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

It is good to hear that you allowed these constructions to take as long as needed, rather than rushing to get them done in the limited time you have available. Congratulations on getting it all done!

Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid. For the most part you're doing well at applying gravity to your piles, and capturing how these forms slump and sag over one another. Always try to think through how each form you add is being supported, so that the pile feels stable. If we look at the form at the lower left of this pile you've asserted it as behind the large form at the bottom of your pile, but also lifting up in the air as it gets further away from the viewer. It is unclear what is supporting the far end of this form, so it appears to be either stiff or weightless. Try thinking of these forms as soft and heavy, like well-filled water balloons.

If you want to push yourself a bit more with this exercise I'd suggest "drawing through" as there are some instances where you'd cut a form off where it passes behind another form rather than drawing it in its entirety. This isn't specified in the instructions for this exercise (you'll see some of the forms are forms aren't drawn through on the example homework) but drawing each form in its entirety can help to get even more out of this exercise as a spatial reasoning puzzle.

You're doing a good job of projecting yous shadows boldly, so that they clearly cast onto the forms below, and they appear to follow a consistent light source, good work.

Moving on to your animal constructions on the whole you're doing very well. Your constructions are well observed, and you're patiently building your constructions up piece by piece, without attempting to add more complexity than can be supported by the existing structures at any given stage. It looks like you've put quite a bit of thought into how to fit all these pieces together with specific relationships, and in many places these relationships are reinforcing the 3D illusion we seek to create, good stuff. I've got a few pieces of advice to offer that I hope will help you when practising these sorts of constructional exercises in future.

By and large it looks like you're being mindful to take actions in 3D as discussed in your lesson 4 feedback. Sometimes you do take an occasional action in 2D, adding lines or partial shapes that only exist in the 2D space of the piece of paper. Here are a couple of examples. Always make sure you're drawing each form in its entirety. There may be places those forms get hidden behind other structures - like the legs - but draw them anyway, so you can understand fully how they sit in space. Here is how those examples might look as complete 3D forms.

Where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building up constructions with 3D forms, here in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design the silhouette of these additional forms. 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.

I can see a lot of places in your constructions where you're clearly thinking through this sort of logic when designing your additional masses. You're doing well, and I'd like to show you a strategy we can use to help anchor some of the additional masses more firmly to the construction, I've made some edits to your giraffe as an example.

I started by enlarging the ellipse of the shoulder mass (in blue) 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.

Then I took the additional mass above the shoulder area, and pulled it down around the sides of the body, pressing it against the top of the shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

You may also notice that I'd broken the additional mass above the shoulder area into two pieces. This was done to avoid pressing inward curves into the additional mass where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press into it and cause this kind of complexity.

The other alterations made here were to give the mass under the belly a complete silhouette that wraps around the underside of the torso sausage, and to adjust the additional mass on the upper leg to correspond to the larger shoulder mass.

The design of your additional masses is coming along pretty well, but something that stands out is that you're adding a lot of additional contour lines to them. Adding contour lines - specifically the kind that run along the surface of a single form, isn't really the tool for the job here. While that approach in the organic forms with contour lines exercise was great for introducing the concept, it does sometimes make students a little too eager to pile them on as a cure-all for making things appear more 3D. Unfortunately, contour lines of this sort only emphasise the solidity that would already be present, either through the simplicity of a form's silhouette, or through other defined spatial relationships. While adding lines that don't contribute much isn't the worst thing in the world, using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses. So, I would actively avoid using surface contour lines on your additional masses 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).

Moving on, I'm happy to see that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction, and are applying it well. I wanted to mention that you're off to a good 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 as puzzles.

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.

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. I can see you're holding to similar principles when tackling head construction- you generally wedge the pieces together snugly- but bring it all together in the way the demos shows (particularly the eye socket shape) and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise.

On a minor note, when drawing eyelids, it helps a lot to actually draw each eyelid as its own separate additional mass, wrapping them around the eyeball as shown here.

Oh, before we wrap this up, you had a question about hair and fur.

I wasn't going to mention fur here, as you've avoided the common pitfalls I see, such as covering the whole surface of the animal with distracting amounts of detail, or applying it sloppily with single lines or monotonous zig-zagging.

I think what you're describing for longer hair is a decent strategy. Thinking along similar lines to the organic arrows should help to capture the gesture of the locks of hair as they flow through space.

Anyway, you've done a good job here and I'm happy to mark this as complete. The 250 Cylinder Challenge is next, best of luck.