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

Starting with your organic intersections your work is pretty good. You're keeping your forms simple and piling them on top of each other with a sense of gravity. Something that will help you to get more out of this exercise in future is to draw through all of your forms. By drawing each form in it entirety instead of letting some of them get cut off where they pass behind another form it will force your brain into figuring out how the whole form exists in 3D space. This isn't a mistake per se, as it isn't clearly shown in the instructions, more of an extra workout to boost your spatial reasoning skills.

Your cast shadows are okay. You're projecting them far enough to read as cast shadows rather than lineweight, but they are a little bit timid. I've given them a bit more depth on your work here to show you how far they can be pushed.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is very well done. You're clearly thinking in 3D, and every one of these constructions feels 3D and solid. There's not a great deal to criticise, so I'll walk through the main points we cover in this lesson and note what was done well, and anything I can offer advice for improvement with.

First, I check that students are taking actions in 3D and avoiding altering the silhouette of forms they've drawn. You're doing a great job here. The only thing I would note here is on the feet of this page of wolves the gaps between the toes fall inside the base form you drew for the feet. This undermines the solidity of your construction in this area by cutting inside the silhouette of your base forms.

Next I check if students are using the sausage method of leg construction correctly, and you're doing great here too. Very occasionally one of your sausage forms gets too complex- like the top section of the hind leg of the cow on the left of this page instead of sticking to simple sausage forms, but most of them are spot on.

Continuing on, one of the key areas we work on in this lesson is using additional masses to build on our constructions. This is something you do well, but I'm going to include some pre-written text about the behaviour of these masses, and then give some specific ways to help with 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.

So, looking through your work, you're doing a pretty good job with your additional masses already. I've made some notes on one of your hybrids here on a couple of ways they can be improved.

1- When you want to make multiple bumps on your silhouette, build each bump with a separate mass. This allows their silhouette to stick to a simple outward curve where they are exposed to fresh air and nothing presses against them to cause any inward curves or corners. Trying to do too much with a single mass risks having unsupported complexity that will feel flat.

2- Be sure to complete each form in its entirety. Sometimes you cut your forms off where they pass between the legs. drawing through your forms will help you increase your understanding of 3D space and boost those spatial reasoning skills.

3- Where you have masses overlapping, have them overlap in 3D space.

4- I also noted a few places where you're doing a great job of wrapping your additional masses around your underlying structures, so that they feel grounded, stable and secure. Well done.

I've made some further notes here which are mostly repeating the same points, but I wanted to note that the mass on top of the back had an arbitrary sharp corner. We only get sharp corners where a mass presses against something. Because the torso sausage is round we will see the mass form a curve here. You can see this explained in this diagram.

I noticed that sometimes when you use additional masses that there are a few cases where 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).

I wanted to mention that you're off to a great start in the use of additional masses along 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, from another student's work - as you can see, 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 and puzzles.

I should mention that colouring in the stripes on these tigers does go against the instructions for handling texture in this course that are introduced in lesson 2. However I do understand where this comes from, as Uncomfortable fills in the tiger stripes in some of the older demos in this lesson.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. It looks like you've taken great care to think through your head constructions and take actions in 3D. 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.

So, overall you're doing a great job! 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.