. -Unfortunately however, this is actually working against you. Those contour lines serve to help a particular mass feel 3D, but in isolation. 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 additional contour lines 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.

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.

The last thing I need to talk about is texture and detail. I saw that you coloured in the stripes on this cat, and I can understand where this comes from, with Uncomfortable filling in some tiger stripes in the intro video for this lesson. I would like to note that he also writes a detailed disclaimer here on the tiger head demo about how doing this will rob you of some of the constructional cues to help you understand the forms you're working with. Instead, the approach to texture that is most useful as a learning tool for students is what you'll find in the texture section of lesson 2. We're using cast shadow shapes to implicitly describe the smaller forms that exist on an object’s surface. We're telling the viewer what the surface would feel like to run your hand along it, which has nothing to do with what colour that surface happens to be.

The scales on this carp would be a good opportunity to practise working implicitly instead of drawing lines all the way around each scale. You can see an example of this at work with these bush viper scales.

All right, I have given you quite a few things to work on here, so I will be assigning some revisions below for you to put this feedback into practise.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

2- Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.