Hello EQAnthem, congratulations on pushing through your frustrations and completing the homework for this lesson, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your critique.

Starting with your organic intersections these are working pretty well, you’re capturing how the forms slump and sag over one another like well filled water balloons, and you’re showing a strong understanding of these forms existing in three dimensions, and not just as flat shapes on a piece of paper.

When building your piles in future, think about dropping each form in from above, and how it will fall onto the pile and come to rest in a position that feels stable and supported. For the most part you’re doing this well, just try to avoid forms that are precariously balanced, like the one at the top left of this page or trying to add forms beneath what you’ve already drawn, such as the one I’ve traced over with blue here.

While I had the image open I made a couple of minor edits that I think help the pile feel more cohesive. Were I’ve marked with a 2, I’ve flipped the direction of the contour curves, to show the form leaning against the larger form behind it, rather than leaning towards the viewer, which makes the form feel unbalanced. Where I marked with a 3 I used a bit of lineweight to assert the ball form as sitting in front of the larger form, rather than behind it. This helps the larger form feel grounded, rather than giving the impression that it is lifting up in the air.

You’ve done a good job of drawing all your shadows following a consistent light source, and some of them are projected boldly so that they cast onto the surfaces below. I’ve put a check mark next to 4 of your shadows that I think work really well, and given some more oomph to a few shadows that were clinging to the forms like heavy line weight.

Moving on to your animal constructions, these are starting to come together nicely. Your markmaking is clear and intentional which suggests you’re making use of the planning phase of the ghosting method to make each line with a clear purpose. I can also see that you’re putting thought into how the pieces of your constructions fit together with specific relationships, establishing 3D connections which help to reinforce the solidity of your constructions. It’s great to see that you’ve been conscientiously drawing through your forms as this helps develop a stronger understanding of how the forms exist in 3D space.

Something I think will help you with your constructions in future is to observe the reference image both carefully and frequently, so that the forms you build up in your constructions are directly informed by what is present in your reference. For example this red panda is climbing up onto a rock, with a distinct upward slant to the body as the shoulders are higher than the hips. Looking at your corresponding drawing everything has been levelled out, significantly altering the pose. There’s a similar issue occurring with this sheep although in all fairness the feet were hidden in the reference for this one so it would be more difficult to spot. It can be difficult to keep the animal feeling grounded if they’re not stood on a flat plane, so perhaps these changes were made deliberately. If that’s the case I’d recommend you check out this puma construction from the informal demos page which shows how we can draw in the ground or object the animal is standing on to help with complicated poses.

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.

It does look like perhaps you may have been grappling with how to construct some of your forms in the right placement and proportion relative to one another. When starting out a drawing, it's definitely a challenging point - you're putting down those initial masses, and they make a lot of major decisions that'll determine how a number of important things turn out. For example, with this sheep the cranial ball was placed a large distance away from the ribcage, and as a result the neck came out huge.

Now, it's true - spending more time observing your reference would have helped, and I can see a few things across your homework that suggest that you probably could be looking back at it more frequently. But what I think is particularly important is the fact that even though your proportions ended up being off, you stuck to them. You didn't try to tweak things after the fact or correct your mistake. You'd made a decision, you'd committed to it on the page, and you held to it through the entire process. That is a very important element to construction, and you definitely get points for doing that. Something I did notice that is a trend, (rather than the various one-off proportional mistakes that happen as we figure things out) is that you often draw the ribcage mass rather short. It should occupy roughly half the length of the torso, as introduced in this section.

Continuing on, the next thing I wanted to cover is leg construction. I’m happy to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method and you’re mostly sticking to simple sausage forms for your armatures. There are a few places where you’d switched to ellipses, such as here which makes the construction stiff.

You’ve made a good start with building onto some of your leg armatures with additional forms to develop the construction into a more characteristic representation of the particular leg in question, although this can be pushed further. You appear to 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.

Moving down to feet, I have a quick bonus for 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 to lay down a structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional. I can see that you’re starting to take this approach on a couple of pages, and we can take this further by using similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

It is good to see that you’ve explored using additional masses to flesh out your constructions, and some of them feel quite convincing. It can be challenging to figure out exactly how to design these additional masses, and 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.

Your masses are coming along decently, although I did notice you’ll often add sharp corners to their silhouettes in places where there is nothing actually present in the construction to cause this sort of complexity. I’ve marked out a number of cases of this with red asterisks on this page as well as marking in blue an example where you’d extended the silhouette of the leg with a one-off line, not quite showing the viewer how the addition connects to the existing structures in 3D space.

So, here I’ve redrawn a few of the additional masses, allowing them to transition more smoothly between curves where the underlying surfaces are smooth and rounded. For each mass we add we want to think through what forms are physically present in the construction at that stage, an let them inform the design of that individual mass. While I had the drawing open I also made the shoulder mass larger (using the blue ellipse) so it was similar in volume to the thigh mass. These bulky shoulder and thigh masses are very useful to include, as they protrude from the side of the torso sausage and give us something we can use to help anchor additional masses to the torso. Notice the specific inward curve in the additional mass on top of the shoulder region, the more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

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:

• 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.

I can see you were working with similar principles as you tackled the majority of your head constructions- you certainly appear to be trying to wedge the various pieces of your head constructions together snugly, like a 3D puzzle. Try bringing it all together in the way the demo shows (pay attention to the 5 sided eye socket shape) and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise. 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. There are a few outliers with particularly strange heads, such as the hammerhead shark, where I think your strategy of mounting an additional form onto the cranial ball and then carving eye sockets into that secondary form was a good call.

So! You’re doing just fine, and from this point the course takes a bit of a turn from the organic constructions we’ve been focused on for the last 3 lessons, moving away from sausage acrobatics and towards tackling some more geometric hard surface constructions in the remaining two lessons. Hopefully you’ll find the slightly different approach in the upcoming lessons a welcome change and a fresh challenge. You are welcome (and encouraged) to continue to practice these organic constructions as you move forward, either by splitting a construction over several warm-up sessions, or periodically setting aside a longer session for practising constructions from previous lessons.

Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.